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"The Astronaut's Wife"

Overall Rating: **

This seems to be the summer of off-beat horror films. Previews for "Stigmata" and "Stir of Echoes" are strange, to say the least. As for what's out now, "The Blair Witch Project" uses unseen supernatural forces and an unseen budget to a generally good effect. Then there was "The Sixth Sense," a magnificent film about a child who sees ghosts. On the other hand, we now have "The Astronaut's Wife," a film that doesn't really get off the ground.

Jillian Armacost (Charlize Theron) is an astronaut's wife, but when her husband Spencer (Johnny Depp) is involved in an accident in orbit, her life is turned upside-down. Though Jillian spends some panic-filled hours waiting for the news, she soon learns that her husband will recover. Not everything is all right, however. Fellow astronaut Alex Streck and his wife Natalie (Nick Cassavetes and Donna Murphy respectively), die under mysterious circumstances soon after the accident in space. Spencer, too, is strangely changed, taking a job with an aerospace firm in New York City, refusing to talk about what happened in space, and generally acting in a menacing manner. Perhaps she's imagining things, but he seems like a totally different person.

"The Astronaut's Wife" is very good at building suspense, and the movie has more than its share of scary scenes. It also has a few witty lines--the one that comes to mind immediately is Jillian's sister's comment, "Men are like parking spaces--the good ones are taken, the available ones are handicapped." Unfortunately, there is just too much film between these successful moments. The pace is agonizingly slow. Sometimes, such as when we wait for news about Spencer after the accident, this works. Mostly, it only makes the film drag.

The big problem is that the threatened alien invasion isn't all that ominous. Their plan seems to be to build advanced planes for the U. S, Air Force and parent children. Vaguely, it seems that there's a method behind their madness, but only vaguely. The extremely small invasion force is hardly the most menacing extraterrestrial army created. With nebulous goals of world domination, and equally arcane methods of accomplishing those goals, "The Astronaut's Wife" makes the aliens in "Independence Day" (who simply want us to die) seem profound. What do the aliens want? How do they plan to get it? "The Astronaut's Wife" doesn't answer these questions--so the result is that it seems advanced aliens are coming to Earth solely to terrorize an astronaut's wife. The desire to keep their plot cryptic makes it practically non-existent.

On a technical level, the film has tons of problems. The film is filled with bizarre camera angles; they add nothing and become annoying. The worst problems are where it depicts things that would be scarier if left unseen. The depiction of what happens in space--done in flashback--works against the movie since part of what makes it scary is that we don't know what happened. A final special-effects flourish in the climactic battle is also totally out of place--the alien we see doesn't go with the mostly psychological horror the film uses elsewhere--and winds up being distracting.

"The Astronaut's Wife" isn't suitable for children. The violent and sexual content are both fairly strong--though much more is implied than actually shown. There is one extremely graphic on-screen suicide. There is also a great deal of strong language. The thematic content may be too frightening, as well.

"The Astronaut's Wife" has an interesting premise, and tries to remain enigmatic. Its execution, however, is a disaster, and the end result leaves "The Astronaut's Wife" lost in space.

Title: "The Astronaut's Wife"
Release date: August 27, 1999
MPAA rating: R
Overall rating: **
Aprox. run time: 109 min.
Director: Rand Ravich
Writer: Rand Ravich
Stars: Johnny Depp, Charlize Theron

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Mansion/7045/A_Wife.htm
Added to blog site: 7/26/09