Adam Sandler’s Spaceman Is An Expression Of The Brutal War Between Introverts And Extroverts
Spaceman is the story of the eternal and neverending war between introverts and extroverts. And as it always is in real life, eventually, the introvert must lose.
When Spaceman begins, we’re introduced to Jakub (Adam Sandler), an astronaut on a year-long solo mission to explore a strange cloud near Jupiter. He’ll be the first person ever to explore it. Back home, he has a pregnant wife named Lenka (Carey Mulligan), whom he loves very much. What he doesn’t know is that she’s done with him.
While Jakub is in the midst of the most dangerous and mentally stressful situation any person could ever be in, his pregnant wife decides to dump him. Also, she’s running away to a pregnancy commune and seemingly plans to make sure Jakub never meets his child.
Meanwhile, mission control is freaking out because they’re worried Jakub will have a breakdown if he finds out his wife has abandoned him. When they plead with his wife to speak to him so that he doesn’t end up dead, Lenka coldly declines, and his health or life seems of almost no importance to her.
Maybe what Lenka does could have been forgivable had Jakub been some sort of monster, but as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that’s not it at all. What’s really wrong? Jakub, as you’d expect from someone who agrees to be alone in space for a year, is an introvert. Lenka is an extrovert, and she’s angry that she hasn’t gotten enough of his time and attention.
What follows is Jakub facing an existential crisis in which he battles with guilt over being an introvert. He slowly convinces himself that because he’s up in his head all the time and pursuing the lofty career he’d always been pursuing since before he met his wife, that he is indeed some sort of monster.
In the end it becomes clear that Jakub’s existential crisis is what Lenka wanted all along. It’s her way of winning the war between their two conflicting natures by making him feel bad about being an introvert so she can force him to comply with her wishes to lavish her with the attention she craves.
Or at least that’s one interpretation of the movie. Somehow, I doubt it’s the one the movie’s director John Renck, wanted to convey. However, in the absence of some justification for Lenka’s horrific actions, it’s hard to reach any other conclusion.
You’re probably wondering what about all that space stuff that’s supposed to be in the movie. Yes, on the surface, the plot of Spaceman revolves around Adam Sandler’s Jakub character floating through space in a capsule and talking to an alien spider.
Whether that alien spider is real or a figment of his imagination, you’ll have to decide for yourself. What’s clear is that narratively, the spider only exists as a way to extend Lenka’s extrovert war into outer space, where the spider slowly torments Jakub by making him feel guilty about his career, his ambitions, and his basic introverted nature.
The space setting is nothing but window dressing. The real story of Spaceman is about the oldest war taking place behind the scenes of everything humanity does. It’s introvert versus extrovert, and whether in a movie or in real life, the introverts almost never win.
SPACEMEN REVIEW SCORE
Spaceman is streaming on Netflix for subscribers right now.
