On Netflix, Adam Sandler is more than lost in space in The Astronaut

You shouldn’t ask the elm for pears, the saying goes, but just in case Adam Sandler It would be ignorant to say that comedians cannot play dramatic roles. In fact he made them (Drunk with love, Rough diamonds, Claw) is very good. Will be The astronaut part of an unusable, useless, boring script.

It was 2002 when Paul Thomas Anderson, who had just directed Tom Cruise, recorded the film Magnoliasaw Sandler as the protagonist of Drunk with love, which was a romantic drama. And it was precisely in 2014 that Sandler signed an agreement with Netflix for four films, renewing it every three years.

And as happened with another great comedian like Robin Williams, Adam Sandler, perhaps as a warning to his fans, grows a beard when he does dramas.

Here it is more than justified, because Adam is an astronaut on a hyper solitary mission. We see it when he spent almost 180 days in orbit, alone, already close to the planet Jupiter. Jakub Procházka became the first Czech astronaut.

Sandler is a depressed cosmonaut in Johan Renck’s dark sci-fi journey, in which Carey Mulligan she plays his wife, and Paul Dano voices the alien tarantula who offers therapy to Jakub in space.

This last one, let’s say, could be a comedy, okay, but no, it’s not.

Strange, because it was directed by the Swede Johan Renck, who in the miniseries Chernobyl He had done an extraordinary job. He also directed episodes of Vikings AND breaking Bad.

Carey Mulligan, who as the feminist protagonist of Nice revenge She went on to play “the wife of” in her last two films, both on Netflix, Teacher and she is Lenka, Jakub’s partner, who is pregnant, has lost a previous pregnancy and plans to leave her husband. Communications so many kilometers away – perhaps it would have been easier if they had been at Cape Canaveral – are difficult, but the leader of the expedition (Isabella Rossellini, light years away from Blue velvet) decides not to send that message to Jakub.

Half is implied: with the millions they will have spent to put it there, a few meters from the “beginning” of the universe (yes, because if we want to make it heroic, let’s put everything into it) it won’t do it. allow its lone astronaut to get even more depressed and not complete the collection, the assigned mission.

Let’s remember that he has another six months left to return, and imagine how he, or you, would feel at this news.

Therapeutic advice to a bearded Adam Sandler

With tarantula legs and six amber eyes, Hanuš offers Jakub therapeutic advice on how to save his crumbling marriage… by keeping him company. “Your memories depress me,” Hanuš discourages Jakub. Even Paul Dano’s voice, his cadence, doesn’t contribute.

When the director, together with his cinematographer Jacob Ihre, with whom he worked Chernobyl, tells what happens on Earth, everything becomes more like a soap opera. There are flashbacks, which could also be like dream sequences.

The problem is that, in the end, if you get to the end, you will probably end up wondering what you saw, a space movie, a breakup soap opera or what.

“The Astronaut”

Drama/Sci-Fi. United States, 2024. Original title: “Astronaut”. 107′, SAM 16. From: Johan Renck. With: Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Paul Dano, Isabella Rossellini, Lena Olin. Available in:Netflix.