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

The Adjustment Bureau (2011) Dir: George Nolfi

Christ, this movie frustrated.
The plot: Matt Damon plays a politician running for office, quite successfully, until a college prank hits the media and his ratings take a nose dive. Preparing his runner up speech in the gents, he is surprised when a beautiful woman emerges from one of the cubicles and, quick as you can take your super-powered hat off, they are locked in a passionate kiss, before she vanishes from his life, apparently for good, with security hot on her heels. A chance meeting on the bus a little while later sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his world, for their blossoming relationship has come to the attention of The Adjustment Bureau, a shadowy organisation, intent on keeping them apart.
But who are The Adjustment Bureau?
What do they want?
And why do they all look like characters out of a Raymond Chandler novel?
Based on a short by Philip K. Dick, this has all of the trappings of a classically cool paranoid sci-fi outing but, thrown in with the genre stuff, we have a weak as gerbil's piss romance between the two leads, a will they-won't they tug of love that would have embarrassed even Ross and Rachel.
Whilst the core sci-fi elements are great - doors used as portals, mind control, meddling with timelines - the huan interest angle sucks out the gravity so that at no point do you truly feel anyone is in any great peril, at no point do you even consider that our lovebirds won't end up together.
Too sentimental and syrupy for the nerd audience, too sci-fi for the sentimentalists, I suspect this will struggle to find a true fanbase. Sure, it will pull a few people in through Damon's presence alone, and the trailer is intriguing enough to get saps like me through the door (mainly as it doesn't hint at the freakin' love story aspect), this is being pitched as Bourne meets Inception and, trust me, this is way below the standard of either of those concepts.
Desperately average.

2 out of 5