K-Pax (2001)

He calls himself Prot.

This has the essence of the book with the addition of time. The story is not unique and the subplots are not unique. However the execution is superb. Just the right people were picked for each character. The pacing was such that you had time to laugh, cry, and be shocked in the best proportions.

Basically Prot turns up out of nowhere; yet many things can be explained. Then again many things can not be explained. As the people that deal with him vacillate as to his nature, others accept him and are better off for the experience.

This leaves you with the question: "Is he a man, alien... or savior?

Phenomenon DVD ~ John Travolta February 11, 2008

K-KRAP

On the one hand, you've got the nuthouse dramas where the mental patient provides deep truths to inmates and staff alike (Don Juan DeMarco; Cuckoo's Nest). On the other hand, you've got the Taoist alien dispensing generic new-age advice (Starman). Trying to mix the two was a BIG mistake. This movie was way too long, way too slow, too self-involved and overall just dull. Kevin Spacey has done some fantastic work (Seven; American Beauty; Usual Suspects) but this is isn't it. Also, someone said the ending was ambiguous. Not true. Prot is Robert Porter. December 8, 2007

Is He Or Isn't He... That is the question... Or is it?

We've seen this film a number of times and enjoy it every time. It is filled with humor, misery, suspense, intrigue, science and a little bit of philosophy. K-Pax tries to get the viewer to expand his/her knowledge of the world around him/her by presenting the story of a man who appears one day in an airport and claims to be a visiting alien, named Prot (Kevin Spacey), from another star system on a mission to collect data.

People react intensely in favor or against him which both shocks and amuses him. He is immediately arrested and transferred to a mental institution where he meets Dr. Powell (Jeff Bridges), a married man with three children who is more interested in helping his patients reach a breakthrough than raising his children.

The more time Dr. Powell spends with Prot the more involved he becomes in trying to determine if he is an alien or a man suffering from split personalities. Dr. Powell makes it his mission to find out the truth no matter what the cost. Both men learn something from one another along the way. The viewer is left to make up their own mind to the truth. The end has many possibilities but no hard conclusions but this is ok. It really is.

Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey are a good match but Spacey definitely steals the show. One of my favorite things about this film is the constant visual play with light (Prot supposedly traveled to our world via a ray of light); a constant reminder about Prot even when he's not in a scene.

I highly recommend watching this PG-13 film. November 28, 2007

strives for more than it can hold on to

The movie is interesting, clever, but ultimately unsatisfying.
It poses what appears to be a simple question: prot, the lead character, is either from the planet K-Pax or he is a crazy man pushed into madness by the brutal destruction of his wife and daughter, and his murder of their tormentor.

But it is not a simple question, not in an age of materialism and scientific evidence as the only valid form of knowledge. Going crazy, even if for a good reason, and getting into touch with aliens from another world, the hybrid solution of the two possibilities is not a synthesis of science but of literature and art and therefore unacceptable to our modern mindset. Which only sees things in their "true, scientific, actual, real form". He either is or he isn't. He is crazy and the movie is about a psychiatrist treating his patient or he is an alien and the psychiatrist is blind to reality because of his blinders to a greater reality than he can see before him.

The movie is partly a mirror into our way of thinking, into what we will allow to be reality, what possibilities we think can exist. We can allow the movie to be sci fi and suspend our disbelief because of the genre and accept K-Pax as a real planet and prot as a traveler from it. But we know this is not real, it is sci fi, it is literary escapism. It doesn't effect our real view of what is real.

Or it can be a psychological thriller, or how the psychiatrist solved the problem of the crazy man claiming to be an alien. This is real, we all know people who wear aluminum hats, we all have seen the homeless boxing with God, and we all know it is just a chemical imbalance, often self inducted, that perturbs their brain into an alternative reality, just for them. Their reality isn't real so it doesn't disturb our way of thinking about the real reality, our reality the least little bit.

But we are given contradictory clues, he disappears (oddly enough simultaneously in real time Kevin Spacey does work in Newfoundland on "Shipping News"), Bess disappears, his box of collected things disappears, he knows things that puzzle the professional astronomers yet he remains catatonic after he catches the 5:47 lightbeam back to K-Pax.

In any case, the movie strives for more than it achieves, it asks questions then doesn't seem to rise up to them to attempt answers. It is as if the writers took the novels it is derived from and lost significant pieces in the transition to a screen play. Pieces that would either provoke more thoughtful analysis or pieces that would answer this few questions about what is reality and our hope of really seeing it for what it is. November 11, 2007

Classic performances from Spacey and Bridges

This film would merit 4.5 stars for me. Kevin Spacey plays 'Prot' and Jeff Bridges play the psychiatrist who is asked to look after him. Prot claims to be an Alien from another planet and (I'm giving nothing away here as this happens immediately the film starts) seems to appear out of nowhere at a train station.

Spacey and Bridges are brilliant actors and as a pairing you couldn't ask for better casting than this. Sure there are bigger stars, but the film wouldn't have been as good without these two. The film leaves you to make up your own mind about Prot. Could he be autistic? This is one possibility to explain his talents. However you'll have to see the film to decide whether he's an Alien or not.

In some ways this is a sister film to John Carpenter's Starman in which Jeff Bridges played the Alien. Like that earlier film K-Pax is both moving and wonderous. I have watched it many times and still can't understand why neither of the leading Actors received any recognition in terms of the major film awards (Oscars, Cannes etc). In 2002 Denzel Washington (a fine actor) won the Oscar for Training Day - nope I don't don't understand that either! October 5, 2007

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