Anyone who has ever wanted to throw Revenge of a Blonde in outer space could almost rejoice in the general direction of Space Cadet (streaming on Amazon Prime Video), which transfers the formula of the overachieving Harvard idiot to NASA. Emma Roberts plays a dazzled Florida party girl who overcomes the odds—and any notion of common sense and plausible storyline—and heads to space camp, where she tries to infect serious people with her bubbly, margarita-swilling charms. Of course, as the clichés dictate, this character is NOT REALLY as stupid as she looks and acts, and is actually quite smart, but I can’t say the same for NASA, which is presented here as a clown show run by idiots. Not that anyone is casting this movie as an accurate reflection of reality, but know that it’s closer to a fairy tale than anything else, so you should adjust your expectations accordingly.
SPACE CADET:BROADCAST OR SKIP?
The essential: That wide-eyed look is NOT the result of a lack of oxygen between the ears. No, Tiffany “Rex” Simpson (Roberts) has always wanted to be an astronaut, and that glazed expression is just her staring into the deep sea of stars above. See, look at all her childhood scrapbooks, filled with cute cutouts of her countless inventions and construction paper manifestations of her dreams, and now look at this flashback of her and her mother sitting on the hood of the car, watching a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral. She’s racked up science fair blue ribbons and even gotten into Georgia Tech. Except now she’s almost 20 and the only science she practices is margarita mixology. She’s a career bartender. She almost always seems a little stoned, and would be even more so if it were an R instead of a PG-13. She parties on the beach with her best friend Nadine (Poppy Liu). She wrestles alligators. She wears swimsuits even when she’s not at the beach or the pool. WHAT HAPPENED?
Well, you could say Florida happened to him, and it did. really hardand you may be right. But it’s also a sad story. Rex’s mom got cancer right before graduation, and college had to wait. And then Mom died, and college never happened, so she learned the margarita business, and also helps her dad (Sam Robards) with his fraudulent ghost tour business. What gets her out of the kind of happy, empty rut that seems all too specific to Wang’s residents in America? A conversation with a former classmate named Toddrick (Sebastian Yatra), who says her slightly off-the-wall thinking inspired him to start his wildly successful civilian space travel business. Okay! Whatever you say, Toddrick! And now this story is a bit like the frog prince story, but instead of a woman kissing a frog and waking the prince, a man has a conversation with a woman who catches alligators about sending donkeys into orbit and awakens his long-dormant passions.
So Rex applies to space camp and, you’ll never believe it, she actually gets accepted. How? She has no degree, no references, no training, no experience. But Nadine got her hands on the application and filled it with lies and falsehoods without Rex knowing, and Rex doesn’t ask any questions when she gets accepted, and NASA apparently doesn’t do background checks, maybe because it only takes two months of training before they send you to the space station, so, you know, what’s the point? Rex gets to Houston and fakes it, befriends other weirdos and enemies with difficult jobs, sparks a little romantic chemistry with NASA guy Logan O’Leary (Tom Hopper), and endures four montages in the first hour of the movie alone. (Four! I counted!) How long will it be before crisis hits the shan? Long enough to criticize the many flaws in NASA’s astronaut selection process, and I would know.
What movies will this remind you of?: Space Cadet is not interesting enough to be The Beach Bum meets Beavis and Butt-Head Make the Universe with a spoonful of Gravityso we are stuck with Revenge of a Blonde meets Space Camp with a spoonful of Apollo 13.
Must-see performances: There’s a lot to like about Roberts’ performance here; she goes to great lengths to ensure that Rex isn’t an annoying, unlikeable protagonist. But the script doesn’t give Rex enough detail and idiosyncrasies to make him much more than just a movie character.
Memorable Dialogue: A family on a tour of the NASA facility sees Rex in all his neon-drenched, over-accessorized glory, complete with trucker hat:
Child: Mom, is he an astronaut?
Mom: Not with my taxes, she’s not.
Sex and skin: None.
Our opinion : Space Cadet is the kind of movie that benefits greatly from the fact that the space campers are labeled with the acronym ASCANS, and I can’t remember what it’s short for, and it doesn’t matter because it’s pronounced “ass cans” and is repeated so often that it’s like a third-grader on the playground learning a new dirty word and using it at every opportunity. The whole movie seems to work against Roberts’s Herculean attempts to make us like him: he’s not funny enough to distract us from the plausibility problems of the plot. The script doesn’t try hard enough to be funny, so the actors have to try too hard to be funny. TO DO It’s funny. He indulges in clipped jokes and animated visual flourishes until he realizes that such things disrupt the narrative flow, so he abandons them in favor of blandness. The montages – the montages! They are everywhere. And there is this atrocious sentence: “One small step for Rex, one giant leap for Florida.”
Is “excruciate” a verb? If so, this movie excites you. I feel bad saying that, because Roberts works so hard to create a recognizable character out of a handful of clichés 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 she’s just putting on her best fool In femininity. Both things can be perfectly true—she can be a genius astronaut and a fool, 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 a specificity of character, deep components of a personality that embody universality while emphasizing the near-infinite psychobiological variations of personality. This is a long and annoying way of saying that Rex is bland and generic, and that even an unholy Frankensteinization of Streep and Hepburn would have a hard time elevating her above a quasi-feminist greeting-card stereotype of a girl who dreams and does what she wants.
I know. What should I expect from a light comedy. It’s just a piece of streaming content designed to distract us from our daily worries. But there’s just too much streaming content that doesn’t feel as grossly derivative (entire chunks of the story are lifted from Revenge of a Blondeit seems), and doesn’t waste the talents of its actors (Gabrielle Union as a NASA enthusiast, Desi Lydic as Rex’s nemesis), and doesn’t look so flat and cheap (those space special effects – yuck), and 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 call: Wrap Space Cadet in ham and feed it to the alligators. JUMP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.