A review by Mike Shea Movie Rating: ( 0) DVD Rating: ( * * * * · )
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Oh wow, did this movie suck. I thought the preview to this film was somewhat intriguing, enough to rent the DVD, but I really wish I had let it stay with that. It is amazing that Astronauts Wife didn't come out so well when you consider it stars Jonny Depp of from 21 Jump Steet and Charlize Theron from Children of the Corn IV. After all, he was Edward Scissorhands and she got fully naked in Devils Advocate so how bad could this be? Well, pretty bad. In the first five minutes we are force fed a juicy, smothery, gagging relationship between two young beautiful people in beautiful sunny Florida. In case we don't get it from all the "Ain't that a peach" love talk, we get an annoying sister, who luckily dies later, to explain to us how nice their relationship is in generation X terms with "Men are like parking places, all the good ones are taken and the rest are handicapped." Then the movie explodes into a scene that would have been stressful if I liked the characters, which I didn't, in which the husband loses communication with his shuttle while fixing a junky satellite. Turns out that evil aliens took him over. The next painful hour and a half is spent with her crying a lot and frantically pushing elevator buttons, hailing taxi cabs and running around in dark storage units with a pair of evil alien babies in her. To be honest, I kept thinking that the movie might be cool if it turned out to all be in her head, that she was just nuts and we were getting the crazy persons view of the world, but alas, the plot is true. Her hubby is an evil alien bastard trying to raise two more alien bastards for some F-ed up alien family of space pilots or something. Ok, so the story sucks and the acting sucks. What about the directing? Sucked. It was like a "best of" dramatic effects video with everything from a guy flicking a cigarette butt in slow motion to her standing silhouetted with a shuttle landing in the foreground. The dramatic effect frankly, wasn't dramatic. Just tacky. The DVD wasn't bad with a 1.85 to 1 16x9 enhanced transfer and a full Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack but the overuse of audio effects to make us feel like we should be on the edge of our seats, even though we aren't, is a bit much. There aren't really any extras, though god knows who would want anything but to use this DVD as a teething device for alien babies. Man, they don't pay me enough to watch movies like this one. In fact they don't pay me at all.