REVIEW: ‘A Girl And An Astronaut’ Would Have Been Great As A Movie

It’s such a shame when a great idea is ruined by it being stuck in the wrong format. That’s A Girl and an Astronaut in a nutshell, a 6-episode Polish-language Netflix Original sci-fi romance with such interesting ideas ruined by the fact that it goes on far too long. In 2022, two astronauts Niko and Bogdan are competing to be selected for a secretive joint Polish-Russian public-private astronaut experiment, as well as the love of the same woman, Marta (Magdalena Cielecka). In 2053, Niko’s spacecraft suddenly reappears after having been publicly thought destroyed and when it lands back on Earth, he’s found alive and unaged.

The sci-fi and the love triangle alike in A Girl and an Astronaut are interesting. There’s no doubt about that. Even with some occasionally cringy CGI, the futuristic world of 2053 is exciting with cool technology that manages to feel futuristic without feeling like it’s an overwhelming police state or an otherwise unbecoming future. The three leads are also hot, even if they’re not especially interesting beyond that, so it’s fun to watch them pine over one another.

What isn’t fun is how much the show devolves into a repetitive slog, a dick-measuring contest, and a confusing Russophobic affair on account of its runtime. Because it’s forced into a series format rather than a concise film, the show has to find a way to fill 6 50-minute slots. Instead of coming up with a series of interesting plots or twists and turns, it just repeats itself ad nauseam. In the past, we see Niko, Bogdan, and Marta in the most repetitive series of back-and-forth admissions of love, frustration, and guilt imaginable. Their love triangle woes are exacerbated over and over and over several times an episode to the point where I got sick of seeing it.

And worse yet, once it gets to a point where Marta’s indecision becomes its most overwhelming, Bogdan and Niko, formerly best friends, devolve into a childish display of machismo and attempted one-upmanship. Not to mention that in the present we already know that Marta and Bogdan are locked in a loveless marriage, so it’s not even a matter of who is going to win out in the end. The three of them would have to have wound up in a throuple for it to remotely interest me how the love plot would conclude in the past, let alone the future, where any choice they could have made besides just leaving everyone alone probably would have disappointed me. And this really does.

Unfortunately, the actual intrigue of the sci-fi plot is just completely uninteresting. For all the potential of the very Planet of the Apes thrill and the corporate intrigue, the totally uninteresting Russian corporate stooges bring nothing to the table and there isn’t really any mystery to the circumstance whatsoever. I never for a minute felt wonder about what happened during the science experiment. It was obvious from the start, with intention, exactly what happened and you’re never really even meant to question it.

Meanwhile, one of the few bits of plot that I suppose is meant to be there in the future timeline is whether and how Niko will fully wake up and if he does, how he’ll escape the Russians. But I never really cared much because I didn’t feel like anything of note was waiting for him on the other side until maybe the end. He’s 30 years younger than everyone he’s ever known now and he didn’t exactly leave Earth on great terms with Bogdan, and Marta has no choice but to have long moved on. The other shoe that eventually drops, like the rest of the show, had huge potential for emotional resonance, but it comes into true view so late in the game that it hardly feels like it matters to me by then. I won’t say the final episode doesn’t finally get exciting, but by the time we get there, it was hardly worth the arduous journey.

It’s just frustrating that such an interesting story idea was wasted on the wrong format. If this were a 90-110 minute movie instead, it wouldn’t have had time to get stale in the love department, and it would have left room for an interesting future plotline where we could wonder why everything went wrong instead of being stuck simply not caring. It’s a great shame. I respect the show for the worldbuilding it does so strongly and lament that it couldn’t reach its honest potential.

A Girl and an Astronaut is streaming now on Netflix.

Jason Flatt

Jason is the Sr. Editor at But Why Tho? and producer of the But Why Tho? Podcast. He’s usually writing about foreign films, Jewish media, and summer camp.