Oh, Johnny Depp, we hardly knew ye. What is up with you, Johnny? One year you’re doing “Dead Man,” then the next you’re in “Nick of Time,” stinking up the screen with Christopher Walken in a movie that never should have been made.

Thing is, even when Depp is bad, he is still better than a lot of hack actors in Hollywood. This film is a good case in point.

The plot is a short story that might have flown in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine as a 10-pager. But drag this thing out for close to two hours, and audience members are screaming for the quick release that only death can bring.

“The Astronaut’s Wife” is the lumbering tale of Spencer Armacost, a U.S. astronaut who is sent on a routine mission into space. While in space, a bizarre accident leaves two minutes of his life unaccounted for.

A satellite explodes, and that is all NASA is willing to admit.

Charlize Theron plays Jillian Armacost, the astronaut’s wife, hence the clever title of this turkey.

She is so relieved to have her husband back alive that she agrees to move with him to New York City after he decides to resign from the program and give up his lifelong love of flying.

Joe Morton plays Sherman Reese, a suspicious NASA scientist who believes that there is more to report on than an exploding satellite.

He is convinced that something truly bizarre must have scared the hell out of the astronauts to make them squeal the way they did on a tape recording of the mission.

After Armacost’s fellow astronaut dies of an unexplained massive stroke and the second astronaut’s wife commits suicide after telling the first astronaut’s wife that her husband was hiding inside of her, the first astronaut’s wife starts to become a bit suspicious that all is not well with her husband.

Armacost won’t talk about what happened in space and during one of the film’s more poignant moments, he nails his wife up against a wall at a party just out of sight of hundreds of attendees. All she wanted to know was what happened in space!

After the rough sex, the film really takes a nosedive.

Jillian becomes pregnant and very depressed. She blames the city for this because it has a way of getting inside of you. Inside of you like a couple of alien embryos, perhaps?

From there, the depressed astronaut’s wife decides that maybe it is just being pregnant that is making her moods swing and turning that frown upside down, she decides to get into being knocked up.

Then she is confronted by the crazy, conspiracy theory-spewing NASA scientist, Sherman Reese.

Reese tries to convince Jillian that the man she thinks is her husband is really some kind of radio-transmitted alien that erased her husband and has now taken up residence in his body.

She doesn’t believe this at first because, as previously stated, it is a pretty lame excuse for a storyline even for a science fiction movie. Spaceships, aliens, invasions … it’s all good.

But radio-wave-traveling, astronaut-infesting, astronaut’s-wife-impregnating, jet-plane-designing aliens bent on conquering the world? Well, let’s say it’s a bit too much to accept without being heavily medicated.

The acting was surprisingly good for such a poor film.

Depp did a great job of looking like he was really screwing Theron. Once he hit her, and that looked pretty real. But even Depp couldn’t play this one to the hilt without a few gaps in the performance.

He did about as good a job as he could, but this script was wanting.

Theron is one good little crier. She puffs up and gets the runny nose. Very believable.

The film was beautifully shot with the exception of all the NASA logos being mysteriously absent. This part felt as if it were completely false. Not one real logo, and the false ones were straight out of “Star Trek.”

The film felt a little too obviously ominous. For the most part, no one was supposed to be a freak or alien but Depp’s character, yet they were all presented as bizarre, lifeless stereotypes.

The good news for Depp fans is, there is always next year.

1 star

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs.