I just watched K-Pax for the 2nd time, and I still don’t get it… what exactly happened at the end?
I think they left it up to you to decide. I wasn’t crazy about the ending, but I think I have my own interpretations. (SPOILER ALERT):
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No REALLY, SPOILERS coming up!
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There are two ways to see it. That the farmer guy that lost his family was also Prot, and had a split personality, or had some sort of psychosis. He’s extraordinarily smart, which explains his creative new persona, and explains how he could know all that stuff about the planets. (Though I really doubt that a guy with a home telescope would be able to figure that kind of thing out. But what do I know?) The farmer guy was so tramatized by what happened to his family that he slipped into this other personality, as a way of escaping.
The other theory is that Prot was an alien who befriended the extremely intelligent farmer guy (Palmer? I can’t remember the character’s name) and could project himself at will into the farmer guy’s body. He came to save the farmer guy when the farmer guy was about to kill himself after finding his family dead. This would explain how Prot knew all that super-secret stuff about astronomy. This would also explain how he knew what the dog was thinking (if indeed he was accurate about that). And this would explain why the other patient (the pretty black girl) disappeared completely from the hospital, because she went back to K-Pax with Prot, leaving the farmer guy’s body. Which would explain while all of a sudden he’s in a coma and won’t talk.
This is how I saw it. You get to decide for yourself which version you want to believe. I am kind of voting for the alien-inhabiting-his-body, because I’m a science fiction fan, and what the hell. It’s just a movie.
I opt for alien-inhabiting-his-body as well.
I just assumed at the end that Prot took off with the non-talkative black gal.
In my opinion there is surprisingly little to debate about this abysmally bad movie–the film makers keep hinting that there may be “normal” explanations for what is going on, but well before the end of the film the viewer has developed enough apathy to stop caring one way or another, and what “evidence” we are given points almost exclusively to the alien-in-a-human explanation anyway.
What seems to happen is that “visitors” take over human bodies when they come to Earth. How and why is not clear–perhaps they borrow only mentally damaged hardluck hosts in order not to disrupt established lives. Goodness knows what Prot looks like in his original form, but we did see some thread-like stuff floating in the light at the beginning of the film, just before Prot materializes.
I was able to guess the entire scenario just after the investigation of Prot’s friend (his body) began, material that when linked to prot’s sprinkler psychotic episode pretty much tells us what is happening. It’s pretty elementary science fiction executed very badly. For a truly good movie where you get to exercise your brain and dig deep into the material for weeks, I suggest turning to Donnie Darko or Mulholland Drive (the latter requires no extraordinary explanation and is a little bit simpler than Darko, something you may not believe if you haven’t seen Darko yet).
I wouldn’t waste too much time on K-Pax though, as it is piss-poor from beginning to end (what was Spacey thinking accepting this role? Why can’t Jeff Bridges stop playing tortured, shallow, and poorly realized characters with come-home-in-time-for-dinner-or-our-relationship-will-suffer wives?).
One other thing… Prot enjoys a moment of pedestrian science when he addresses the challenge of how he got to Earth, explaining that nothing with mass may travel at or faster than the speed of light. This leads me to wonder how Prot got to Earth in the first place, since we know that his original body has some mass (refer to his description of sex and he clearly mentions bodies and secretions) and above all how he made the silent girl vanish if he did indeed bring her to K-Pax.
If we assume that there is no science fiction element to the movie, the whole thing just doesn’t work; we would have to assume a long series of documented errors on behalf of everyone, starting from the guy who almost sees Prot materialize, to prot’s escape from the ward for a period of days and his return, to the mysterious disappearance of the silent girl. We would have to explain Prot’s remarkable vision, his physiology, his resistance to drugs, his incredible knowledge of astronomy, and above all the way he eats bananas.
This film struck me as a poor imitation of One Few Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (the book) with some Jesus allusions thrown in for good measure. After some of the reviews this film got I was especially interested to see an intelligent science-fiction film without explosions, guns, violence, etc., but instead all I got was a waste of two hours. Fortunately soon after that I saw Donnie Darko and was most pleased. Now that is real brain candy.
Abe, in one of his moments of pedestrian science, Prot explains that Einstien’s theories were limited to bodies accelerating to the speed of light and he sort of implies that this didn’t apply to him.
But then Berman and Braga do this every week.
Yes, I mentioned that moment in my post. From what I recall it goes something like this:
person: but nothing can go faster than Light, Einstein demonstrated that.
Prot: then I would say you are not reading Einstein right
person: how is that?
Prot: Einstein said that particles with mass cannot accelerate to the speed of light because their mass becomes infinite. That does not limit particles already travelling at the speed of light.
So what does Prot do to get to Earth? Beam a tachyon-encoded copy of his “mind” over to the earth, while his body slumbers on K-Pax for years? How does he transport the silent girl (who has mass) back to K-Pax? Would he load a copy of her mind on a tachyon beam heading for K-Pax and disintegrate her earthly body?
That’s not transportation, that’s murder, even if a copy of her mind makes it to K-Pax.
This kind of thing I can accept from Star Trek, which is light entertainment, but from a movie as pretentious and holier-than-thou as this one it just doesn’t work.
I’m with you there, but I didn’t find the film as annoying as that.
And I thought Jeff Bridges was great.
Perhaps I watch too much Star Trek
Live long and prosper