The 100% human interpretation

Let me begin by saying that I'm a sci-fi geek and that my TV guide had "sci-fi" on the description of this movie, so I was absolutely prepared to buy into the "hero is an alien mistaken for a mental patient" interpretation. However, by the end of the movie I was convinced that it's not about traveling aliens but about a genius person with a split personality disorder. If this wasn't the case, I would hardly see any point in the movie...

Here's Porter's life and split personality history, according to the clues:

- Porter invents an imaginary friend named "Prot" (a slight anagram of the first half of his own surname) when his father dies, which is his way of coping with the loss.

-Porter is a brilliant high school student (a "brainiac", as the sheriff calls him) keeping his love for science as a hobby, while working in a slaughterhouse in order to sustain his family. Presumably, he would have gone to college and become a scientist, if it weren't for the unplanned pregnancy, which is there in the script exactly for that purpose: to explain why such a brilliant person with a passion for astrophysics did not have formal higher-level education.

-All the years preceding his suicide attempt he has had plenty of time to study and work out all the details of his imaginary friend's planet - just for fun, one assumes.

- After he survives drowning, he subconsciously decides that the only way to cope with his huge trauma is to shut off his real self and let his body be "taken over" by his imaginary friend, thus going into that split personality phase.

- After that event, he's had another five years to adapt into Prot's personality and presumably gain access to libraries and other resources through which he could make his fantasy as realistic as possible.

- He subconsciously decides that 5 years is enough for a period of grief, so he decides to abandon his imaginary friend (or let himself "be abandoned" by him) and he reverts to his real self, who remains shut-off (hence the catatonia) due to the graveness of the trauma.

And here are "Prot"'s inconsistencies:

He says that they can travel on specific dates and times, due to heavy interstellar traffic. However "Prot" is there exactly when Porter needs him, to comfort him for his father's death and to help him survive when he attempts suicide. He says he heard him (or felt) him calling - which he cannot explain in a sci-fi way (why would an alien from lightyears away be connected to a single human whose grief he can feel through all that distance?) and, most of all, he could not explain why the exact dates that he is "allowed" to travel happen to be the date when his "friend's" trauma occurs and its five-year anniversary.

The other patient's disappearance cannot be used as evidence for the K-Paxian interpretation: if light-travel is achieved in a non-bodily form (hence the need to take over someone else's body), then the lady who traveled with Prot should have left her body behind, which of course was not the case (she just found the opportunity to escape).

Of course, the creators kept major give-aways and explicit explanations out of the way, in order to keep the movie purposefully ambiguous. They left a small "what if..." window open (with clues such as the drug dose, the almost impossible science knowledge and the patient's disappearance) just to add a little flavor to the story.

My opinion of the movie is that it was good but not great. It felt like it had a lot of good ingredients, but it was missing those special creative traits that make a movie stand out. I read that it is a remake/rip-off of an older Argentinean film, which explains a lot: sadly, it is a common practice in Hollywood to borrow an original idea, believing that they 've found the recipe of a successful project, only to end up with a copy that manages to transfer all the characteristics of the original, except from its "soul".

~*~