Anyone who has ever wanted to take the plunge Legally Blonde into outer space could almost rejoice in the general direction of Space Cadet (now available on Amazon Prime Video), which brings the Harvard self-improvement formula to NASA. Emma Roberts stars as a terminally starstruck Florida party girl who beats the odds (and all notions of common sense and plausible scripting) and makes it to space camp, where she attempts to infect the serious folks with her cheerful, margarita-swilling charms. Of course, as clichés dictate, this character isn’t REALLY as dumb as she looks and acts, and she’s actually pretty smart, but I can’t say the same for NASA, here presented as a clown show run by morons. Not that anyone is excited about this movie being an accurate reflection of reality, but let it be known that it’s closer to a fairy tale than anything else, so you should adjust your expectations accordingly.
SPACE CADETSTREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: That wide-eyed look is NOT the result of oxygen deprivation between the ears. No, Tiffany “Rex” Simpson (Roberts) has always wanted to be an astronaut, and that glassy expression is simply her staring deep, deep into the sea of stars above. Look, she looks at all her childhood scrapbooks, filled with adorable cutouts of her countless inventions and construction paper manifestations of her dreams, and now check out this flashback of her and her mother sitting on the hood of the car, watching a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral. She racked up science fair blue ribbons and even got into Georgia Tech. Except she’s in her 20s now, and the only science she practices is margarita mixology. She’s a career bartender. She seems to be almost permanently a little high, and would be more so if this were an R instead of a PG-13. She laughs out loud on the beach with her best friend Nadine (Poppy Liu). She wrestles alligators. She wears a swimsuit even when she is not at the beach or pool. WHAT HAPPENED?
Well, you could say it happened to Florida, and it happened to her. very hardAnd you might be right. But it’s also a sad story. Rex’s mother got cancer just before graduation, and college had to wait. And then Mom passed away, and college never came, so she learned the margarine trade, and also helps her father (Sam Robards) with his fraudulent ghost-travel business. What gets her out of the kind of happy, empty routine that seems entirely specific to Wang’s residents of America? A conversation with a former classmate named Toddrick (Sebastian Yatra), who says her off-the-wall way of thinking inspired him to create his wildly successful civilian space travel company. Okay! Whatever you say, ToddrickAnd now this story is sort of like the Frog Prince, but instead of a woman kissing a frog and awakening the prince, a man has a conversation with a female alligator wrestler about launching butts into orbit and awakens his long dormant passions.
So Rex applies to space camp, and — you’ll never believe this — he gets in. How? He has no degrees, credentials, training, or experience. But Nadine got a hold of the application and filled it with lies and falsehoods without Rex knowing, and Rex doesn’t ask any questions when he’s accepted, and apparently NASA doesn’t do background checks, possibly because it only takes two months of training before they send you up to the space station, so, you know, why bother? Rex arrives in Houston and fakes it, makes friends with other weirdos and enemies with hard jobs, sparks some romantic chemistry with NASA guy Logan O’Leary (Tom Hopper), and endures four set-ups in the first hour of the movie alone. (Four! I counted!) How long will it be until the crisis comes to an end? If he’d railed long enough about the numerous flaws in NASA’s astronaut selection process, he would have known.
What movies will it remind you of? Space Cadet It’s not interesting enough to be that. The Beach Bum Satisfies Beavis and Butt-Head make the universe With a spoonful of Gravityso we’re stuck with Legally Blonde Satisfies Space Camp With a spoonful of Apollo 13.
Performance worth watching: There are plenty of positives to be found in Roberts’ performance – she goes to great lengths to ensure that Rex isn’t an irritating, unlikable protagonist – but the script doesn’t give Rex enough detail and idiosyncrasies to make her anything more than a basic movie character.
Memorable dialogue: A family visiting NASA facilities sees Rex in all his glory, dressed in a trucker cap, full of accessories and neon lights:
Child: Mom, is that an astronaut?
Mom: Not with my tax dollars, it won’t.
Sex and skin: None.
Our opinion: Space Cadet It’s the kind of movie that gets a lot of mileage out of the space campers being labeled with the acronym ASCANS, and I can’t remember what the abbreviation is, and it doesn’t matter at all, because it’s pronounced “ass cans” and repeated so often that it’s like a third grader on the playground who’s learned a new naughty word and uses it at every available opportunity. The entire movie seems to be working against Roberts’ Herculean attempts to make us like it: It’s not funny enough to distract us from the plot’s plausibility problems. The script doesn’t try hard enough to be funny, so the cast has to try way too hard to be. do It’s fun. It indulges in short jokes and animated visual flourishes until it realizes that such things disrupt the narrative flow, so it abandons them in lieu of blandness. The montages… The montagesThey are! everywhere. And it features the painful phrase: “One small step for Rex, one giant leap for Florida.”
Is “insufferable” a verb? If so, you’ll be insufferable in this movie. I feel bad saying that, because Roberts works so hard trying to create a recognizable character out of a bunch of cliches thrown into a paper bag with a big hole in the bottom. You’ll spend half the movie trying to figure out if Rex is actually smart or if he just gets it together. fool in femininityBoth of these things can be absolutely true: she can be a genius astronaut and a jerk, and thus a reflection of the mysterious contradictions of the human condition. But to be a true reflection of the mysterious contradictions of the human condition, a person needs specificity of character, deep components of a personality that embody universality while also highlighting the almost infinite psychobiological variations of personality. Which is a long, annoying way of saying that Rex is bland and generic, and even a secular version of Streep and Hepburn a la Frankenstein would have a hard time elevating her beyond a quasi-feminist, greeting-card stereotype of “you can do it, dream it and do it.”
I know. What should I expect from a light comedy? It’s just streaming content designed to distract us from our everyday concerns. But there’s too much streaming content that doesn’t feel so grossly derivative (parts of the entire story are taken from Legally Blondeapparently), and it doesn’t waste the talents of its cast (Gabrielle Union as a NASA expert, Desi Lydic as Rex’s nemesis), and it doesn’t feel so flat and cheap (those outer space special effects, ugh!), and it doesn’t feel like it’s using montages as weapons. Again: Four of them! In the first hour! Space! Where no one can hear you scream!
Our calling: Envelope Space Cadet in ham and feed it to the alligators. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
