Adam Sandler Is Dropping Quite the Bomb on Netflix Viewers Right Now. I Kind of Enjoyed It.

Many a cinephile has asked themselves the question: What if Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, the avant-garde 1972 sci-fi classic about a widowed space explorer forced to grapple with his grief while on a mission to a mysterious planet, starred Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan as a fracturing married couple, alongside Paul Dano as the voice of a giant benevolent space spider? And what if Isabella Rossellini were the leader of Czechoslovakia's space program, which somehow, in this universe's alternate version of political and technological history, was the best-equipped in the world to send a manned mission to the outer reaches of Jupiter? The result of that mashup might be something like Spaceman, an oddball psychological drama from the Swedish director Johan Renck, best known for a long résumé of music videos and lately for helming all five episodes of the acclaimed HBO miniseries Chernobyl. The script, adapted by Colby Day from the 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar, leaves many questions unanswered. If the mission of Sandler's character--the depressive, remote, and career-obsessed Jakub--is so significant to humanity's future, it isn't clear why he would have been sent into space all alone.