WhatzUp

The Astronaut's Wife
by Derek Neff

The Astronaut's Wife is all about surface, its own sleek set design and little else. It has aliens in it, but we can't really tell who is human and who isn't, because there's scarcely a difference to begin with. Everyone acts stiffly, as if posing on the runway at a fashion show. There's no paranoia of the kind we see in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or other movies it would like to claim itself akin to.

Astronaut Spencer Armacost (Johnny Depp) and his partner are involved in a mysterious accident while installing a satellite in Earth's orbit, during which they briefly lose contact with mission control. Soon it becomes clear that NASA is covering up some details about the accident that suggest something sinister may have happened while they were up there. After Spencer returns to Earth, his wife Jillian (Charlize Theron) begins to notice changes in his behavior. For one thing, he impregnates her almost immediately, in a violent, protracted scene that should be disturbing but somehow isn't. (There's lots of talk of heartbeats in this movie, but my pulse never rose once.) They live out their days with increasing unease in their absurdly spacious and antiseptic-looking apartment; the cold and inhuman set design is what should send Jillian running away in horror, not the fact that her husband is some kind of extra-terrestrial.

The movie heavy-handedly suggests parallels to Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, but it flatters itself beyond all measure. Just because Theron's hair is cropped as short as Mia Farrow's was in Polanski's still-creepy horror classic doesn't mean we are ever for one moment as disturbed, or, frankly, as conscious as we should be when things begin to go awry. (I mean conscious in the not-falling-asleep-from-sheer-boredom sense.) In lieu of substance we're given plenty of flashy camera angles (and one inexplicable, tedious close-up of Theron's lovely lips after another), more out of what I sense as desperation on the part of writer-director Rand Ravich than from any sense of real style.