Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Million Miles Away’ on Amazon Prime Video, a Feelgood Inspirational Bio about Mexican-American Astronaut Jose Hernandez

BOATS movie alert: A Million Miles Away (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) is the Based On A True Story story of Jose Hernandez, a Mexican immigrant and son of migrant farmers who dreamed of becoming an astronaut – and then he became an astronaut. Eventually, at least. It took a while, and a lot of hard work, as you’re about to see. The perennially underrated Michael Pena plays Hernandez, whose autobiography was the basis of this movie from director Alejandra Marquez Abella. Will it succumb to the usual biopic cliches, or give us some inspiring drama? Both, as it turns out.

A MILLION MILES AWAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with tearful goodbyes. The Hernandez family leaves Michoacan for California, and we hear a Spanish-language version of ‘California Dreaming’ which transforms into an English version after they cross the border. Notably, young Jose Hernandez (Juan Pablo Monterrubio) holds an ear of corn out the window, and “flies” it like a rocket, the leaves resembling a plume of flame blasting from the engines. It looks like the 1960s, but we’re not quite sure. We see Jose in school, where we learn he’s head-and-shoulders above his classmates at math; for his when-I-grow-up assignment, he draws himself in an ear of corn “rocket” that’s blasting off. He attended multiple schools as his family briefly settled and worked the local fields and packed up and moved on to briefly settle somewhere else and work the fields before they moved on again, etc., with hopes of earning enough money to move back to Michoacan and buy a house. But Jose’s teacher drops in on his parents and says he’s a bright kid and his education is suffering due to all the moving and inconsistency. So they settle down in Stockton, California, where the family sets aside its dreams of going back to Mexico, all for Jose’s education, something his father will never, ever let him forget. And somewhere in here, we get a title card proclaiming it’s 1969, affirming my assumption.

That’s all a 17-minute preamble followed by a title card showing us the movie title and a hop to 1985. Jose is now played by Pena, and is a fresh out of college with an engineering degree and a job at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a research center. There, he helps develop Cold War defense systems that’ll hopefully defend the country from Russian nuclear missiles; meanwhile, he sends application after application to NASA’s space program, and gets rejection letter after rejection letter. He feels out of place at work, where people see a Mexican guy and assume he’s the janitor. To help fit in, he trades in his tricked-out vintage Impala, and ends up asking out the office manager, Adela (Rosa Salazar), who’s charmed by his nervous, stumbling demeanor. I mean, Jose is a nice guy, and smart, with a heart of gold, so who wouldn’t be charmed?

Jose finally gets a W at work, and before you know it, he’s leading the department. Meanwhile, Adela sits down with him and shares that she wants to be a chef and own a restaurant, and he says he wants to be an astronaut, and she laughs and laughs then realizes he’s serious and then takes him seriously, so seriously that the next scene cuts right to their wedding, which tells us he got a W with this lovely, whip-smart woman, too. Next is a montage of babies – so many babies; Jose and Adela eventually stop at five – and then a scene in which Adela learns he’s been secretly applying to NASA. She’s not happy he kept it a secret, because she’d’ve said much earlier that they’ll do whatever it takes to get his tuckus into orbit. And now, another montage, where Jose learns to be a pilot and scuba diver, etc., all the stuff that’ll hopefully make him a prime astronaut candidate – and another series of rejection letters that he crumples up in frustration, then flattens out and puts in a box. Now it’s 1999, then 2003, then 2008 and, gasp, pant, is he in outer space yet? No, but it’s coming, I promise.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A Million Miles Away is what might happen if Apollo 13 or First Man had been funneled through the immigrant experience. (And the last time Pena turned up in an astronaut movie? Moonfall!)

Performance Worth Watching: It’s nice to see Pena land a leading-man role. The writing in A Million Miles Away isn’t particularly, ahem, stellar, so he doesn’t get a lot of screenplay support here, but his characterization of Hernandez as a portrait of optimism carries us through. Note, I was about to highlight Salazar here, but her Marisa Tomei-esque bubbly performance early in the film transforms into a fairly rote stressed-out-wife role, proof that she doesn’t enjoy much screenplay support either.

Memorable Dialogue: Indian-American astronaut Kalpana Chawla gives Jose a pep talk: “Do you know how important it is that someone like you or I jump on this ride? I too had to work so hard. Tenacity is a superpower.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Early in A Million Miles Away, Jose’s teacher tells him, “You are a force of nature. Nothing will stop you,” and this is the movie doing what it does a touch too frequently: telling us what’s happening instead of showing us. I’m not sure we ever truly understand what drives Jose to be among the very, very few people who have enough of the Right Stuff to make it to outer space beyond, hey, who wouldn’t want to go to outer space? It seems like a cool place to hang out for a week or two. Although depth of character isn’t the film’s strong suit, that doesn’t mean it’s superficial; maybe it’s too mediumweight for its own good at times, taking what’s surely a compelling real-life public figure and blanding him up for a feelgood biopic bent on middle-of-the-road mass appeal. There are moments where it’s more montage than movie, as it attempts to cover vast swaths of the man’s life as efficiently as possible, like the rare Wikipedia entry that gives us the basics without being too skimpy or burying us in needless detail. 

Despite its rickety foundation, the movie works for the most part, pushing past some of the rote look-at-all-the-sacrifices-Jose’s-family-made-for-him melodrama to emphasize the challenges a Mexican-American man must overcome to achieve a wild dream. Racism isn’t a main character here, but a relatively subtle recurring theme, and it takes every iota of support from Jose’s tight-knit extended family to bolster his confidence and keep him committed. Take the sequence where other astronauts’ families gather to watch the Space Shuttle launch, and where most groups are subdued, Jose’s family turns a NASA dorm room into a party with tequila and music, because that’s what they do for every celebratory gathering. That communal fabric ties together Jose’s story, which is driven by Pena’s performance, heartwarming throughout and a little bit poetic at the end, elements that are more than enough to overcome the movie’s shortcomings.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s a nagging sense that A Million Miles Away could have been bolder and better, but that doesn’t mean we should fire it into space. It’s a perfectly watchable biopic that audiences of all ages should find at least modestly inspiring.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.