from Gravity and Interstellar to The Martian, Astra adand Elite societythe sci-fi film about sad astronauts has recently become a subgenre of its own, and Johan Renck’s Cosmonaut now joins his weeping ranks. An annoyingly sad saga about a Czech astronaut on a mission to the far reaches of the galaxy who really misses his wife and can’t get over his father’s mistakes – and finds a way to deal with both thanks to an unexpected new alien friend – it’s stellar an Adam Sandler vehicle that aspires to stratospheric emotional heights and yet ends up so self-seriously bleak and sweet that it plays like a leaden travesty.
Yakub (Sandler) moves around his spaceship with sunken cheeks, exhausted body language and a weary look in his eyes. This is nominally due to the fact that his toilet keeps making horrible noises that keep him up at night and slowly drive him insane. Mostly, though, it’s because he’s sad. In case it wasn’t immediately obvious, Chernobyl Director Renk’s film (on Netflix March 1), adapted from the book by Jaroslav Kalfarge, has Yakub making a phone call to Earth, during which a young sixth-grader tells him she’s read that he’s “the loneliest man on the world”. Yakub denies this, but is unconvinced, and his spirits are not lifted by the idea that he is on the verge of saving the universe from a large purple mass of particles on the outskirts of Jupiter called the Chopra Cloud, which he is sent to investigate, all by himself, at the age of one solo mission.
Five hundred million kilometers from home, Yakub’s only real contact is with Peter (The Big Bang Theory‘c Kunal Nayyar), his mission control friend whose job it is to keep Yakub in good mental and physical shape. Alas, this is difficult because Jakub is so sad and the current cause of his sadness is his inability to use his videophone to contact his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan). Peter makes excuses why Yakub can’t contact his wife, but Cosmonaut explains that this is because Lenka, who is pregnant, is also sad and her sadness is related to her husband. Abandoned once again by Yakub, Lenka is like the loneliest woman in the world, and when her cosmonaut dad approaches Chopra Cloud, she sends him a recorded message informing him that she is ending their marriage. Yet unfortunately for her, Yakub’s boss (Isabella Rossellini) blocks this transmission from reaching the astronaut because she realizes that he’s already sad enough and making him sadder will just further jeopardize their venture.
Cosmonaut exists in an alternate reality where the space race is being waged by the Czech Republic and South Korea (whose emissaries are hot on Jakub’s tail), and its scant contextual details are mostly puzzling, such as Lenka’s eventual relocation to a rural convent for single mothers. Instead, the main focus is on Jakub’s face, which goes from forlorn to scared when he wakes up one morning to find that his ship has a surprising second inhabitant: a giant alien spider that speaks in the calmly curious and wise voice of Paul Dano. Plagued by nightmares about his father as well as brooding dreams about Lenka, Yakub assumes this creature is a figment of his imagination, especially since it doesn’t register on any of Peter’s sensors. However, after overcoming his initial apprehension (exacerbated by a recent dream about a spider crawling under his skin), Yakub slowly befriends the beast and even gives it a name: Hanus.
Although Hanus does not reveal how he got onto Jakub’s ship, he does explain why he is there: “Your loneliness intrigues me.” This makes Hanus the astronaut’s de facto marriage counselor, there to fathom the depths of his malaise, and Cosmonaut soon the creature invades Yakub’s mind, forcing him to reexamine his memories of his father and his wife, all of them shot through with fish-eye spots that are as affected as the material’s overarching atmosphere of solemnity—here heightened by the decision of director Renk to cover literally everything on earth and among the stars in pitch black. What they reveal is that, although he loves Lenka, Yakub has a habit of constantly leaving her for space, and that he thinks that becoming a world hero will somehow absolve him of his father’s previous communist sins of betrayal. “You go where I go, and I go where you go,” Lenka says in repeated flashbacks, and the fact that Yakub reneged on this deal is central to his (and her) displeasure.
Hanus (voiced by Paul Dano)
Netflix
The interpretation of Yakub’s condition is not complicated because Cosmonaut both wear their hearts on their sleeves and say exactly what they think, the latter to the point of exasperation. “If only I saw her the way I saw her then,” laments Yakub. “If I knew then what I know now, I would never have left,” he laments. “You were right there in front of me and I didn’t see you,” he counters. Sandler’s protagonist never stops making the film’s main points, and so does Hanus, who tells his human compatriot, “You should come back with a very different discovery, but all you can see is yourself.” It’s far more irritating than Hanus’ silly penchant for calling Yakub a ‘skinny man’, and it becomes all the more pronounced when Cosmonaut near the Chopra cloud, whose ancient particles are according to Hanus from “The Beginning” and therefore intended to help Yakub tap into the origin of his own feelings for Lenka. Cue uncontrollable moaning.
Renk reaches in vain for operatic grandeur by cutting off the CGI views of Chopra’s cloud (and also by peppering his soundtrack with opera), and with a late sequence, he provides his own weak 2001: A Space Odyssey-like travel through cosmic time and space. These gestures, however, are as mechanical as the film’s melodramatic maneuvers. Even with Sandler performing a serviceable loner routine and Mulligan matching his every dark look, nothing for Cosmonaut is charming and even less resonant as moving. It’s a sad space trip that’s so desperate for you to know it’s sad and feel its sadness that it just happens to be the absolute wrong kind of sadness.
