Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Space Cadet’ on Amazon Prime Video, Which Is Pretty Much The Astronaut Version of ‘Legally Blonde’

Anyone who ever wanted to launch Legally Blonde into outer space might almost sort of rejoice in the general direction of Space Cadet (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video), which shifts the overachieving-ditz formula from Harvard to NASA. Emma Roberts headlines as a terminally bedazzled Florida party girl who overcomes the odds – and every notion of common sense and plausible screenplays – and makes it to space camp, where she tries to infect serious people with her peppy, margarita-quaffing charms. Of course, as cliches dictate, this character isn’t REALLY as dumb as she looks and acts, and is actually quite smart, but I can’t say the same for NASA, here rendered as a clown show run by morons. Not that anyone’s firing up this movie for an accurate reflection of reality, but let it be known that it skews closer to a fairy tale than anything else, so you should adjust your expectations accordingly.

SPACE CADET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: That wide-eyed look is NOT the result of not enough oxygen between the ears. No, Tiffany “Rex” Simpson (Roberts) has always wanted to be an astronaut, and that glazed expression is just her staring deep deep deep into the sea of stars above. See, look at all her childhood scrapbooks, full of cutesy cutouts of her myriad inventions and construction-paper manifestations of her dreams, and now watch this flashback of her and her mom sitting on the hood of the car, watching a Cape Canaveral rocket launch. She piled up the science-fair blue ribbons and even got into Georgia Tech. Except now she’s in her late 20s and the only science she practices is margarita mixology. She’s a career bartender. She seems almost permanently a little bit high, and would be more so if this was an R instead of a PG-13. She whoops it up on the beach with her bestie Nadine (Poppy Liu). She wrestles alligators. She wears bathing suits even when she’s not at the beach or pool. WHA’ HAPP’N’D? 

Well, you might say Florida happened to her, and happened to her real hard, and you might be onto something. But it’s also a sad story. Rex’s mom got cancer right around graduation, and college had to wait. And then Mom passed, and college never happened, so she learned the marg trade, and also helps her dad (Sam Robards) with his scammy ghost-tour business. What shakes her from the kind of happy-empty rut that seems wholly specific to residents of America’s Wang? A convo with a former classmate named Toddrick (Sebastian Yatra), who says her way-out-there manner of thinking inspired him to create his highly successful civilian-space-travel enterprise. OK! Whatever you say, Toddrick! And now this story is kind of like that of the frog-prince, but instead of a woman kissing a frog and awakening the prince, a man has a conversation with a gator-rasslin’ woman about blasting asses into orbit and awakens her long-dormant passions.

So Rex applies to space camp and, you’re never gonna believe this, she actually gets in. How? She has no degrees, no credentials, no training, no experience. But Nadine got her hands on the application and filled it full of fibs and phonies without Rex knowing, and Rex doesn’t ask any questions when she gets accepted, and NASA apparently doesn’t do background checks, possibly because it only takes like two months of training before they send you to the space station so, you know, why bother? Rex gets to Houston and fakes it, making friends with other weirdos and enemies with the stiff jobs, kindling a little romantic chemistry with NASA guy Logan O’Leary (Tom Hopper) and enduring four montages just in the first hour of the movie. (Four! I counted!) How long will it be until the fit hits the shan? Long enough to criticize the many flaws in NASA’s astronaut-vetting process, and I would know.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Space Cadet isn’t interesting enough to be The Beach Bum meets Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe with a dollop of Gravity, so we’re stuck with Legally Blonde meets SpaceCamp with a dollop of Apollo 13.

Performance Worth Watching: There’s a lot to like about Roberts’ performance here; she puts a lot of effort into making sure Rex isn’t a grating and obnoxious protagonist. But the screenplay doesn’t give Rex enough detail and idiosyncrasies to render her much more than just a basic Movie Character.

Memorable Dialogue: A family on a tour of the NASA facility spots Rex in all her neon-drenched, overly accessorized, trucker-cap glory:

Kid: Mom, is that an astronaut?

Mom: Not with my tax dollars, she’s not.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Space Cadet is the type of movie that gets tons of mileage out of the space campers’ being labeled with the acronym ASCANS, and I don’t remember what it’s short for, and it doesn’t at all matter, because it’s pronounced “ass cans,” and is repeated so often it’s like a third-grader on the playground who learned a new naughty word and uses it at every available opportunity. The whole of the movie seems to be working against Roberts’ herculean attempts to make us like it: It isn’t funny enough to distract us from the plot’s plausibility issues. The script doesn’t try hard enough to be funny, so the cast has to try too hard to make it funny. It indulges cutaway jokes and animated visual flourishes until it realizes such things disrupt the narrative flow, so it abandons them in lieu of blandness. The montages – the montages! They’re everywhere. And it features the excruciating line, “One small step for Rex, one giant leap for Florida.”

Is “excruciate” a verb? If so, this movie excruciates you. I feel bad saying that, because Roberts works so hard trying to fashion a recognizable character out of a fistful of cliches tossed in a paper bag with a big hole in the bottom. You’ll spend half the movie trying to determine if Rex is actually smart, or if she puts the ninny in femininity. Both things can absolutely be true – she can be a genius astronaut and an imbecile, and therefore a reflection of the mysterious contradictions of the human condition. But in order 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 embodies universality at the same time it highlights the near-infinite psycho-biological variations of personhood. Which is a long, annoying way of saying Rex is bland and generic and even an unholy Frankensteining of Streep and Hepburn would struggle to elevate her beyond a you-go-girl dream-it-and-do-it greeting-card quasi-feminist stereotype.

I know. What should I expect from a lightweight comedy. It’s just a piece of streaming content designed to distract us from our everyday worries. But there’s just too much streaming content out there that doesn’t feel so grossly derivative (entire story beats are lifted from Legally Blonde, it seems), and doesn’t squander the talents of its cast (Gabrielle Union as a NASA wonk, Desi Lydic as Rex’s nemesis), and doesn’t look so flat and cheap (those outer space FX – yeesh), 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 gators. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.