Giant Spiders Can Go Fuck Themselves, Or Why I Can’t Watch Adam Sandler’s Spaceman
The post Giant Spiders Can Go Fuck Themselves, Or Why I Can’t Watch Adam Sandler’s Spaceman appeared first on Consequence.
I must apologize to Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Paul Dano, Isabella Rossellini, and director Johan Renck, because I will not be finishing their new Netflix film Spaceman. It’s not them, it’s me: The short version is that I am terrified of giant spiders, which makes watching a movie in which an astronaut named Jakub (Sandler) encounters an giant spider (Dano)… A challenge.
Any subscriber to Stream On (Consequence‘s weekly streaming recommendations newsletter) knows how much I love including movies and TV shows that take place in space, which was why I sat down with the Spaceman screener this week. I can’t remember if the thumbnail for the screener had an image or was just text on a grey box (as is common for pre-release Netflix screeners) — I just know that I hit play with calm anticipation, and found myself immediately engaged.
Because in those first twenty or so minutes, Spaceman featured a number of things I very much enjoyed: Isabella Rossellini plays the leader of the European space agency overseeing Adam Sandler’s space mission! Carey Mulligan is Adam Sandler’s estranged wife back home! Adam Sandler is actually playing a real character! And the movie’s ’70s Solaris aesthetic, with just a touch of Michel Gondry, was extremely promising.
Initially, there was a hint of something not just weird but spider-weird going on, after a scene with a hairy leg emerging from Jakub’s face. But I was not prepared for my first and ultimately last glimpse of Hanus, the “creature from the beginning of time lurking in the shadows of [the space] ship” (from the official Netflix description).
If I had known Spaceman featured a giant spider, to be clear, I wouldn’t have hit play in the first place. Unfortunately, while I am a professional consumer of content, I often actively avoid learning too much about some projects until I start watching them, craving the experience of a great twist or surprise whenever I can get it. And, well… I certainly got that, in this case.
I am an adult woman and professional critic and journalist of many years; I am also, like all of us, still a bit of a child deep down inside, and some specific things do make my inner child freak the hell out. Like, say, giant spiders. They aren’t my only major fear — like Indiana Jones, I’m also not a huge fan of snakes — but it’s a pretty serious thing, going back to childhood. Things might have begun with the terrifying sequence in Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation of The Hobbit where a bunch of Shelob’s relatives attack the poor innocent dwarves. In the third grade, I also was horrified by a copy of the magazine Zoobooks, as its cover image was an extreme close-up on a spider’s face, with the eyes.
You’d think it was the eight skittering legs that inspires this terror, but no, it’s the eyes, alongside the pinchers. Because there are too many eyes, flat and blank, and the way the pinchers move… It’s just not right. Giant spiders is my official phobia, yet any detailed look at a spider in action is hard for me to watch — I kept my eyes firmly shut for large portions of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King as well as the descent of the radioactive spider that transforms 2002-era Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) into Spider-Man. (I don’t want to talk about the summer I worked at a video store where Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets would play in a loop on the monitors.)
While I am bone-deep terrified of giant spiders, there’s at least one person who finds them fascinating: Legendary movie producer Jon Peters, whose obsession with the idea of Superman fighting a too-big alien spider was first made public knowledge by filmmaker Kevin Smith.
Smith’s told the story multiple times over the years, and he’s relatively consistent about the details, including quoting Peters as saying that “Spiders are the fiercest killers in the animal kingdom. You know you gotta be careful around spiders. So if you had a big one — imagine how deadly they are.”
Jon, I’ve been doing that for decades.
What’s funny, though, is that recently, I’ve felt like my giant spider thing had… not gone away entirely, but certainly become more muted. Last month I caught a clip of the film Son of Godzilla, in which Godzilla and son fight the fearsome Kumonga, and I didn’t run screaming out of the room. I rewatched the Simpsons episode where Homer encounters an oversized arachnid without closing my eyes once. And during 2023’s The Flash, I was laughing so hard at the fact that CGI Nicolas Cage was making Jon Peters’ dream come true that I only felt a twinge of panic.
Yet, I suppose, one’s deepest fears never really leave us — I might have thought the terror was gone, but Spaceman brought it back, full throttle. To acquire photos for this article, I asked my colleague Jonah to download them for me from the Netflix press site, rather than look at the available options myself. I was wise to do so, because according to him, there were “like four” images of the giant spider in the gallery. “Thing is gnarly,” he added, so helpfully.
This was one of the weirder images from Spaceman (Netflix) that Jonah sent me. I guess there are fantasy sequences later in the movie? I will never find out for sure.
Later, Jonah mentioned that maybe the giant spider looked a little friendly. And from the reviews I’ve read of the movie (carefully avoiding any photos that might have been included) that seems like it’s part of the point of Hanus being a giant spider — that despite his appearance, Hanus is actually kind and empathic, there to help Jakub through his harrowing space mission by helping him work through his problems.
I respect that idea a lot, and if his alien form looked like a giant beetle or something more vaguely alien, I wouldn’t be trying to figure out how to remove Spaceman from my “Continue Watching” row without looking directly at the image that’s now there. (You can see the eyes in the thumbnail. It’s very upsetting.) That said, if the point was to challenge the viewer’s preconceptions of Hanus, make them see the good spirit beneath the surface… The freakiness of the surface might have been calibrated a little better. (I fully screamed “Fuck!” multiple times at the screen, before hitting the back button on my remote.)
I don’t love admitting to this degree of cowardice in print, but I wanted to do so because I believe that being critics means bringing at least some part of ourselves to the viewing experience. Even the toughest dude will react differently to a movie with children in peril after he becomes a father. Our life experiences, our traumas, our passions — all the things that make us people — affect how we process what we watch, even on a professional basis.
Bailing out of a movie I was watching critically, because one of the characters is literally my worst nightmare, isn’t ideal. But it goes hand-in-hand with that approach. I watch films and shows because I want to engage with the humanity the creators bring to their work. It’s only fair that I bring my own humanity along with it.
So, that’s why I won’t be reviewing Spaceman. Or even finishing it. Because seriously… fuck giant spiders.
But if you’re braver than me (not hard), Spaceman is now available on Netflix.
Giant Spiders Can Go Fuck Themselves, Or Why I Can’t Watch Adam Sandler’s Spaceman
Liz Shannon Miller
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