If "The Astronaut’s Wife" had been a ten minute short instead of a feature film, I would still have had time to take a nap and do the dishes without missing much of the plot. As it was actually a full length movie, I went ahead and rebuilt my car engine and repaired the foundation on my house during the story and wasn’t any worse for it. Not to say that the movie was long, boring, or pointless, but let’s face it – this movie made watching political debate reruns on television seem quick, exciting, and educational.
"Wife" opens with a happy domestic scene between the freakishly tall and attractive Charlize Theron and the unfortunately blonde Johnny Depp. That she has married someone with such a bad bottle job is not supposed to arouse suspicion because he also has an annoyingly fake Southern accent. So from the beginning the movie stumbles into the category of bad marketing experiment and keeps on with that theme for the rest of the eight or ten hours until the end. The plot itself is of little consequence since the writer left shortly after he penned the title to pursue a more lucrative career in the sanitation arts. Suffice to say that something alien possesses Depp while he is up on the Shuttle repairing a satellite and he returns to Earth to impregnate his wife (a worthy effort in the case of Theron) with whatever space virus he has contracted. I say virus like the alien being was something concrete and could have been prevented with a large astronaut condom or space diaphragm, but really I mean something without form that manages to have its way with Depp without touching him. But regardless of how rude the alien is, it also manages to make itself undetectable to humans and thus sets the stage for the bulk of the film wherein Charlize tries to figure out just what in the name of the Hubble Telescope is going on with her newly creepy husband. Anyone with a few extra neurons would have figured it out by then, but as I said, there was no writer, and poor Charlize would have to wait for the end of the picture to buy a clue.
Now normally I can be accused of hyperbole with regards to my reviews, but in this case I defy anyone to contradict me on how long, boring, and repetitive the middle of the movie is. Just count the number of times Theron agonizes over Depp’s odd behavior or the number of references to the missing two minutes in space when Depp and his partner were out of contact with Ground Control. Add to those the pointless discussions, meaningless acid trips, and bizarre red herrings and you get one indefensible pile of galactic dog droppings. Can you smell that kind of thing in space? I don’t know the answer to that, but I sure could smell something here on Terra Firma, and it was coming from my VCR.
Now having said all of that, I will go on to add that the ending sucked harder than a black hole pulling in a neighboring solar system. Without "spoiling" the ending, which for all the wrong reasons was at least a minor surprise, I will just say that they left an opening for a bad sequel. Dollars to doughnuts (and what on Earth does that mean?) they can’t find anyone on this planet to make another one.
My advice? Rent "Aliens" or go see "Galaxy Quest" in the theaters. Otherwise, just stay at home and tweeze some nose hairs. I guarantee it will be less painful than watching "The Astronaut’s Wife".
(Thanks to tmjtwilson and Lambria for their inspiration in writing this review. Hope it was worth the wait…...Crandretti)
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