"Pineapples!"*

sexytail

*During the scene where the rocket launches in "The Astronaut's Wife" it cuts from stock footage of a space launch to a very artificial shot of the Earth accompanied by a several children's voices shouting the word "pineapples". It turns out to be a transition to a classroom full of schoolchildren naming fruit from around the country to tie in with Johnny Depp calling Charlize Theron a peach. This is the most unintentionally funny and memorable part of the entire film.

This movie was made in 1999 when Charlize Theron's acting career was starting to takeoff and Jonny Depp's was still coming out of a deep freeze. Together they are the Armacosts, he is a southern sounding pilot turned astronaut and she is the mild mannered school teacher and of course "The Astronaut's Wife". They have the exact same haircut. Jillian Armacost likes to watch "Penny Serenade" with her husband to get in the mood. Oh, and she has a sister. Now you know everything about the lead characters that a person who watched the movie would know.

As anyone who watched the preview that played constantly on TV in the summer of 1999 will remember, the plot concerns Johnny Depp coming back from a space shuttle mission infected with an alien parasite and nobody believes in and impregnates Charlize Theron with alien twins who watches a video tape of Joe Morton saying he may have been killed by Depp. In the trailer it took about a minute to tell, but in the movie some of these things are supposed to be a surprise. The result is a very boring drawn out "suspense" during which we are supposed to keep "guessing" whether Depp is or isn't infected with an alien parasite. Just like with "Double Jeopardy" (also 1999) the trailer blew all the plot twists so there's no reason to watch the movie.

I only watched because I'm terminally curious and as usually I got what I paid for. The story is (as was it was popular to point out at the time) as rip-off of "Rosemary's Baby" (minus the funny satanic cult) as was Theron's much better 1997 thriller "The Devil's Advocate" (with funny satanists). The idea of impending motherhood never really seems concrete just like the "change" in Depp's character doesn't either. The trailer hyped up the idea that Jillian is the only one who notices a change in her husband upon his return but in the actual film there isn't a change to notice. Depp's character is underwritten, hardly 2 dimensional. He's the same until Theron suddenly accuses him of being different. The idea that Depp is an astronaut is equally abstract as the only space footage is a dream sequence and as far as I remember they didn't even spend the money to show him in a space suit.

Rand Ravich is a weak writer at best and his directing in this film thoroughly justifies it being his only feature length movie. Ravich posed one interesting visual idea with Theron standing in front of a screen showing a video from Depp's landing shuttle after the space accident. It would have been worthy of Nicolas Roeg if it hadn't been ruined by clumsy cutting. In keeping with this all the photography is slapdash and the color is universally hideous. I think the only reason anyone called it "stylish" is because the apartment where the Armacosts live is a sterile glass lined set that few of us could actually afford to live in and that none of us are obsessive enough to keep clean.

You can skip this one without feeling at all bad about it. The only reason there are two stars instead of one is because I laughed when the kids said pineapples.

score 2/10

sexytail 4 April 2007

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1630929/