10 Sci-Fi Movie Ideas Too Good To Fail (That Did It Anyway)
1. The Astronaut’s Wife - Alien Meets Rosemary's Baby! (But Not As Scary Or Gory And More Boring)
We’re not sure what was in the water in the late
nineties—maybe Hollywood had simply sat through too many late-night reruns of
Chris Carter’s megahit the X-Files and decided they could do that if they
wanted to. Whatever the cause, 1999 played host to many potentially great
sci-fi films which failed to live up to their killer premises. Amongst these
was Johnny Depp flop The Astronaut’s Wife, a chilling thriller starring a
miscast Jack Sparrow as the returning space explorer and future Furiosa Charlize
Theron as his eponymous wife.
Suspicious of her husband’s odd changes in behaviour, Theron’s paranoid paramour becomes convinced Depp’s character has contracted some form of alien parasite in his interstellar travels, and that the offending extra-terrestrial has taken control of him.
Slow-burning its way to a predictably bleak conclusion, the film wastes a clever “Rosemary’s Baby meets Alien” conceit on what amounts to an overlong and underwritten instalment of The Outer Limits’ nineties revival sans the mean-spirited comedic streak of that series.
And without that mean streak there’s approximately nothing left to recommend in this tension-free dud, outside of its clever underutilized premise.