Review: The Astronaut's Wife

inane (adj.) 1.void of sense or intelligence; 2. The Astronaut's Wife

Jillian Armacost's (Theron's) husband, Spencer (Depp), is a space shuttle astronaut. On a routine mission to repair a satellite, he and his co-pilot, Alex Streck (Cassavetes), are incommunicado for two minutes. When they get back on the ground, they refuse to discuss what happened during those two minutes. There is also something a little odd about them.

Spencer Armacost quits NASA and takes a corporate job designing a high-tech fighter plane that drops electromagnetic pulse waves instead of missiles. With modern weapons of war almost totally dependent on electronics, it's the Ultimate Weapon.

Jillian learns she's pregnant with twins, but there's something a little odd about them, too. At least that's what she thinks when she learns Alex Streck's widow, Natalie, was also pregnant with twins when she electrocuted herself in the bathtub with a radio.

It takes about 15 minutes to get the idea that Ravich is going for a kind of Rosemary's Baby meets Alien. Unfortunately, he is neither Roman Polansky nor Ridley Scott, so what you have is two hours of total boredom that has all the suspense of tapioca.

Lacking that, Ravich attempts to compensate by using a lot of artistic camera angles and supposedly symbolic settings that mean nothing because they relate to nothing. Jillian is constantly being shot in tunnels--hallways, subways, walkways--but what that's supposed to imply never comes out. Theron's performance doesn't help since she seems to have only two emotional levels: zombie and manic. She's either staring blankly or raving hysterically. Depp is just as bad. His opening performance is fine, but once he plays host to the extraterrestrial invader, he shuts down entirely. Even when he tries to be menacing, it's halfhearted.

The Astronaut's Wife might have worked if Ravich had stuck to sci-fi. Instead, he tries to use a sci-fi theme to produce some kind of deep-delving character study, too, and it fails on both counts. The dialogue is preachy, pompous and pointless; the characters are little more than talking heads, and the plot is so thin you could strain spaghetti through it. As for the science--don't ask. The entire premise relies on the idea that an alien race has learned to transport themselves via radio waves. In order to have "taken over" the two astronauts, the aliens would have had to either (a) been able to hover out there until they came along or (b) overcome the fact that any news they received about impending shuttle launches would already be years old. But, hey, we're going for art here, not reality. And the reality is: this movie is only good for insomniacs.

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