A Girl and An Astronaut (Netflix series, 2023)
A Girl and an Astronaut is a ‘near fiction’ series from Poland about, well, a woman and her old astronaut flame who returns from the future and hasn’t aged a bit.
I’m sure the filmmakers watched Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar as well as a bunch of other science fiction films and series before they went to work.
But as they say, there is always a chance to tell an old story in a new way, and apparently the filmmakers felt confident that they had a story worth telling over the course of six episodes.
A Girl and an Astronaut (Dziewczyna i kosmonauta) takes place both in 2022 and 2052, and involves a classic love triangle.
It’s about the beautiful Marta, who is courted by two fighter pilots, Niko and Bogdan - Top Gun is another influence - who are also competing to be sent into space.
Niko wins the race to space, but when his spaceship fails him, he vanishes into thin air, so it should not come as a surprise that Marta and Bogdan end up together.
Thirty years later Niko returns out of nowhere, while still looking young and healthy. He tries to win Marta back, who is by this time tired of her marriage to Bogdan, but the world (including the Skycom corporation) just wants to know the secrets of his youth.
It seems that there was more to Niko’s original mission than meets the eye.
The series was directed by Bartosz Prokopowicz and written by Agata Malesinska, who also wrote for the two Polish Harlan Coben series The Woods and Hold Tight.
The opening sequence of A Girl and an Astronaut looks highly promising, it is well shot and edited, and the production design looks believably futuristic.
The story that follows takes some interesting twists and turns, and the show benefits from its game cast. But once again, this is one of those Netflix series where there was money for some scenes, but not enough for the series as a whole. A lot of the interior scenes just look dimly lit.
Which is a why some parts of the show are pretty good, while other parts are fair to middling. There is some entertainment value here, just not consistently so.