The Astronaut's Wife

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Year:	1999
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	Rand Ravich
Genre:	In space, no one can hear you yawn.
Starring:	Johnny Depp, Charlize Theron, Nick Cassavetes
Rating:	2/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138304/
Tagline:	Witness the birth of pure evil
Favourite line:	None worth mentioning

Science fiction and romance?
Can it possibly be true?

The plot:
Johnny Depp and Charlize Theron play the perfect couple.
She's a primary school teacher with a class full of kids so obedient they may as well be fucking automatons.
He's an astronaut, jetting off on one last mission.
On the mission, he and his astro-buddy have to perform a space-walk and, whilst outside the spacecraft, something happens.
For two minutes, contact is lost.
Upon return to Earth, Depp's character seems OK, but his companion is clearly damaged in some way, and it's not long before he's dead and his wife has committed suicide. Theron discovers she is pregnant with twins and slowly, slowly, she begins to suspect that whatever came back from space that day was not her husband at all.....

There's a few problems here:
First: Depp and Theron's characters are so puke-inducingly perfect that I found it impossible to feel any form of compassion. Clearly never having suffered a day in their lives, so happy and content did they appear, I felt a period of terror and disquiet would do them good.
Second: The plot is nothing new, though it seems to think it is. Anyone who has seen Ambassadors of Death from classic Doctor Who will certainly know what I mean - "Something came back from Mars" barks Jon Pertwee's Doctor - then there's Lifeforce, Rosemary's Baby (even Theron's hairstyle invokes memory of the Polanski classic), Invaders yadda yadda yadda.
Thirdly: It is cripplingly slow, ponderous to the point of pain. By the time the tension and vague suggestion of something unpleasant does kick in, you've already lost the will to inflate your lungs.
Too sappy and saccharine for proper sci-fi fans, too sci-fi for sap fans, not horrific enough by far for horror fans, this seems to be caught in three minds, and fails to deliver on any of them.
Unnecessarily dull, then.