The Astronaut's Wife | 
 enlarge | Director: Rand Ravich
Actors: Johnny Depp, Charlize Theron, Joe Morton, Clea Duvall, Donna Murphy
Studio: New Line Home Video
Category: DVD
List Price: $9.98
Buy Used: $0.60
You Save: $9.38 (94%)
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Rating:  144 reviews
Sales Rank: 7125
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dvd-video, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 110
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
DVD Layers: 1
DVD Sides: 1
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: DN4906D
ISBN: 0780628551
UPC: 794043490620
EAN: 9780780628557
ASIN: 0780628551
Theatrical Release Date: August 27, 1999
Release Date: February 8, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com
An intriguingly creepy premise but failed execution marks this stylish and ultimately bland thriller about a pretty, young woman whose pretty, young astronaut husband comes back from his most recent space mission a little... odd. Before that fated space trip, Spencer (Johnny Depp) and Jillian (Charlize Theron) were a sunny, happy couple with matching blonde hairdos and a predilection for romping in the sack from extremely clever camera angles. However, after a communications blackout brings Spencer and his partner back down to earth prematurely, things are a little... peculiar. Spencer's partner goes bonkers and has a heart attack; on top of that, the partner's wife takes a fatal shower with a plugged-in radio. Getting out of the space biz, Spencer accepts a job as a corporate exec in New York, and as a welcome to the Big Apple for his comely wife, he molests her at the company cocktail party. Soon enough, Jillian is pregnant, but as you might expect, this pregnancy (twins, don't you know) is a little... unusual. Writer-director Rand Ravich takes his sweet time getting from extremely obvious plot point A to even more obvious plot point B, stretching out the development particulars in mind-numbing, suspense-killing fashion. Even Joe Morton, as a sinisterly psychotic NASA official, can't liven things up--you know you're in bad thriller territory when the biggest scare comes from a light suddenly being switched off. Theron, sporting a Mia Farrow-Rosemary's Baby haircut, sleepwalks beautifully through the movie, but she did this role much, much better in The Devil's Advocate. Depp, with a cornpone Southern accent, is about as realistic as his peroxided hair. Ravich does the viewer no favors with a hackneyed ending straight out of a B-grade paperback horror novel in which the most shocking moment is Theron's sudden emergence as a brunette. With Blair Brown as a jaded socialite who offers to help out Theron by providing do-it-yourself abortion pills, and a lovely Donna Murphy as the suicidal wife who figures it all out before everyone else. --Mark Englehart
Description
A woman becomes embroiled in a mystery after her astronaut husband suffers an accident and retires as a hero from the space program. When he begins acting strangely, she must decide whether his odd behavior is all in her mind, or if he is no longer the man she once knew.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 139 more reviews...
 "The Astronaut's Wife" June 9, 2008
That this film is a psychological thriller, I whole-heartedly agree. I think my problem with another reviewer is that what-else-should it be? I liked, "2001." I liked Tarkovsky's, "Solaris." And, I liked Soderbergh's and Clooney's, "Solaris," remake. I liked Andrew Niccol's, "Gattaca."
The thing with TAW is that, perhaps, because it leaves out outer-space footage and extra-terrestrial monsters, that don't look like Johnny Depp, we can't view it as some sort of action adventure yarn, but must view it with a sense of the unknown rather than a pretended known. I think, also, that this film's portrayal of the largely unknown as a thoroughly uninterested and uninteresting Johnny Depp character was its primary flaw. Depp could have been playing an uninterested and uninteresting CEO of a major corporation or a marine private, only willing to divulge his name, rank and serial number (when and if captured) for all I could tell. Perhaps, if our astronauts were in their sixties or seventies, Paul Newman could have done better. But, because Johnny has proven himself adept at pleasing audiences with wildl-l-l-ly eccentric behavior and quirks of interests in pursuits not known to have been dictated by any senior officer or presumed military code of conduct, it seems unlikely that Johnny acted outside his director's direction to play the extra-terrestrial as somberly and as uncreatively as a fence post, rather than as a tree.
Still, it is an interesting film. And, I suppose, it is vaguely possible that extra-terrestrial adventurers are primarily interested in how stocks are trading on their home-world. Or, maybe, the adventurers are simply Pentium 643s instead of Pentium 4s. Kind of makes me wonder how many versions of Windows they would have needed to think up.
 not a bad film...i liked it April 17, 2008
i just watched this film last night and i gotta tell ya....it's not bad.it kept my attention all through out. wasn't bored at all.
will i watch it again ? yep. :D
 REVERSAL OF THRUST April 6, 2008
Could have been much better with Charlize as the Astro. Lovely sets,lovely costumes ......eye candy and all of that.
Could really have been more fun if we already had 'some' of these jellyfish' aliens living amongst us ......
Overdone and recycled.....
 The Only Depp Movie I Didn't Like January 22, 2008
I'm a huge fan of Johnny Depp, but this movie was absolutely horrid. I honestly can't understand how anyone could give this movie a good rating. It was achingly slow and dreadful to the point where I nearly couldn't watch the entire movie. The plot seemed promising and the actors very enticing, but this movie failed to deliver in every way imaginable. I am so thankful that I didn't actually purchase this film (it was a gift).
If you must watch it - borrow it or rent it, but save your money and don't buy it.
A waste of time, talent, and money. January 13, 2008
The movie begins slowly, and plods all the way until the hokey ending. It's not a complete rip-off of a single film, but a rather predictible cobbling-together of a number of tired plot devices from 'Rosemary's Baby', 'The Devil's Advocate', 'The Omen', etc.
Pretty much the whole movie consists of blue-filtered shots of Charlize wandering around and being frightened by sudden appearances from her sneaky and unnecessarily ominous husband, interspersed with reminders that that she's pregnant with her possessed spouse's evil alien twins.
In the end, Charlize's character electrocutes her husband by flooding their apartment and then plugging in a submerged radio when he's standing in the puddle, yet in the next scene is shown remarried and living happily as a possessed housewife raising the two evil alien twins. How she managed to avoid being placed in custody after murdering her husband eludes me.
Did I mention that the whole ordeal was pointless, since the alien just left the husband's dead body and possessed her anyway? When you can transform into a pusling amalgam of tentacular energy and possess people at will, what's the point of inhabiting Johnny Depp and having him stalk around an apartment, spooking his wife, before being barbecued? Staving off boredom, I guess.
Do yourself a favor and get something else.
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