BEFORE: More post-Comic Con sci-fi tonight. Charlize Theron carries over for Movie #4, and for the last time in this chain. Hmm, who's going to carry over into tomorrow's film, I wonder?
THE PLOT: After an explosion in space and subsequent two-minute radio-out period, two astronauts return home to their wives. Slightly it's revealed that they're not the same as they were.
AFTER: Didn't I see ads for this as a TV show starring Halle Berry? OK, I haven't watched that show, so maybe it's quite different, but it seems like there's a very similar starting point.
I had this film in the proposed Halloween chain for a long while, because I have a lot of horror films this year with a similar theme, with something sort of invading someone's body. So please keep this theme in mind, and I'll be back to it in October, which isn't really all that far off, if you think about it. For me, it's only about 80 movies from now.
This is a pretty low-key film, however, not bogged down in all the special effects one usually associates with a typical horror film, or that other genre (information withheld here for risk of spoilers). Let's just call it sci-fi, OK - which is another FX-heavy genre.
This is also sort of a slow-burn think-piece - it takes a long while for the title character to realize that something is wrong with her husband, and then even when she's made aware of it, she's in some form of denial, so that slows things down even further. I guess, as with "Aeon Flux", someone figured the truth is so amazing that we've got to ladle it out, bit by bit. But the end result of that process is making the film like it's a 10-minute story stretched out to an hour and a half. Still, I stayed awake for the whole film this time, so that automatically grants it a higher score than "Aeon Flux".
Another way you can tell that a movie is stalling for time is when the characters all say each other's names over and over - I heard "Mrs. Armacost" so many times in this film, it was really annoying. "Don't you understand, Mrs. Armacost?" and "You have to listen to me, Mrs. Armacost!" Ugh, give it a rest, people just don't use each other's last names so formally and so often in everyday speech.
But this film also played upon the vulnerabilities of a spouse who hasn't seen her husband in a while - how do you know when someone goes away on a trip that they come back as the same person? What do you do when you feel that they've changed somehow? There's another female fear that gets touched upon here, but I can't refer to it without giving away a plot point... Let's just say that the human body is a wonderful thing, but certain processes are very weird, especially for women, and they tie in with the whole strange life-form thing, if you get where I'm going.
However, it's a bit of a cheat to tell us that a character has changed after an incident, when we never really saw him before. Where's the reference point? I understand the mystery that gets created by not showing the audience the incident in question - and I understand how much easier it would have been to show, rather than tell. Still, "show" is usually more exciting than "tell", as a general rule.
Also starring Johnny Depp (last seen in "Into the Woods"), Joe Morton (last seen in "The Night Listener"), Clea Duvall (last seen in "Argo"), Donna Murphy (last seen in "The Bourne Legacy"), Nick Cassavetes, Tom Noonan (last seen in "Heaven's Gate"), Blair Brown (last seen in "Space Cowboys"), Gary Grubbs, Cole & Dylan Sprouse (last seen in "Big Daddy").
RATING: 4 out of 10 old-timey radios
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