The Astronaut's Wife (1999) Dir: Rand Ravich

Science fiction and romance?
Can it possibly be true?
The plot:
Johnny Depp and Charlize Theron play the perfect couple.
She's a primary school teacher with a class full of kids so obedient they may as well be fucking automatons.
He's an astronaut, jetting off on one last mission.
On the mission, he and his astro-buddy have to perform a space-walk and, whilst outside the spacecraft, something happens.
For two minutes, contact is lost.
Upon return to Earth, Depp's character seems OK, but his companion is clearly damaged in some way, and it's not long before he's dead and his wife has committed suicide.
Theron discovers she is pregnant with twins and slowly, slowly, she begins to suspect that whatever came back from space that day was not her husband at all.....
There's a few problems here:
First: Depp and Theron's characters are so puke-inducingly perfect that I found it impossible to feel any form of compassion. Clearly never having suffered a day in their lives, so happy and content did they appear, I felt a period of terror and disquiet would do them good.
Second: The plot is nothing new, though it seems to think it is. Anyone who has seen Ambassadors of Death from classic Doctor Who will certainly know what I mean - "Something came back from Mars" barks Jon Pertwee's Doctor - then there's Lifeforce, Rosemary's Baby (even Theron's hairstyle invokes memory of the Polanski classic), Invaders yadda yadda yadda.
Thirdly: It is cripplingly slow, ponderous to the point of pain. By the time the tension and vague suggestion of something unpleasant does kick in, you've already lost the will to inflate your lungs.
Too sappy and saccharine for proper sci-fi fans, too sci-fi for sap fans, not horrific enough by far for horror fans, this seems to be caught in three minds, and fails to deliver on any of them.
Unnecessarily dull, then.

2 out of 5

Face/Off (1997) Dir: John Woo

Very silly, very noisy action sci-fi guff from Hong Kong's Sultan of Stunts John Woo.
The plot.
Nicolas Cage is Castor Troy, supercriminal, one of the most wanted men on the planet, involved in arms, drugs and terrorism.
John Travolta is Sean Archer, a cop haunted by the death of his son at the hands of Troy, his sole focus catching the child-killing son of a bitch, to the exclusion of all else, including the love of his wife.
We join the action as Archer finally manages to take down Troy, almost killing him, which wouldn't normally be a problem but, thing is, Troy has planted a bomb somewhere in L.A. and only he and his brother know the exact location, and his brother won't cooperate.
Using a new scientific procedure, Archer is able to take the face of Troy - literally take the face right off and stitch it to his own - to infiltrate the prison gang of Troy's brother
All goes well until Troy kills everyone who knows about the swap, leaving Archer in prison with another man's face, and Troy on the outside world, acting as husband to Archer's wife......
It's totally ridiculous, of course, but there is no denying the entertainment factor.
Cage and Travolta seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves, effectively playing each other, attempting to affect the mannerisms of the other man.
Sure, the plot creaks like an old walrus, but the leads are engaging enough, Cage perfectly suited to the mania driven performance and Travolta is just plain fucking weird anyway, so seems well cast.
The action set pieces are efficiently crafted, as you would expect from Woo, but the movie does suffer from unnecessary length and, had twenty minutes been shaved off in the editing room this would be a genuine action classic.
As it is, damn good fun, but flags towards the conclusion.
Good, though.

3 out of 5