A Million Miles Away (2023)

The biographical drama has become a reliable machine for the streaming era, and A Million Miles Away runs it with a smooth hum. Alejandra Márquez Abella traces José M. Hernández from the grape fields of California to the cabin of a shuttle in orbit, and she does so with a Latino ensemble that never has to justify its presence. Michael Peña carries the film with quiet, unshowy dignity. This is a Mexican-American story told by people who understand it from the inside, and the film wears that identity openly, from the Spanish spoken at the kitchen table to the careful accounting of what assimilation costs a man who only wanted to belong.

The script takes ethnicity seriously as a subject, not as decoration. José trades his customized Impala for a sensible Mazda because he wants to fit in at the laboratory, and the moment lands with real discomfort. His father comes home with partial wages after a season of labor, a small wound that gestures at a larger unfairness the film acknowledges without ever climbing onto a soapbox. The economic critique stays personal, a hardship to be overcome. The women here, a devoted teacher, an encouraging astronaut, a patient wife, exist to steady the hero's arc. The film has no interest in interrogating that arrangement, and it shows.

What remains is the inspirational apparatus, and it grinds. The perseverance-and-dreams messaging arrives on schedule, every setback answered by a speech, and reviewers were correct to find the grit narrative heavy-handed. There is comfort in a film this earnest. There is also a faint weariness, the sense of having sat through this sermon before with better lighting. It is warm, well acted, and entirely predictable. We file it accordingly, with a respectful nod and a long exhale.