Bold move after the big success with “Chernobyl”
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full screenAdam Sandler in “Spaceman”. Photo: Netflix
CHRONICLE. Adam Sandler has deep conversations with a monster spider in space.
No one can say that Johan Renck is a coward after the great success with “Chernobyl”.
What would you do if you came home after moving your family to the Baltics and working there for nine months?
Take it easy, maybe? The Swedish director Johan Renck was actually on that track after filming the mini-series “Chernobyl” in Lithuania. In an interview with Variety he says that movies and TV shows were the last thing he wanted to do after that experience. When he and his family returned to Brooklyn, where they live, he began toying with the idea of opening a restaurant.
For everyone who has seen “Boiling point” and “The bear” knows how soothing that industry is…
Well. Suddenly Johan Renck got a film script in his hands and then it was done. He knew immediately that he had to make “Spaceman”.
Monster spider in space
The film, which premieres on Netflix on March 1st, will inevitably be described as in my introduction: Adam Sandler and a monster spider in space.
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full screen The giant spider in “Spaceman”. Photo: Netflix
But in fact it is a slow, profound and depressing story about a Czech astronaut who finds himself far from home to investigate a space cloud that has become visible in the sky from our planet.
He begins to think about troublesome childhood memories and worries about his wife Lemka (Carey Mulligan), who is pregnant but perhaps also about to slip away from him.
The film is based on a Czech novel by Jaroslav Kalfar. Isabella Rossellini and I was Lena have smaller roles. Especially the former would have liked to have seen more, in the role of polished manager of the space project.
That’s a lot Andrei Tarkovsky, a filmmaker whom Renck admires, reinforced by the fact that the film seems to take place in a kind of alternative time where humanity is so technologically advanced that we can send astronauts far into space… but at the same time, all the technology is borrowed from the filming of “Chernobyl”. Soviet 60s meets the future.
Learn to divide the audience
Considering how popular “Chernobyl” became, this is certainly a bold project to follow up with. It will divide the audience.
The half will shut down as soon as the giant spider enters. Personally, I found the film’s pace and inevitable craziness hard to swallow.
But the other half will admire, as the Americans say, the size of Johan Renck’s balls.
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