The Astronaut's Wife
How well do you know the one you love?
Johnny Depp (Sleepy Hollow) and Charlize Theron (Devil's Advocate) star as courageous NASA astronaut Spencer Armacost and his beautiful, schoolteacher wife Jillian, a seemingly perfect couple whose lives are momentarily shattered when Spencer's mission mysteriously loses contact with Earth for 2 minutes. But neither Spencer nor Jillian know that those 120 seconds of terror will ultimately threaten their sanity, their future and their lives in this heart stopping psychological thriller the critics call "One scary edge-of-the-seat nightmare."
Member Reviews
Bored! - Sheenie
I kept waiting for this movie to start. About an hour in I realized that was as good as it was going to get. There was a lot of potential for a cool movie but it just fell flat. It took too long to get started and the climax was… well, anti-climactic. It wasn't scary or suspenseful, just a waste of time. I like Johnny Depp and Charleze Theron, but this wasn't a masterpiece for either of them. Definitely one to skip.Attempt to Build Suspense on Inferences Results in Weak Thriller - c4th
The Astronaut’s Wife has potential to be a remarkable thriller but delivers nothing beyond passable. The direction of Rand Ravich creates an awkwardly paced sci-fi drama that poorly allocates its time. His attempt to build suspense on inferences results in a weak thriller forcing viewers to accept vague notions without true conviction.
I was perplexed by the wife’s indignation toward NASA for losing contact with their astronauts for two brief minutes. Are there not extended periods of non-communication during typical space missions? Yet, the plot quickly assumes we accept the notion that this was inexcusable and that something horrible did indeed happen during those two minutes. We have only the wives’ inferences to go on since the incident was not portrayed on film. This is followed by one wife’s extremely subtle intimation that her husband’s behaviour has dramatically changed. How would we know? We saw next to no development of any characters other than the wife prior to the mission. Again we have scarce explicit observations to go on and what we did see fails to suggest any dramatic change until very late in the plot when it becomes unavoidably obvious.
Scenes featuring Joe Morton provide the only opportunities for the building of suspense. He plays a NASA representative with covertly-obtained physical evidence that something about the surviving astronauts is amiss. These scenes are well shot and provide the movie with its few promising moments. Ravich’s persistence in focusing on the pregnant wife’s internal conflict is wasted on most viewers. Charlize Theron’s performance is strong enough to hold its own but suffers next the lacklustre performance by Johnny Depp. The stone-faced persona that served him well in previous roles was woefully out of place here.
If you are a big fan of either Theron or Depp you will probably find this movie passable but unremarkable. It may fail to impress anyone outside of its stars’ fan base.poor - basilbenz
Johnny Depp plays a NASA astronaut named Spencer Armacost who, while on a space mission, losses contact with Earth for two minutes. He and his colleague, Alex Streck (Nick Cassavetes), return home to their spouses, Jillian Armacost (Charlize Theron) and Natalie Streck (Donna Murphy). Bizarre episodes begin to occur with Alex, leaving Jillian suspicious of her husband's condition. As her husband's strange behavior increases, Jillian begins to question what really happened in those 120 seconds.
"The Astronaut's Wife," written and directed by Rand Ravich, poorly executes good ideas. We have imaginative and potentially suspenseful ideas with this film's concepts behind such happenings in two minutes as Spencer and Alex are in galactic boundaries. The gradual increase in Spencer's unusual behavior depicts effective suspense-but thorough introduction of the characters does not take place, nor do we witness the key events in which the rest of the move hinges upon. Consequently, "The Astronaut's Wife" does not work.
The film's first act is full of incidences, characters, and subplots. Clearly too many things happen too early in the story. Within the first thirty minutes the production attempts to develop two separate relationships, shows us the atmosphere of a teacher's workplace, something bizarre transpires out of earth's orbit, a decision is made to resign and move to New York, a suicide takes place, a character mysteriously dies, and probably more. I just couldn't follow the plot.
I liked the eerie, supernatural overtones located throughout the production. The film is smart to reveal the right amounts of information at the precise time. There is also a certain style to "The Astronaut's Wife," containing an elusive mood, a weirdly intriguing design, and some tense and unusual camera angles. The movie becomes more interesting as we reach the closing.
Charlize Theron has been in a lot of movies lately, but "The Astronaut's Wife" is her first lea
Member Reviews
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Bored! - Sheenie
I kept waiting for this movie to start. About an hour in I realized that was as good as it was going to get. There was a lot of potential for a cool movie but it just fell flat. It took too long to get started and the climax was… well, anti-climactic. It wasn't ...Attempt to Build Suspense on Inferences Results in Weak Thriller - c4th
The Astronaut’s Wife has potential to be a remarkable thriller but delivers nothing beyond passable. The direction of Rand Ravich creates an awkwardly paced sci-fi drama that poorly allocates its time. His attempt to build suspense on inferences results in ...poor - basilbenz
Johnny Depp plays a NASA astronaut named Spencer Armacost who, while on a space mission, losses contact with Earth for two minutes. He and his colleague, Alex Streck (Nick Cassavetes), return home to their spouses, Jillian Armacost (Charlize Theron) and Natalie ...