They love their aliens in Hollywood. And not just the kind that go around atomising everything and chanting “exterminate�, either. The movie capital’s soft spot for benevolent creatures from another planet is as prominent now as it was in the midst of the sci-fi boom of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It’s not really surprising; the planet’s such a catalogue of misery at the moment that the only real fantasy of “salvation� left to filmmakers is the other-worldly figure who knows everything, exhibits a few amusing personality traits but is otherwise decidedly human-looking, and who finds our Earth technology quaint and its people naive. Yep, somewhere out there, probably light-years away and therefore conveniently beyond our reach, is the answer to all our problems, and naturally it looks like us, but has a batter standard of living and cooler stuff to play with.

Initially seeming to be a melange of familiar ideas, K-PAX takes this very well-trodden approach as the basis for its story, though it’s by no means as cut-and-dried as that. As the film opens, a beam of light cuts through Grand Central station in New York, where it illuminates assorted dust as well as the figure of a man in sunglasses who looks a lot like Kevin Spacey. Instantly coming to the attention of police for daring to assist a robbery victim, he is asked why he wears shades. His answer: because the light on this planet is too bright. That’s enough for the NYPD, who lock the man up and throw away the key (the message here is, essentially, do not hold Star Trek conventions in New York unless you want the entire audience committed). Treated by Dr Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges), the man declares his name to be Prot and his place of origin the planet K-PAX, light years from our solar system, circled by purple moons and lit by two suns. Powell, of course, thinks the poor man is crazy, but as he gets to know Prot he starts to wonder if perhaps his story is the truth; he becomes determined to find out the truth. Meanwhile, Prot is transforming the lives of the patients in his psychiatric ward, presumably thinking he’s Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Despite the sci-fi premise, this one’s ultimately a fairly sedate, personal story, one that leans surprisingly heavily on a batch of influences from past movies - Starman and Cuckoo’s Nest amongst them. Performances are uniformly fine, but it’s Spacey that stands out as the enigmatic Prot; sure, he spends the first act of the film happily doing That Spacey Thing (in more ways than one - he has an amusingly appropriate surname for this movie!) but as he expands on his character as the film progresses, the acting challenges get tougher and Spacey keeps meeting them.

Perhaps not the movie many will expect it to be, K-PAX is a gentle, nostalgic and often intriguing story that might not be the most original tale currently on offer, but certainly is one of the most optimistic.

K-PAX was made by Universal Pictures along with a German production company, and it was Universal that released the film on DVD in the US. Consequently, the video transfer on this R4 release (from Buena Vista) has not been done by the usual people that have a habit of making BV discs look so remarkably vibrant and smooth. Not that this 2.35:1 16:9 enhanced transfer looks bad - far from it, in fact. There’s plenty of detail and the occasionally obnoxious photographic stunts (such as the intense overexposure of a barbecue scene, presumably to represent how bright the Earth looks to a light-sensitive Prot) are handled well. But there’s a little too much noise bubbling under the surface here, as though the film grain (which is quite visible at times) has proven to be a challenge for the video compression team, who’ve left gigabytes of space unused on this dual layered disc. Overall it’s a decent and watchable transfer of a film that was photographed in a deliberately washed-out style, and while it seems a little soft at times, it isn’t to the point of distraction. A curse on whoever stuck the layer change where it is, though.

Meanwhile, the audio is functional Dolby Digital 5.1, nothing more. Fidelity is excellent and the largely electronic score by Ed Shearmur (as well as the surprisingly electronic end-title song by Sheryl Crow) sounds terrific. Don’t come here looking for surround-sound sensationalism; this is a drama, pure and simple. And certainly don’t come here looking for extras; it’s a rental disc, and so there aren’t any.