I don’t know perhaps it’s cyclical, or maybe it’s just a subliminal effort from Hollywood to convince kids that NASA is still a relevant program worth spending our tax dollars on when we could be using it for health care and education, but we’re now in the millennium and the big fad is animals in space! “Space Chimps” is not an allegory, it’s not symbolic of something, and hell it’s barely even a creative name. It’s just a title that tells you the premise with zero effort almost as if the intent from producers. It’s chimps in space, they’re astronauts. If you want to know anything more then you’re over estimating Vanguard. I really wanted to enjoy “Space Chimps” mainly because the trailers were so funny, but if you’re not under the age of ten and hopped up on sugar, you’re not going to enjoy what Vanguard serves up to audiences. An uneasy mixture of pop culture nods, spiritual undertones, and NASA propaganda, “Space Chimps” moves at such a breakneck speed that it’s impossible to really enjoy what’s going on.
 

The characters are so broad that we never get the chance to like them because after the first ten minutes we’re watching slacker chimp Ham III in NASA training to be an astronaut. After only a few montages of him training and not taking his work seriously, does he finally go to space in a moment so abrupt I almost thought the producers opted to cut footage.

If that’s not enough, an obligatory plot involving aliens, a secret volcano on another planet, and a plan to rule the galaxy is shoe horned in to the plot and never actually finds a way to combine to feel like one singular narrative. Instead we jump from one central plot that’s basically a fable a la “Apollo 13,” while we jump on to another that’s almost like a rejected idea for a Dr. Seuss movie. Upon the villain’s introduction, I wondered if they’d accidentally edited another film in to “Space Chimps,” the editing is so shoddy. Before we can even grasp the one note characters (there’s the chimp who takes his job too seriously, the hero who doesn’t, the feminine foil to the childish males, the experienced chimp) we’re launched in to endless antics that are either hit or miss, and when they miss it’s a pretty flat affair to sit through Even at only eighty minutes, “Space Chimps” is tedious, and the writers seem to be working so hard around this one note concept of Chimps in Space, that they struggle to fit in actual story, and fail more often than not. It’s the definition of mediocrity in a summer that gave us “Wall-E.”