Last Saturday, I talked about Czech astronaut Jakub, flying towards the ominous Chopra Cloud, positioned between Saturn and Jupiter.

He’s close to the Cloud; however, his main problem isn’t that; it’s rather that Lenka, his wife, has decided to end their marriage. The leader of his mission, Commissioner Tuma, has not at that point shown him his wife’s final message but Jakub knows something is wrong because Lenka is no longer talking to him.

Then, just as he is already experiencing considerable emotional distress, he goes to fix his broken toilet and sees a giant spider in the bathroom.

The spider tries to explain itself: It likes the broken toilet’s whine.

Jakub understandably assumes he has gone nuts and goes to the airlock. He puts on his space suit and talks to his partner in Mission Control Peter. He tells Peter to release a decontaminant because he thinks something harmful might be polluting the air. Peter reluctantly agrees and decontaminates the ship. After a few minutes, Jakub leaves the airlock. But the spider is still there.

The obvious question…

The obvious question is whether the spider is real. The movie tries to leave the question open but does not succeed. For one thing, the spacesuit Jakub wears is in constant contact with Mission Control. This means that Peter would’ve heard the initial conversation Jakub was having with the spider.

Peter does ask Jakub if he said something, but the truth is, I doubt he would’ve missed Jakub’s conversation with the alien. He was already worried about the astronaut. Although Jakub can press a button on his radio whenever he wishes to speak with Mission Control, we are told that half the cameras on the ship have malfunctioned. But that means that the other half are still working. If the spider was not real, Mission Control would’ve seen Jakub talking to nothing. If the spider was real, they would’ve seen the giant thing roaming the ship. There is no way Jakub could’ve hidden the spider or his madness.

The spider also eats some kind of off-brand chocolate hazelnut spread. If Jakub had enough sanity left in his broken mind, he would’ve checked to see if the spider was actually eating his food. The movie tried to play both sides but didn’t do a good job, and this creates some giant plot holes in the story.

The other thing that bothered me was why they chose to go with a spider. That’s not really a plot hole, but if they’d committed to the madness angle, they could’ve done some cool things with the spider concept. They might’ve had Jakub suffer from a fear of spiders, which would make the creature more of a specter, like a Ghost of Christmas Past haunting the ship. Or the writer could’ve been clearer about the idea that the creature was real — and was choosing a form that truly bothered Jakub. A missed opportunity.

At any rate, the spider says it wants to understand Jakub’s loneliness and help him. It then starts probing his mind and forcing him to remember his past with Lenka. This was where the problem with the flashbacks (which I mentioned last Saturday) begin. The Chopra Cloud was never treated as a threat; therefore, Jakub’s actions were never interpreted as heroic. And Lenka was incredibly unlikeable. Changing the order in which the flashbacks were presented and adjusting Jakub’s reactions to them would’ve corrected these problems. I’m going to present a scenario that I feel would’ve made the movie more coherent.

A more coherent movie

First, the audience needed to see scenes of Jakub and Lenka when they were having fun together. Remember, Jakub is worried that something is wrong with his relationship, and it would make sense for him to be thinking about the good times with his wife — even if the spider wasn’t forcing the memories to surface, which the movie implies is the case. The audience needs to see Jakub pushing his wife away.

Although Lenka is kind to him, he spurns her. The spider asks why. Jakub would bring up the importance of the mission, its stakes, and how his worries consumed his mind. The spider would claim this was a lie, and the memories would continue. The audience next sees Jakub becoming increasingly cruel, and this round of memories would end with the main revelation of the movie, which is that Lenka had a miscarriage, but Jakub continued to shut her out. Again, the spider asks why, and Jakub repeats the importance of his mission. The spider would again claim this was a lie, and the memories would continue. Finally, the writer would address Jakub’s tragedies and connect them with his behavior. Then Jakub would have his moment of redemption near the climax of the film when they reach the Chopra Cloud.

All of this should be spread throughout the movie, with the dark midnight of the soul moment being when we learn about Lenka’s miscarriage. Perhaps the spider leaves at that moment, disgusted by Jakub’s actions. Then the spider comes back, determined to save a fallen man.

This approach would solve the two main problems. It gives the threat of the Chopra Cloud proper attention and it establishes that Lenka is truly a good person, whom Jakub has pushed away. It also enables the audience to understand Jakub when they see the tragedies he endured in the past. However, the movie mixes all of these moments around and fails to tell the story of Jakub and Lenka’s relationship. This kills the pacing because audiences have an intuitive story sense. If the flashbacks are told in the right order, they could anticipate the rise, fall, and redemption of Jakub and his relationship.

But because the writer mixed the order of the flashbacks, the audience barely understands what’s going on. The flashbacks don’t tell a story, and the writer needs a story to be told because the setting of the movie is a man floating alone through space. The disjointed nature of the flashbacks also muddles the redemption arch because, the way things are presented in the script, there’s no precise flashback that causes his revelation.

The spider leaves because Jakub is not cooperating with him, and Jakub mourns the loss of his hallucination, then decides to send Lenka a message and have Peter give it to her. Did the flashbacks cause him to realize his problem, or was he just upset because the spider left? The audience can infer that he’s sincere, and Adam Sandler gives a marvelous performance during this part of the movie, but the script doesn’t give us a specific moment that tells the audience what changed his mind.

After Jakub delivers his apology to his wife, the spider returns and admits that a bunch of parasites are eating his body. The spiderly alien, it turns out, doesn’t have long to live, but at least viewers can see what’s inside the cloud before he passes. We’ll cover what happens then, as well as some of the additional plot holes, next Saturday.

Here are my thoughts on Spaceman from last Saturday: World is ending. Worse, an astronaut’s wife wants out. It’s not clear just what role the threatening Chopra Cloud plays and that complexity dogs the story. Things come to a head when the astronaut’s toilet breaks and when he goes to fix it, he finds a giant spider in his bathroom.