This review contains spoilers for the 2024 film SPACE CADET and for the 2001 film LEGALLY BLONDE.
2001’s LEGALLY BLONDE is lightning in a bottle, and still seemingly transgressive in the ways it approaches performed femininity and achievement reliant upon hard work and intelligence. Reese Witherspoon is radiant and bubbly as she floats through the film as an almost otherworldly presence, wearing pink clothes, carrying a cute little dog with an ironic name, and effusively sharing her love of fashion and make-up. Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah’s script cleverly named Witherspoon’s character “Elle,” French for ‘she,’ as a nod to her absolute personification of femininity. In 2001, monoculture sternly admonished women that to be taken seriously, at all and certainly not likely as an equal to someone who is masculine-presenting, a woman had to cast off common affectations for femme-presenting people. No all-pink outfits. No little purse dogs. No bold candy-colored cosmetics. In LEGALLY BLONDE, Elle Woods is indisputably intelligent. What focuses over the course of the film are her reasons for success. She chooses to stop pursuing law as effort to win back her boyfriend, and does so for herself. The film also focuses that much of the conflict between women in the movie is the result of patriarchal control systems. The hostility experienced between Elle and Vivian (Selma Blair) is first because society has trained them to see each other as competitors for the same man’s affection and then, when Elle lands a prestigious internship from Professor Callahan (Victor Garber), Vivian assumes it must be because of sexual favors; she dismisses Elle’s intelligence because of presented femininity. LEGALLY BLONDE is emphatic in its messaging. Accomplished, intelligent women can dress however they damn well please and owe society nothing when they pursue their own hobbies and interests. Liking pink and fashion makes no one dumb, and conflict between women often exists because of the expectations of women imposed by men.
So, I was pretty excited to hear about Liz Garcia’s SPACE CADET. The elevator pitch for the film was “LEGALLY BLONDE but NASA,” and that sounds pretty great. I may have said earlier that 2001’s monoculture devalued women’s capabilities based on the femininity of their wardrobe and their interests and hobbies, but not much has changed. One only has to look to the hostility around BARBIE’s release last summer to see that women are still widely made to feel that if they want to embrace feminine performance, then they aren’t taken seriously. You can’t see me, but I’m waving my hands at the discourse around Sydney Sweeney at any given moment. Director Liz Garcia’s previous film, THE LIFEGUARD, has a melancholy sweetness and honesty that made it immediately compelling. SPACE CADET’s hook was that the central character, Rex Simpson, was on a bright path with a future in science until the death of her mother when she was a teen. I knew from THE LIFEGUARD that Garcia has the skill to deal with character’s wounds as more than mechanisms to animate plot. So, the added dimension of examining how grief impacts a young woman’s academic trajectory sounded compelling.
When we meet SPACE CADET’s Rex Simpson (Emma Roberts), it’s not pink and cosmetics she’s ensconced in, but the culture of Florida’s panhandle. Rex wears the kind of airbrushed T-shirts someone might buy at a state fair, acid-washed denim and bold cosmetics. She’s a bartender who loves frozen, fruity drinks and literally partakes in occasional gator wrestling. The film spends time showing how she has occupied her unchallenged mind since having to step away from her scholarship. At her job, she demonstrates eidetic memory to a degree that impresses customers and her boss alike. There’s an early scene where we see her put down a platter of over twelve drinks, each in front of the correct patron, all customized, and everything is correct. She frequently engineers solutions to problems she sees. She’s built modified deck chairs that simplify tanning. She’s built a series of lochs and gates designed to keep manatees safe and redirect them back to their habitat. After running into a classmate, Toddrick (Sebastian Yatra), who is now a billionaire at her class reunion, she feels adrift.
So, Rex decides to follow her dreams and apply to NASA’s astronaut training program as a woman who never completed any post-graduate work, let alone finished college. She’s hoping her enthusiasm and candor about her background will make the impossible possible. This is where the film first missteps. The movie easily could have proceeded with a conceit that allowed Rex to be accepted with disclosure of her inadequate resume. Write it off to a fluke, or maybe a mean-spirited administrator who’s trying to disprove the value of the program, whatever. Baking into the story a B-plot about how Rex’s resume was forged that eventually converges with Rex’s own success at NASA muddies the waters. When Rex shares her resume and cover letter with her best friend, the pregnant Nadine (Poppy Liu), her friend takes it upon herself to fraudulently enhance Rex’s resume before submission. This creates opportunity for there to be multiple admittedly funny scenes where someone is calling to check Rex’s references, and Nadine pretends to be any number of them.
