Director: Liz W. Garcia
Stars: Emma Roberts, Kuhoo Verma, Gabrielle Union
NASA and the light romcom don’t often intersect… except if it happens to be this week, with Fly Me to the Moon jetting into cinemas and Space Cadet crash-landing onto Amazon Prime. Liz W. Garcia’s fish-out-of-water story is quite unfortunately overshadowed, not only by its more accomplished counterpart hitting multiplexes, but by falling foul of one of the more unavoidable “Simpsons did it” scenarios (in this case, Season 5, episode 15 ‘Deep Space Homer’).
Emma Roberts is Tiffany ‘Rex’ Simpson (yes, Simpson), an average-jane Florida Girl who squandered academic potential when her mother got sick and has settled for less waitressing, partying and manhandling alligators (because Florida). A happenstance run-in with a successful school friend reignites her girlhood ambition to travel into space, something which coincides rather neatly with NASA’s outreach to blast an ‘unconventional candidate’ into the stratosphere.
Arriving in Houston, Rex has her requisite meet-cute with nerdy deputy mission director Dr. Logan O’Leary (Tom Hopper) and her anxious roommate Violet (Kuhoo Verma). Kitted out like she got fashion advice at a mid-’90s frat party, Rex is in hog’s heaven, but her brash personality rubs up against the more serious-minded astronaut candidates (“AsCans”; that’s a long running joke).
Garcia, no stranger to bubbly streaming content, shoots this thing for TV. Space Cadet is visually unambitious as though anticipating its audience won’t be paying full attention anyway. At best bland, at worst outright ugly (especially whenever garish VFX are used to balloon Rex’s fantasy-inclined daydreams-to-camera), it’s a familiar comedy that rests much of its credibility on the cast.
What stops this one from become a Challenger-scale disaster is – 100% – Emma Roberts. The best Ghostface and queen of Scream Queens has a way of throwing herself into major roles with all she’s got and that energy is welcomingly replicated here, certainly enough to get us through subpar colonoscopy jokes and the like. Comparable to Anna Faris, Roberts has comic timing that salvages material that’s way (way) beneath her.
Alas, that is the case here, working with a screenplay that has the joke hit-ratio of a sitcom that gets canned after an unaired pilot (people saying “AsCans” amounts to about 50% of the material here). Her support are… mixed. Gabrielle Union is under-utilised as the mission commander. David Foley seems to be awkwardly channeling Nick Offerman, except he isn’t pulling it off, adding distracting noise to the corners of any scene he graces. Hopper’s O’Leary gives discount store Glen Powell vibes. Verma is something of a highlight. Too bad she’s trapped in the cliché role of Diverse Best Friend and shit-canned (sorry, As-Canned) early doors.
Come the 11th hour, Space Cadet requires a rescue mission and the lies that Rex has told to get her accepted come back to bite her. The movie attempts some mild moralising about truthfulness but it falls flat, especially given the more earnest efforts along these same lines articulated in Fly Me to the Moon, while Rex’s cod party-girl philosophy means we end on a particularly ripe note.
There are undoubted highlights for Roberts – getting to fly in a NASA jet for one – but these on-location experiences seem somewhat wasted, hardly communicated to the audience with the sense of occasion and immediacy of, say, a Tom Cruise stunt. Half the time Garcia cuts away for some more of O’Leary’s inane background-checking. It’s symptomatic of a movie that doesn’t really factor the viewer into the equation, meaning this one – unfortunately – never gets off the ground.
Mission abort!
The Lost Highway Hotel 