'Space Cadet' review: Empowerment fantasy that doesn't go anywhere

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Rex Simpson (Emma Roberts) is the life of the party in her Florida hometown, but she once dreamed of something more.

Not content to sling drinks at a bar or to wrestle the occasional alligator, our hero reflects on where things have gone and decides to resurrect that long-ago goal: She will become an astronaut, she tells her best friend Nadine (Poppy Liu).

And wouldn't you know it, despite absolutely no credentials and thanks to some application shenanigans, she finds her way into a NASA astronaut-in-training program, alongside serious and actually qualified potential candidates.

“Space Cadet” arrives on Prime Video from writer-director Liz W. Garcia. The movie co-stars Tom Hopper (“The Umbrella Academy”) and Gabrielle Union as the directors of the training program.

MY SAY The critical dilemma provided by “Space Cadet” is more interesting than the movie.

Should the picture be taken seriously, with the application of actual standards of logic and thought, even though it has no interest in utilizing any of that itself?

Or, should the critic simply surrender to the inanity? To not only turn off the brain at the door, as the cliché goes, but to blast it to space, not to return to Earth until long after Rex Simpson's saga reaches its merciful conclusion.

The first approach means recognizing that not a single person in this movie acts like an actual human at any point, at any time or in any way.

It requires accepting that the directors of a program run by, we'll repeat this again, NASA, could be so dopey as to believe that this person has any business being near the Johnson Space Center as anything but a tourist.

It means acknowledging that you're sitting through a “Legally Blonde” knockoff that's so far below the standards established by that comedy classic that it's sad to even have to bring it into the conversation.

It means struggling through endless comic dead air as Roberts tries desperately to bring something to an impossible character, someone who is at once infuriatingly shallow and capable enough to con the space program.

It means laughing at the same repeated joke, the PG-13-level, vaguely racy shorthand nickname the movie's version of NASA gives to its astronauts-in-training, and it means enduring one of the least compelling screen romances in a good long while.

It's no fun, in other words. 

So if you find yourself stuck watching “Space Cadet,” take our advice, and adopt the other approach. Recognize that the movie does not want you to treat it with anything like actual brainpower. Understand that it's an empowerment fantasy geared toward impressionable girls, the spiritual successor of a whole subgenre of family movies built around young people being thrust into unlikely positions. Use it as a chance to talk to your own kids about their dreams for the future.

It's the only way to salvage 110 dreadful minutes.

BOTTOM LINE It doesn't work at all, but there's at least a shred of redeeming value.