But it taints Rex’s accomplishments in the eyes of the viewer and creates an inconsistency in her character. This is a young woman who gave up her dreams to stay by her dying mother’s side and rescues manatees recreationally… and she doesn’t immediately disclose to NASA that Nadine doctored the resume when she finds out? It’s not consistent with the wonderful performance that Emma Roberts puts forth as Rex. Like Elle Woods before her, Rex is radiant and bubbly and self-assured in her identity. She’s a Florida girl through and through, and the only reason she doesn’t do the right thing is to pad out the run time with a running reference-check bit.
The growth of Rex’s relationship with fellow candidates is very structurally similar to Witherspoon’s with Selma Blair and Oz Perkins. Rex lifts up the culture around her with her authenticity and leans on her roommate for support and everyone is better for it. The little montages of Rex and Violet (Kahoo Verma) helping each other are charming and cute, if not necessarily paying off as deeply as Witherspoon-Blair.
Eventually Rex’s lack of degree or accomplishments is discovered, and she’s kicked out of the training program. At this point, I thought the obvious arc was that she reapplies, without Nadine touching the resume, and is granted re-entry or maybe cutting to a college graduation four years later, as we see that Rex is no longer putting the cart before the horse and has managed her grief in a way that lets her go back to school. We do neither.
After the International Space Station collides with a bunch of micro-asteroids rotating the station’s solar panels such that it is no longer getting power, Rex feels compelled to act! It just so happens that the astronauts trapped aboard the station are her former fellow astronaut candidates. She cares about them! She needs to help! So instead of getting to the International Space Station aboard a NASA or Russian rocket, she gets to space aboard billionaire Toddrick’s rocket. Toddrick is the one who finally sees Rex’s value. The private sector had the solution! So, when Rex does ultimately become an astronaut in the employ of a character that seems to be a proxy for Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos, I felt significant discomfort, with this being an MGM film. Musk, Bezos, and Richard Branson’s space programs are emblematic of growing global wealth inequality and the loss of power in the face of oligarchs that control them from outside. Musk can afford to play with space because he does not pay his fair share in taxes. Bezos launches a cock shaped rocket into space because his tax burden is significantly below where it should be.
Here, in the film’s third act, Rex’s arc is stripped of power because instead of finding success at an institution primarily interested in science and serving the public trust like NASA, she ends up in the service of a billionaire oligarch in the profit-seeking private sector. Even if we accept the idea that Toddrick can see her value, what good is it to her or the audience if NASA didn’t see it? I could reconcile the film having messaging around how science, technology, and engineering jobs need to have alternative paths of entry for those that didn’t have the opportunity to take advantage of higher education. It’s real. The economic barrier of a lifetime of debt or the barrier of coming from a marginalized community is real. Much like LEGALLY BLONDE’s thesis of how conflict between women is a product of patriarchal expectations, there would have been room in this charming little comedy to talk about the inaccessibility of college. But to have the problem of Rex’s lack of credentials or experience handwaved by a character that is a proxy for Daddy Bezos in a film that is ultimately paid for by Daddy Bezos feels weird. Hooray capitalism!
As much as I struggle with the film’s third act, I find Emma Roberts and Poppy Liu to be incredibly charming, and even though the faked resume plot thread created the inconsistency I mentioned, watching Poppy Liu pretend to be six different references is deliciously funny. While it isn’t the seismic declaration that LEGALLY BLONDE is, SPACE CADET has charm and laughs. Just be ready to detangle its problematic third act.
them, not even once. When he’s not disappointing his cats he’s watching and writing about film.
His interests run toward naturalism, SOV and forgotten thrillers. Against his better judgment he
has hosted a podcast, Impossible Coin, for six years.
Tags: Barbie, Emma Roberts, Kahoo Verma, Karen McCullah, Kirsten Smith, Legally Blonde, Liz Garcia, Oz Perkins, Poppy Liu, Reese Witherspoon, Sebastian Yatra, Selma Blair, Space Cadet, Sydney Sweeney, The Lifeguard, Victor Garber
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