The more I think about K-Pax, the weirder it becomes. The two concepts of a more advanced extraterrestrial (PAX=PEACE, GET IT??) and a repressed mentally ill man who has built this absurd wall to separate himself from his past seem to be equally likely in this movie. The fact that he has such an accurate outlook on a distant star system is unlikely because he's never seen cracking a book, as is the fact that he has such success in affecting the minds of the mentally ill.
I like the idea of a mentally ill "Prot," though, this guy who went out and researched this new insane existence and goes as far as eating a banana with the peel on it to look like an extraterrestrial.
thats exactly why i thought this movie was crap. i had such a hard time deciding through most of the movie whether the performance was poorly written or kevin spacey was doing a bad job or he did it perfectly and the character was just so film un-friendly, but i wasn't impressed at all by the character.
like i felt like the way he demonstrated how much he knew about space wasn't impressive or shocking and when jeff bridges finally revealed his past it was pretty much exactly what you thought it would be. they shrug off his weird knowledge of the stars as "oh he was always pretty sharp even as a country hick"
concerning whether or not he was an alien it seems almost obvious that he was not- it really felt like they added that missing person onto the end of the movie to satisfy the people who wouldn't be happy with a non-mystical solution, and despite that it seems to me that someone who killed his family and tried to kill himself and then studied space to some ridiculous degree is definitely capable of killing/kidnapping someone and hiding them
also wtf! they finally find out this guy killed his family and tried to kill himself and they just throw him back in with the rest of the mentally ill? wtf! and when he convinces one of the other patients to stangle someone theyre just like "hey don't do that!"