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Alien impregnation >> Johnny Depp gets body-snatched in The Astronaut's Wife
by MATTHEW HAYS
For those who'd like to counter that argument, The Astronaut's Wife offers no help whatsoever. This is a stylish but entirely unoriginal cross between I Married a Monster From Outer Space (itself a knockoff of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Rosemary's Baby. But despite the lack of novelty, I confess to having enjoyed watching Wife. It's pretty mindless, yes, and the trailer says it all, but writer-director Rand Ravich has managed to pull something entertaining together here. Certainly, the two leads are pleasant enough to look at. Johnny Depp's other-wordly good looks make him the perfect husband-cum-alien (though his alien status is much easier to believe than his southern drawl--a whopping mistake, for sure). Charlize Theron is his smitten wife who is thrown asunder after one of Depp's space missions goes awry. He and his copilot, on a routine space shuttle trip around the Earth's orbit, manage to lose contact with mission control after an explosion. A mere two minutes of lost time, but enough, it appears, for something nasty to have happened to the two astronauts. After the two return, they are honored as heroes by the President. Before anyone can say "computer-generated plot twist," Theron is pregnant with twins, while starting to feel awfully funny about Depp's strange and not-quite-himself behaviour. Theron confronts Depp about the lost two minutes in outer space: what happened up there? Why does Depp never talk about it? Depp responds by whispering into Theron's ear and groping her while they're barely out of sight at a cocktail party, eventually banging her right there (it seems the aliens have had multiple workshops on how to talk dirty). Despite its rerun-for-the-70th-time aura, Wife is still stupid fun. As the film unreels, Depp--again predictably--becomes creepier and creepier, as Theron becomes panic stricken. It's another take on that motif we can all relate to: do I really know the person I chose as a mate? It's also a bit of brain candy perfectly suited to the waning days of summer.
The Astronaut's Wife opens Friday, August 27 |
A strain of conventional wisdom has it that all the stories have already been told. All we poor contemporary audiences can hope for, the theory continues, are semi-decent reruns of what's come before.