The X-Files taught us that alien colonization won't be loud like Independence Day, but insipient, like Body Snatchers, Puppet Masters, all that. More They Live than War of the the Worlds. The trailer establishes all this with minimal effort, too, as it's already conventional knowledge. And we are hungry for it, or something like it. It's been two summers now since Contact made the aliens benevolent, paternal, essentially erasing the (ir-)rational fear of the Alien series. Which is to say it's high time to give those aliens fangs again. The Astronaut's Wife does just that. Or, to be more specific, it gives NASA pilot Spencer Armacost ('Texan' Johnny Depp, a long way from 21 Jumpstreet, bit closer to Elm) fangs, via a low-orbit close encounter. And of course no one can see those fangs for most of the movie. His wife Jillian (Charlize Thiron) has her suspicions, but, luckily for Spencer, Jillian is an ex-mental patient, so is thus easy to convince that it's all hallucination and paranoia brought on by her pregnancy. And there's even the suggestion that it might all just be paranoia. But then there wouldn't be any special effects. To writer/director Rand Ravich's credit, however, he is able to milk a lot of tension from an otherwise subdued movie by keeping the range of Spencer's suprahuman abilities more or less under wraps until the closing frames, a bit of dramatically-effective concealment. But Spencer's not the title-character here. Jillian is. Along with their marriage, which is so ideal for the first few minutes that it has to be doomed ('unmade in heaven'). This is something of a non-traditional approach, though, putting the wife--the ostensible victim here--in the leading role. Typically, it's the alien's pursuer who gets the screentime, which gives the movie license to use all the cop/criminal conventions in space etc, but The Astronaut's Wife isn't Predator, is a bit more low-key than that. Which is to say it has to rely on a whole nother set of conventions. Specifically, those Polanski hammered out once and for all with Rosemary's Baby. Chereze Thiron even has a schoolboy Mia Farrow haircut and a husband who spends his days at the office. And everyone who shares her suspicions is summarily removed. It's all about isolation. The only difference is that instead of giving birth to the supernatural, Jillian may be giving birth to the extraterrestrial. Not the 2001 kind of extraterrestrial, though, but something less the benign-infant, more our replacement. Again, it's how aliens get a terrestrial foothold: hybridization. And don't think Starman here. Think Species. Jillian does. But too, she has a little more of that final-girl resolve than Rosemary did. Very Jamie Lee Curtis, except instead of intense action and longindying screams we get intense dialogue and longindying stares. Which is a bit of a change. The stand-off as opposed to the shoot-em-up. This is a drama, after all, nevermind the alien overtones. It's about trust in marriage, what the breakover point is. What will convince Jillian she's not losing it, that Spencer is in fact listening to the coded-static radio transmissions we know from Contact, Arrival. And it's all fairly strong up until then, until her convincing. And then, inside of two minutes, it simply falls apart, uses the same cheap trick Fallen used to 'surprise' us in the closing frames. And the thing is, there was such a better ending within reach. In all The Thing incarnations there's always the distinct possibility early on that these people have just been cooped up too long. Instead of expanding on that, using it for the ending, The Astronaut's Wife takes the easy way out, the grand way out, the Hollywood way out. Shoots for the disturbing Twilight Zone ending and doesn't quite make escape velocity, has to settle for the typical, when it had the potential to be so much more. (c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
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