Watch TV with Paul Flynn
HILARY SWANK IS one of those actors it’s hard to pitch on the fame graph. Her Wikipedia page has her sharing an audience with Michelle Obama, and she boasts two Best Actress Oscars. She has an incredibly famous face. Yet the more distant her plaudits, the more a minor question mark hangs over her career. Is she the go-to actor for projects Julia Roberts CBA with?
Swank’s new role is as Emma Green, an astronaut heading up a mission to Mars, in Away. It’s a canny pivot to Netflix event drama, though I did spend 10 minutes of it wondering whether Emma Green was, in fact, also the name of Rachel’s baby in Friends?
Swank’s astronaut ‘vibe’ is over-emoting everymum with a choppy finger-wave. Her co-pilots should constitute a new Fab 5 of evolutionary space travel, but for the fact that the Russian and Chinese crew members don’t really trust Emma at all. Racial stereotyping has not made it past the gates of NASA, it would seem. And given she can’t put out a routine fire during their stopover to the moon, one can hardly blame her fellow space travellers for their concern.
The dramatic nexus of Away’s set-up mostly happens back home for Emma, suggesting perhaps that the idea of a woman heading a mission to Mars wasn’t quite the incendiary, post-metoo empowerment tract it read as in the elevator pitch. A lot of the film hangs on whether Emma is correct to ditch her wifely duties as her husband recovers from a stroke and teenage daughter comes of age while she flits around, interplanetary. There is a lot of screen time between the three of them, suggesting space travel might consist of more highfalutin Zoom meetings than strictly necessary.
There’s something generally rather glib about Away’s relationship with the nuts and bolts of its subject matter, rendering it a show that shares more in common with the heavyweight schmaltz and sentimentality of
This Is Us than it does a gender-switched
2001: A Space Odyssey. The awe and wonder of what exists out there is mostly hung on Swank’s expressiveness, which all feels a bit homely. It’ll make great hangover TV for wasted Sunday afternoons. But there’s little to suggest Away is much more than the ‘You OK, hun?’ of the space race.
On Netflix from 4 September