SPACE CADET— 1 STAR
Throughout the history of movies, there has always been different types of intentional caricature characters, built to play the proverbial fish-out-of-water in various settings. Take Abbott and Costello meeting movie monsters on their turf, Laurel and Hardy bringing their signature look and act to period pieces, or Bing Crosby and Bob Hope essentially playing themselves across the globe in their exotic Road to… travelogue movies. In more modern times, we’ve had Jim Varney’s Ernest P. Worrell and Tyler Perry’s Madea busting up prisons and holidays. In all those classic examples, the main characters were purposely exaggerated stereotypes. Space Cadet, a new digital release from Amazon Studios, had the crazy and off chance to join that bunch.
In Space Cadet, former child star and teen idol Emma Roberts, recently seen in Madame Web and Maybe I Do, has been given an over-the-top character named Rex Simpson. She is a free-spirited party girl in her late 20s who works as a beachside bartender in Cocao Beach, Florida. Rex can wrestle an alligator one minute and turn on fetching charisma the next for her social media platforms, spewing all the hashtags and vernacular fitting of her Millennial/Gen Z generation. Her colorful DIY fashion sense highlights tall shoes, airbrushed hats and shirts, and shiny studs on every surface that can take a Bedazzler. If one were the give the look and attitude a name, it might be “Florida Woman” matching the type of you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up zany news headlines.
LESSON #1: LEAN ON THE CARICATURE– That description right there of a loud, sparkly woman-child from the saucy wilds of Florida is the kind of caricature that skits and movies alike could plant anywhere for humorous effect. Picture the possibilities: Rex Simpson Goes to Paris, Rex Simpson Climbs Mount Everest, or Rex Simpson Meets Freddy Krueger. With the right tongues in the right cheeks, there’s room for a new caricature misfit being the butt of jokes in 2024. Honestly, if you think about it, the semi-clueless, girls-rock exterior of Rex Simpson could be a spiritual descendant of Reese Witherspoon’s Elle Woods character from the Legally Blonde movies. She made the impossible possible and didn’t compromise her inner self.
Space Cadet wants the same gumption for Rex Simpson. Underneath the glam exterior, Rex has a smart and savvy side. She missed a full ride to Georgia Tech to stay home caring for her ailing (and now departed) mother and her helpless, wayward dad (TV veteran Sam Robards) who runs a ghost tour haunted house scam for tourists. Rex did put her closeted science acumen to good use on a local project to manage manatee waterways. She is a consummate and unselfish helper to all. Her biggest dream, one shared with her mother while watching shuttle and rocket launches as a kid over the years, was becoming an astronaut.
The NASA in Space Cadet opens a sliver of a window for Rex Simpson to make that dream happen. From both a mission side and a public relations one, the stagnant astronaut program has been looking for new blood and is targeting unconventional candidates and “experimentalists” over the usual accomplished pilots and high performing scientists and engineers. Rex throws together a weak email essay of her passions and dreams while, without her knowledge, her pregnant bestie Nadine (Poppy Liu of TV’s Dead Ringers and The Afterparty) grossly inflates and submits Rex’s resume with false schooling, experiences, and references. Impressed by her uniqueness and trumped-up qualifications, NASA directors Pam Proctor (fellow former teen star Gabrielle Union), Logan O’Leary (Tom Hopper of The Umbrella Academy), and Rudolph Bolton (silvered comedian Dave Foley) bring Rex in to join the next candidate training group at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Sure enough, Rex Simpson shows up in her fullest and loudest “bruh” Florida-ness to join a squad of genuinely qualified individuals. Her ensemble of competition and teammates includes academic geniuses Violet Marie Vislawski (The Big Sick’s Kuhoo Verma), Miriam Ospery (Josephine Huang of Billons), and Hector Kaneko (Troy Iwata of What Lies Below), military man Capt. Jack Mancini (Grease Live! member Andrew Call), the athletic Grace Jackson (The Hating Game’s Yasha Jackson), and the fiercely All-American doctor and perfect mother Stacey Kellogg (Desi Lydic of The Daily Show). They each play a thinly-defined demographic checkbox, and the script gives them all quirks on top of quirks to fit those given labels. And here’s the imposter, Rex Simpson, working in due time to outshine all of them.
LESSON #2: RUN THE BACKGROUND CHECKS BEFORE YOU ADMIT A PERSON INTO YOUR WORKPLACE– Therein lies a galaxy’s worth of improbability in Space Cadet. Unfortunately, Rex Simpson is not Elle Woods. She may have spunk and a courageous mettle, but she lacks the actual intelligence and skill to be there. Hang around long enough and you learn the ropes, you ask? No, this stuff takes years. The eye rolls start when no one at NASA runs a proper background check or reference interview before Rex arrives and infiltrates the program. Those moments are saved for lame comedy bits over the phone between Logan and Nadine creating cover identities to cover for Rex. As one of Rex’s fellow candidates tells her, “Deceit never ends well,” and they’re right.
To their credit, Emma Roberts and the script by writer-director Liz W. Garcia (Purple Hearts, The Lifeguard) imbue Rex with grit and motivating leadership qualities. She encourages “positive vibes only” and lives her life with “freakin’ spirit.” Those are splendid attributes to trumpet for young women, and especially teens and girls wanting to enter the male-dominated areas of science, and Roberts gives those aspirations a level of shine and contagious warmth.
LESSON #3: YOU CAN’T TAKE SERIOUSLY WHAT’S NOT TAKEN SERIOUSLY– However, at some point, Space Cadet has to realize they are planting this character in a profession that demands high qualifications for a reason. For all the wonder surrounding being an astronaut, it’s a job that has life and death risks and consequences. Historical figures like Sally Ride and Mae Jemison didn’t become astronauts because of tokenism or cuteness. They busted their tails and became experts in their field legitimately. Space Cadet asking us to swallow their narrative with Rex besmirches that revered history and belittles the importance of program to a borderline disrespectful level.
That platform is hard to forgive for the sake of plucky frivolity. Because there’s not a chance in the whole universe Space Cadet’s premise would even work, that’s when the film should have leaned into full farce. There’s a version of Space Cadet which is simply Rex Simpson Goes to Space that is as innocuous as it would be comedic. Let Emma Roberts live and breathe this persona with a pro wrestling kayfabe-level of commitment to the bit, and play it up those excessives. When knowingly not trying to be serious up front, a caricature of a character like Rex can get away with much more, and that looseness becomes much more palatable and, frankly, more entertaining. Instead, you’ve got a reductive movie striving for inspiration it can’t and shouldn’t earn.