by Jake Hjort, Contributing Writer
I’m typically a sucker for any sort of astronaut or space movie. There’s just something about the stories of human perseverance and ingenuity combined with the scientific elements — sometimes fictional, sometimes not — which check all the right boxes in my brain and make me susceptible to falling in love. From the onset, 2024 looked to be a promising year for these space-bound sagas, with the films Spaceman and Fly Me to the Moon on the horizon, but there is another, lesser promoted astronaut film released this year: the subject of this review, Space Cadet. So, does this new Prime Video release land amongst the stars or does it fail to lift off? Spoiler alert: This rocket is still sitting on the launchpad.
Space Cadet tells the story of Rex Simpson (Emma Roberts), a party-loving girl from Florida who once dreamed of becoming an astronaut, but instead spends her days bartending and wrestling alligators. However, despite her outwardly brash and bubbly demeanor, Rex is, as we are told, a bright young woman with a great mind for engineering, having designed gates to allow for the safe passage of manatees through her local canals. Inspired by a run-in with a former classmate turned private spaceflight investor, Toddrick (Sebastián Yatra), Rex decides to try and chase her dreams and apply to NASA’s astronaut program. With the help of a résumé unknowingly falsified by her best friend, Nadine (Poppy Liu), Rex is accepted into NASA and jets off to the Johnson Space Center to train under doctors Logan O’Leary (Tom Hopper) and Pam Proctor (Gabrielle Union), and try to reach her goal of making it to space.
It doesn’t take a supercomputer to surmise that the initial pitch for this film was “Legally Blonde in space.” To give a brief summary, Legally Blonde is a 2001 film about Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon), a sorority girl who manages to get into Harvard law school to try and win back an ex-boyfriend, but finds that her unique outlook makes her a very proficient lawyer. Both Rex and Elle butt heads with their colleagues due to their unconventional approach to their fields, but are able to use their quirks and skillsets to solve problems that their seemingly more competent peers are unable to, combatting their preconceived stereotypes. However, while Legally Blonde is a great film that has spawned sequels and a Broadway musical, Space Cadet, well, is not.
Why then do these two films, despite following very similar recipes, have such a disparity in quality? For starters, Space Cadet is a romantic comedy that falls completely flat on both accounts. Rex and Logan are the primary romantic coupling in the film and, alongside the general ickiness of Logan being Rex’s superior at NASA, the two have almost no chemistry. I’ve seen Roberts and Hopper be great in other projects, so I certainly don’t think this is a lack of ability on their part, but just an overall inability of the film and it’s script to generate a compelling couple and romance. Likewise, the film fails to generate any good comedic bits, as I genuinely don’t think I uttered even a single chuckle throughout the entire runtime. Rex’s antics are much more abrasive and obnoxious than endearing and charming, so I was neither laughing at her nor rooting for her to succeed. The film also lacks a good straight man, each supporting character having their own brand of zaniness, which is crucial for grounding the comedy and juxtaposing the absurdity with rationality.
Perhaps more damningly, Space Cadet fails to have anything of substance to say about the world. Ostensibly, it means to say the same things that Legally Blonde did: We should push past our preconceptions of people and base our judgments on who they really are, and that you should stay true to yourself while following your dreams. However, both of those concepts fall flat on their face because of one of the film’s central plot points: Rex didn’t really deserve to be at NASA. Sure, she was a smart girl and a capable engineer, but so are a lot of people — she was only able to get the chance that she did because of the litany of false experiences on her résumé. Even though she does so unwittingly, Rex gets into NASA not because of her hard work and determination, but because of lies and deceit. How then can you really say that the film encourages you to be true to yourself and to break stereotypes when Rex really is the unqualified astronaut candidate that her colleagues claim she is?
Space Cadet is unfortunately not a great film. Given the NASA setting and Legally Blonde structure I went in sure that I would at least have a bit of fun watching it, but sadly I spent more time groaning at it than anything else. The jokes fall flat, the chemistry is nonexistent, and the characters are incredibly obnoxious. In a world of space shuttles and rockets, Space Cadet is a launch that fizzles off and crashes back to Earth mere moments after takeoff.
Rating: Didn’t Like It
Space Cadet is currently streaming on Prime Video
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