What do you get when you mix six parts "I Married a Monster From Outer Space" with four parts "Rosemary's Baby," "The Omen" and "Village of the Damned," shake it and stir it, then add "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and the "Alien" movies as chasers? You end up with "The Astronaut's Wife," a film cobbled together from so many disparate and familiar sources that the audience is always ten giant steps ahead of both the plot and the characters.
This shamelessly derivative film, essentially an unattributed remake of "I Married a Monster From Outer Space," stars Johnny Depp, taking one of his rare side forays into straight commercial moviemaking, as an astronaut who experiences a strange, inexplicable two-minute long phenomenon while outside his space capsule and who returns an oddly changed man - though Depp plays both the before and after roles in so similarly deadpan and lowkeyed a style that we frankly cannot see too much of a difference. Charlize Theron portrays Spencer's wife, Jillian, who slowly comes to perceive that all is not true blue with her hero husband.
"The Astronaut's Wife" suffers so fatally from a sense of deja vu that it becomes almost impossible to stay interested despite a yeomanlike performance by Theron who even sports the shorn pixie hairstyle made famous by Mia Farrow, thirty-two long years ago, as she too ran around New York City, desperately searching for answers as to just what diabolical force was incubating deep inside her womb.
This film does provide an admirably dark finale as well as art direction, cinematography and music that create a spare, almost hermetically sealed world, devoid of sunshine and life. Too bad these quality elements are placed into the service of such completely unimaginative material.
This shamelessly derivative film, essentially an unattributed remake of "I Married a Monster From Outer Space," stars Johnny Depp, taking one of his rare side forays into straight commercial moviemaking, as an astronaut who experiences a strange, inexplicable two-minute long phenomenon while outside his space capsule and who returns an oddly changed man - though Depp plays both the before and after roles in so similarly deadpan and lowkeyed a style that we frankly cannot see too much of a difference. Charlize Theron portrays Spencer's wife, Jillian, who slowly comes to perceive that all is not true blue with her hero husband.
"The Astronaut's Wife" suffers so fatally from a sense of deja vu that it becomes almost impossible to stay interested despite a yeomanlike performance by Theron who even sports the shorn pixie hairstyle made famous by Mia Farrow, thirty-two long years ago, as she too ran around New York City, desperately searching for answers as to just what diabolical force was incubating deep inside her womb.
This film does provide an admirably dark finale as well as art direction, cinematography and music that create a spare, almost hermetically sealed world, devoid of sunshine and life. Too bad these quality elements are placed into the service of such completely unimaginative material.