15 Sci-Fi Movie Endings That Would Have Changed Everything

Trading on the vibe and visuals of Gattaca and Contact, but without any of the substance to back it up, Rand Ravich’s only feature film The Astronaut’s Wife is a sci-fi flick that time has all but forgotten.

Charlize Theron stars as Jillian Armacost, the titular wife to Johnny Depp’s NASA pilot Spencer. When Spencer goes off-radar for several minutes in space, Jillian fears the worst, and yet he makes it home in one piece. But the weeks and months after Spencer’s return are fraught with strange occurrences and a distinct personality shift from Jillian’s once-loving husband that, along with the rantings of an off-the-rails NASA representative, leaves her questioning what happened up in space.

Pregnant with his twins, Jillian confronts Spencer in the final act and outs him as an alien. She fries him using a house full of water and an electric cord, but the massive, protoplasmic being leaps from his body into hers, and she goes on to raise two sinister kids in the most X-Files ending to the most X-Files-feeling film.

But there is another finale, a more nuanced and compelling one. Throughout the film we see the unborn twins’ ability to influence Jillian’s actions, and Ravich uses this in his scrapped ending, which has Jillian manipulated by her children into moving to the countryside and bringing them to term – leaving us on tenterhooks about what happens when she delivers them and is no longer under their control.