Kevin Spacey: Alien or not, you decide. The people behind the movie (director Iain Softley, screenwriter Charles Leavitt, original novel by Gene Brewer) leave it ambiguous right up to the end. And by that I mean the closing credits, they never come out and say one way or the other. Hope you’re not dissapointed. However, after the success of the movie, Brewer was able to publish two sequels and I assume they bring some answer closer to hand. Interesting that Jeff Bridges plays the psychiatrist working with Prot (Spacey’s alien character name) since he played one of the seminal ‘modern’ aliens in Starman so many years ago.
Unfortunately, like so many other worthy attempts, K-PAX does not succeed as a film. The attempt to create a parallel subplot concerning the relationship of Bridges to his wife and children just doesn’t have enough substance, for example, and Softley pushes too hard with visual effects (such as repeated shots of faces merging and mirrored in window glass) to define what should be in the plot.
Not recommended
Making a harsh right turn, we watched the last 40 minutes of the Jet Li film The One immediately after this finished. The violence is such a contrast from K-PAX but the underlying theme of identity in a chaotic universe is quite similar.
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