Needless to say, this is rarely a good sign. If the last five minutes of a film are all that makes it worthwhile, you've effectively spent 85 minutes (or in the case of 'The Astronaut's Wife', closer to 100 minutes) sitting in the dark waiting for something interesting to happen.
That said, I managed to sneak into an early showing anyway, and can honestly say the movie might not be a revolutionary work of genius, but it's far from the disaster I'd steeled myself to see. And the shock ending was pretty good.
Otherwise, the film wasn't so much engaging as morbidly fascinating, but there's a lot to be said for that. Director/screenwriter Rand Ravich seems to have been going for a certain new wave atmosphere of alienation and oncoming nervous collapse, and so everyone walks around in an emotionally distant, battered haze, talking past each other but never really getting anywhere while the title character, Jill (the lovely but icy Charlize Theron) meanders into the twilight zone.
Needless to say, she's married to an astronaut, Spencer (Johnny Depp, sporting a particularly weirdly bleached coif), who has a shuttle accident and comes back subtly different. Or does he? Only Jill, and presumably his hairstylist, know for sure, but meanwhile they go to New York and become languid together. And she gets pregnant.
For a film so baldly pitched like a blond frisbee at Depp's estrogen-crazed fans, The Astronaut's Wife is remarkably smart. Part of first-time director Ravich's triumph here is that he's pulled off a supreme Hollywood bait and switch, making the audience expect good old all-American between woman and alien and then serving up a millennial update of 'Rosemary's Baby'.
It's a slick move, and it keeps the thinking audience off balance by allowing Ravich to update not the McCarthy versus the Martians classic 'I Married a Monster from Outer Space' but Roman Polanski's much scarier dissection of what happens when pregnancy, monsters and hysteria meet in the person of Mia Farrow.
'The Astronaut's Wife' is, as I'm sure other critics will say (once they get into public screenings, of course), 'Rosemary's Baby From Outer Space', even though Theron actually looks more like Twiggy than Mia Farrow.
Cracking this code took me about half of the movie, after which the thrill had largely worn off. Jill's emotional detachment may well be part of Ravich's point -- she's apparently been hospitalized for depression before, and there are hints she's had an abortion before -- but it's hard to embrace a movie that's this numb, this frozen. A non-stop litany of Male Authority Figures parade by and tell Jill what's going on in the plot so she can laboriously fail to react, while the clever camerawork makes its Lovecraftian point that the universe doesn't think like a human and then keeps making that point over and over.
The film's also about 20 minutes too long. If Ravich was trying to recapture the dreamlike phantasmagoria of the great black-and-white horror movies here -- 'Carnival of Souls', 'Cat People' -- he's missed the point. Those movies work because they were at best 75-minute commando affairs, show what you need to show and then let the monsters grow in the back of the viewer's brain. That's why 'Blair Witch Project' works.
That's why 'The Astronaut's Wife,' while a worthy effort, doesn't. Once Ravich makes his point, his characters have cooled past the point of doing anything really surprising, so he makes the point again. And again. And again. Is she crazy, or is he an alien? Feminine psychology is a beautiful thing, but Johnny Depp's fans already know how they think. Instead, they're hungry for resolution, plotline, movement -- all of which are in short supply here.
Depp is adequate but not really extraordinary with his unnatural hair and redneck accent, a weird intruder even if he isn't possessed by Things From Beyond. Theron is distant and looks like Twiggy, and that's about it. Of the claustrophobic supporting cast, only Joe Morton (best known to SF viewers as the cybernetics researcher Sarah Connor tries to kill in 'Terminator 2') stands out with a dementedly bipolar performance worthy of Donald Sutherland.
And it was very, very blue. The most hypnotic scenes -- Jill at home, Spencer's dream of space, and a truly creepy sequence in a blue-on-blue NASA briefing room that shifts into a blue-lit intensive care ward -- glow like the edge of space. It's a cool effect. So cool it's downright chilly.
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