2024-03-11 17:06:54
Adam Sandler went into space as Jakub Procházka in the spaceship Jan Hus 1. The sci-fi drama directed by Johan Renck called Kosmonaut z Cech, which was based on the book of the same name by the writer Jaroslav Kalfara, represents one of the deepest Czech traces in the original work of the Netflix video library. It’s just a shame that there wasn’t much left of the original domestic motifs in the film.
When Kalfař, originally a Czech writer living in the USA, published his first English-language novel Kosmonaut z Cech in 2017, the sci-fi novel appealed to foreign readers and reviewers mainly due to its specifically down-to-earth tone.
The book about loneliness in space and other familiar themes in the genre smelled slightly of beer and the Communist past of the protagonist’s family. Rather average prose about an encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence was characterized by the protagonist’s background. He grew up in the post-revolutionary Czech Republic, and his fate and behavior were influenced by the death of his parents, as well as by the dark past of his father, who was not exactly a dissident under the previous regime, on the contrary.
Kalfař narrated in the first person and that “big step for the Czech Republic” in the form of the launch of the space shuttle with Jakub Procházka was glossed from the first lines with insight and a light touch. Instead of pathos, he kept to the ground. “The citizens then left the ship to its heavenly fate and with excited chatter began to descend from Petřín to quench their thirst with beer,” he wrote, for example.
During his stay in the solitude of the eight-month mission to the edge of the solar system, the hero often returned in his thoughts not only to his wife Lence, which is one of the central motifs of the book and the film, but also remembered the death of his parents or his childhood with his grandmother and grandfather. There he fed spiders to the chickens or, when sick with fevers, vomited into the bucket intended for pig blood at the slaughterhouses.
Three bottles of whiskey helped Calfara’s hero with loneliness, depression, longing for his wife – and also with the fear of meeting a strange alien creature that appears in his ship. The mission leadership reluctantly allowed him to take her on board.
The film lost its humor and deeper links to Czech realities. The picture shows Adam Sandler as Jakub Procházka. | Photo: Netflix
All this color is found in Johan Renck’s film, which is aptly named Spaceman in the original and can be seen on Netflix since last Friday, in barely a trace amount.
The director, who drew attention to himself with the Chernobyl series, carefully chose what he would shoot next. A cosmonaut from the Czech Republic was supposed to be a project of his heart. The film practically renounces perspective and context. Cele focuses on building an orphaned atmosphere in a confined space where gravity is absent. And the relationship of the protagonist Jakub, played by Adam Sandler, with his wife Lenka, who is estranged from him, played by Carey Mulligan, and with the spider-like alien Hanuš.
The result is a brooding minimalist sci-fi in the spirit of films like Ad Astra or Moon, focusing on how being in the solitude of space affects the psyche of the protagonists. But this time we’re also watching science fiction with a slightly funny spider, who speaks in the luscious voice of Paul Dan in the English version.
Here, the filmmakers encounter certain limits of the film medium. Although the creature was described in a similar way in the book, the hero took its appearance quite for granted, stated what was going on in his head, how he searched in his personal past and the history of the entire nation. The movie Hanuš more easily raises questions as to whether he is not just a hallucination, moreover a hallucination that seems to have arrived here from a slightly different subgenre of science fiction.
On the one hand, the profundity of the picture turns into an almost insensitive, detached spectacle, which is only given seriousness by the unpleasant musical background of the composer Max Richter. But at other times, Dvořák’s Rusalka sounds again and the creators noticeably exceed the permitted dose of pathos.
As the footage increases, the cosmonaut from the Czech Republic slips into unintentionally comical moments. The picture shows Adam Sandler as Jakub Procházka. | Photo: Netflix
Although the authors have omitted almost everything from the hero’s past and focus only on the crumbling relationship with his wife Lenka (and conversely the deepening bond with Hanuš), we learn the absolute minimum about the coexistence of the central couple compared to the original.
Film adaptations of books can’t be everything, of course, but the method of cutting away anything that was special about the book and leaving only the bare, hundreds-of-times-seen sci-fi skeleton is rather strange. The result loses humor and deeper links to Czech realities. Instead of a final sobering up in the form of the last third of the book, it unwaveringly heads for a banal finale.
Along the way, Johan Renck creates a few atmospheric images of the cosmic phenomenon called Chopra, for which the entire mission takes place, from Sandler’s interactions with Hanuš and the effort to map the hero’s psychological state, but in the end not much sticks in the memory. Because as the footage increases, the film slips into unintentionally comical moments. At the same time, he wants to end with a memory of nice romantic moments.
A mediocre book turned into an even more mediocre movie. He gave up all the earthiness of the original, leaving only some shabby post-communist spaces in which short earthly episodes take place. And he set out on the path of ambitious science fiction, eager to explore the mysteriousness and depression of the cosmos, which can hardly sit on the backs of those who reside in it.
However, the news does not say anything revelatory about this topic, and mainly gets lost in itself. There are far too many tonal mistakes, pathetic outbursts and missteps for meditative science fiction. At times, it’s not enough to keep the film from switching to a completely different position in Sandler’s acting portfolio.
As if the creators themselves noticed the contradiction, they prefer to leave Sandler lost in space. Why mess with the hero in the depressing corners of Pilsen or Karlovy Vary, as was the case at the end of the book, when you can forget him in the cosmos, give him one last touching papa and let the credits play?
Film
Cosmonaut from the Czech Republic
Directed by: Johan Renck
The film is available on Netflix.