‘Astronaut’s Wife’ would be better lost in space

THE ASTRONAUT’S WIFE

Capping one of the year’s worst weeks in film is Rand Ravich’s “The Astronaut’s Wife,” an unbearably dull waste of celluloid that, to quote one of its characters, is “an insult to the brain.”

The film is one small step in Ravich’s career, and one giant leap backward for the psychological drama. It dares to go where few films have gone before — absolutely nowhere.

The film stars Johnny Depp as Spencer Armacost, a NASA astronaut who loses two minutes of consciousness while on a mission in space. It’s what happened to Spencer — and to his astronaut buddy Alex (Nick Cassavetes) — that’s supposedly at the core of this film.

But the film’s script is full of black holes. Since the story is first about the great love shared between Spencer and his wife, Jillian (Charlize Theron), it’s absolutely essential that we believe in their love. Only then will we care when it’s threatened by extraterrestrial events.

But there’s no chemistry between the actors, no life in their bones. Ravich saturates his film in such cold, steely blues, Depp and Theron become two blocks of ice moving about on the screen. Each time they hit the sack, you half expect one of them to leave some cash on a bedside table. And we’re not talking a large sum of money.

Worse is Depp’s performance. Why Ravich insisted on having the actor speak in a slow, dim-witted Southern drawl is beyond me; throughout, he sounds less like a bright, wealthy, educated astronaut responsible for billions of dollars in technology than a man selling sides of pork out of a backwoods trailer. Sample dialogue: “When the solid rocket boosters come on, that’s when you know you’re going somewhere real fast!”

Too bad there was enough fuel to bring him back.

Theron shows the most range, which is probably because she gave a similar performance in “The Devil’s Advocate.” Still, she’s a good actress whose talents are crippled by a rotten script — one that eventually asks her to question whether her husband became an alien during those two lost minutes in space, and then, when she becomes pregnant, whether the twins she’s carrying are aliens as well.

Unlike M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense,” which is the best psychological drama Hollywood has produced in years, “Wife” is not a sustained piece of work. It has learned nothing from the canon, certainly nothing from the genre itself, because it exists in a sort of vacuum.

There is no sense that Ravich has done his homework, no feeling that he has learned from the mistakes in Cronenberg’s “The Brood,” the triumphs in Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” the suspense in Kubrick’s “The Shining.” His film has the clinical feel of Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers,” but none of the surprises or depth. The sets are terrific, but it’s cheaper to purchase an issue of Metropolitan Home.

In the end, it comes down to the characters — it always does — and Ravich’s characters are dead on the screen, cadavers with moving mouths and watery eyes who have no connection to themselves, the story or the audience.

If they had to be this horribly dead, why couldn’t they have been as dead as the living dead in Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead”? At least those corpses instilled in us some sense of feeling — not to mention a strong measure of dread.

Grade: D-

On video

OFFICE SPACE

Playing like a live-action version of the “Dilbert” comic strip, Mike Judge’s “Office Space” will remind some of the previously released “Clockwatchers,” a film about the hell of temporary employment in a full-time world. But “Office Space” suggests that full-time employees have it even worse: Their sentence isn’t temporary — it’s for life.

From the creator of “Beavis and Butt-head” and “King of the Hill,” this solid satire focuses on white-collar slavery, which — as anyone friendly with middle-management knows — can not only be ugly, but also charged with comic possibilities.

This is the kind of film that finds Jennifer Aniston being criticized for not wearing enough “flair” at her restaurant job, one character having to bear the humiliation of being named Michael Bolton, and three corporate computer grunts exacting revenge on a system that loves to deliver pink slips — but no respect.

As one character puts it, “Since I started working here, every single day has been worse than the day before, so that every day you see me is the worst day of my life.”

When he and his officemates destroy a fax machine midway through, the vindication and the glory are not only theirs, but ours.

Grade: B

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His film reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS. Tonight on WLBZ’s “News Center 5:30 Today” and “News Center Tonight,” he appears in The Video Corner.