Space Cadet Parent Guide

Ever since she was a little girl watching space shuttle launches with her mom (Natasha Warner), Rex (Emma Roberts) wanted to be an astronaut. When her mom died as she graduated high school, Rex struggled to get back on track. Her plans to go to university faded, and before long, she was a carefree party girl with an easy gig bartending on the beach and a side hobby building canals to save manatees. Rex’s creative mechanical ingenuity could have helped her become a good astronaut candidate, if she’d ever gotten around to getting her qualifications, but now she’s stuck.

One drunken night, Rex and her friend Nadine (Poppy Liu) slap together an application and submit it to NASA’s astronaut selection program. The call Rex gets from Dr. Logan O’Leary (Tom Hopper), head of said program, comes as something of a shock. What Rex doesn’t know, yet, is that Nadine took some “creative liberties” with her resume. And it’s only a matter of time before somebody at NASA notices that Rex might not have the background her resume suggests.

This production has been made to look exactly like a Disney Channel made-for-TV-movie from the early 2000s. It’s got the same vague girl power messaging, the bubbly energy, the chart pop soundtrack, even the goofy animated title cards. It’s kind of hard to hate the movie, since it so clearly wants to be that kind of movie. For reasons which I suspect have to do with appealing to the nostalgia of thirty-somethings, Space Cadet has very deliberately recreated one of the most vapid forms of entertainment in existence.

This film is stupid in almost every way a movie can be stupid. And it’s not just our erstwhile protagonist, either: I wouldn’t trust any of these people to run a salad bar, let alone a space mission. Blank-eyed stupidity can be funny, but for me, there’s a pretty short best-before date on that. By the end of the second act, I’m kind of hoping for some kind of fuel leak – either into the shuttle or into my room, whichever ends the movie sooner.

There isn’t much content to be worried about. Despite Rex’s party-girl ways, there’s hardly a mention of sex, and only brief joking reference to drug use. They’ve also replaced most profanity with the ever-helpful “fricking”, which frees the movie from actual profanity and causes it to sound like it was written by a 13-year-old with strict parents. The catch is the extensive social drinking, which is unusual in a film which is otherwise remarkably sterile. That doesn’t necessarily make it worth watching – trust me – but it does limit its suitability for younger viewers. Frankly, the content isn’t the issue here: the biggest problem is the movie’s determination to blast off into imbecility – a journey most adult viewers won’t want to take.