Reel Reviews column: ‘The Astronaut’s Wife’ not a thriller
By JAMIE ANNEL
*1/2 out of ****
After the success of "The Blair Witch Project" and "The Sixth Sense," the trend in dramatic thrillers continues with "The Astronaut's Wife," starring Johnny Depp and Charlize Theron. But unlike those films, "The Astronaut’s Wife" tries too hard to be frightening. The suspense builds in predictable ways, and the ending is anti-climactic.
As the film opens, astronaut Spencer Armacost (Depp) travels into space on a mission to repair a satellite in Earth's orbit, leaving his pretty schoolteacher wife, Jillian (Theron) behind. Something goes wrong on the mission, however, and for two minutes NASA loses contact with Spencer and his fellow astronaut, Alex Streck (Nick Cassavetes).
Contact is eventually reestablished and the men are brought back down to safety. Spencer appears unharmed, but Alex later succumbs to what is deemed a massive stroke. After the funeral, his widow commits suicide, but not before telling Jillian something cryptic.
Spencer, meanwhile, has decided to quit NASA. He takes a plum corporate job, and he and Jillian move to New York where she quickly becomes pregnant. All should be going well, but Jillian starts to think that there's something wrong with Spencer.
Her suspicions are confirmed when she's contacted by a former NASA employee who claims to know what happened to the men during those missing two minutes.
"The Astronaut's Wife" bears strong similarity to the 1968 horror classic "Rosemary's Baby." In that film, Mia Farrow played a woman who went through similar feelings of suspicions and uncertainty when she was pregnant with the devil's child. (Coincidentally, John Cassavetes played the husband in "Rosemary's Baby," while his son, Nick, plays the doomed Alex Streck in this movie.)
Both films deal with the themes of a woman's mistrust of her spouse and her inability to make people believe she's not going crazy. "The Astronaut's Wife," however, is a pale imitation of that superior film. Charlize Theron looks a bit like Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby" (they even have strikingly similar hairstyles), but is unable to portray the vulnerability that Farrow did.
Johnny Depp is one of the best actors working today, and he does a fine job with what he's given. The problem is that he's only given a character whose sole job is to appear menacing.
Rand Ravich, the director, can create suspense, but too often it results in little payoff. He also adds unnecessary "arty" touches, such as having the camera spin wildly around Jillian to portray confusion or having dramatic action unfold in slow motion. The art direction is excellent, though; the apartment the Armacosts live in is the kind you only see in the movies unless you happen to be a multimillionaire.
"The Astronaut's Wife" was likely intended to be an "intelligent thriller" and a return to a more old-fashioned approach to storytelling. Unfortunately, it has come out in the wake of the year's best scary movie, "The Blair Witch Project", which accomplished those same goals in a better and more original way.