There’s a great story hidden beneath the saccharine feel of A Million Miles Away. There’s a lot of good scenes but they all don’t add up correctly. Every scene in the movie can be seen a million miles away coming. It’s not a totally bad movie. Yet that doesn’t mean I don’t think you’d like it. A lot of people will. I’m just saying there needs to be a little more that elevates this above a glorified TV movie.
Made by Amazon MGM Studios and streaming on Amazon Prime, this is the type of movie you can leave on while you’re doing things around the house and casually watch a scene here and there and like it while not missing much. But if you’ve seen a lot of movies, you’ve seen a lot of the usual tropes and formats that you wish director Alejandra Marquez Abella and co-writers Bettina Gilois and Hernan Jimenez constructed a better story.
Syd Fields was criticized for the way he made a fortune basically telling all wannabe writers to construct the same plots and formats. A biopic like this seems to be from the Syd Fields School of Screenwriting. Starting off in childhood, we see the pratfalls Jose M. Hernandez and his family undergoes as migrant farmers in California. Young Jose is definitely a lot smarter than the rest of the caucasian kids in his schools who dismiss him for being a chicano who bounces around from school district to school district. One of his teachers, Miss Young (Michelle Krusiec), is the only one who thinks there’s more for Jose than picking fruits and vegetables which the rest of his family.
I had to groan and roll my eyes a little because I had seen this before. And it’s been done better. At first the parents are resistant because they think the more grapes they pick the more they can save for a house. But because they’re migrant workers, they’re being screwed over. Eventually, Jose (played by Michael Pena as an adult) accomplishes more than picking grapes. He graduates from University of the Pacific and becomes an engineer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. But because he’s a Mexican-American, no one takes him seriously and even confuses him for the janitor.
The plot goes through the motions of Jose’s life from a migrant worker as a child, engineer no one takes seriously as a college graduate, and the struggles he endures to become a NASA astronaut. It’s a nice story and it shows that Jose has a can-do attitude and never quit no matter what. It also msean that his wife, Adela (Rosa Salazar who is poorly underused) had to hold on to her dreams of opening a restaurant as she encouraged him to pursue training for NASA. This meant having to spend the family savings while raising five kids on things like SCUBA training and Russian language lessons to help Jose’s chances.
And of course, Jose, after being rejected numerous times, decides on the advice of Adela to travel to Houston to hand deliver his application to astronaut top dog Frederick W. Sturckow (Garret Dillahunt). Jose also delivers a motivational monologue about all that he’s done and even if he’s rejected, he’ll be back in Houston the following year to deliver another application. It’s not that I don’t think Jose’s story needs to be told and Pena does what he can with it, there’s nothing that feels fresh. It doesn’t feel like a stoy that is totally Jose’s. It feels like it’s been done only this time with a different cast.
Even when the movie makes reference to the Columbia disaster which claimed the life of many astronauts including Kaplana Chawla (Sarayu Blue), it never feels like a shock like it should be. A better movie would’ve taken a small moment or time frame in Jose’s life and focused on that. Watching Apollo 13, you knews more about the astronauts and those as mission control than you could’ve known if you’ve followed them from childhood. Because you know from the start that Jose is going to be an astronaut, you’re just waiting for the moment and it’s over and done with so fast, you feel like why didn’t they have some fun with Jose in space. There is a moving scene of Adela feel flustered as she can’t watch the launch but feels better when she’s in Jose’s room.
I like the use of Miss Young and Krusiec gives the character enough that her appearance later on is a welcomed surprise. But you feel a lot of the other people in Jose’s life and the people at NASA are just stock characters. And I know I may be criticized for this, but the scenes involving Jose and Adela’s families just felt too stereotypical. Adela’s parents only allowed her to date when the man was there with her family who look like they’re from Central Casting. Not everything really needs to be included in a movie.
That being said, you may like it. But I couldn’t get into it as much as I could. With a PG rating, this feels more Disney-fied. And because of that, some of the scenes and the dialogue didn’t seem real.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 