When I first heard about Life of Pi I thought it was thriller type movie based on a vague association I made with the movie Pi. After the first trailer was released I honestly wasn’t too thrilled to see it, but always willing to give movies a chance I was game for it.
Life of Pi is the story of a young boy who is the only survivor of a shipwreck in the Pacific Ocean and his struggle to survive while he drifts through the ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. But it’s more than that. As a young boy Pi decides to follow many different religions, much to the chagrin of his family, in order to fully understand god. When the ship they are traveling on to Canada sinks Pi views his survival as god testing his will and devotion, much like Abraham in the bible. As he drifts about, he comes to find more about himself and what faith means to himself and others. Not once during his ordeal does he curse God, or gods, for putting him in this situation or taking his family away from him, he just has faith that he will prevail and survive.
For a while Pi struggles with keeping the tiger at bay because it’s a large animal and views Pi as food and at one point the tiger jumps out of the boat into the water to catch some fish, viewing an opportunity to reclaim the lifeboat Pi leaves the tiger to drown. This is one of the most important scenes in the movie because even as the beast is about to drown Pi simply can’t let him. This is a turning point for Pi because he realizes that even though this beast may appear evil to him, it’s only acting on instinct and Pi is eventually granted respect from the animal. The tiger also holds another more important role in the movie that might be considered a spoiler, so I’ll just let you figure that one out for yourself.
This movie is a visually stunning and it comes as no surprise being from Ang Lee. There is not a dull shot in the movie with state of the art CG and some of the best 3-D I have ever seen, and I am one of the biggest opponents of 3-D. Seeing this movie in 3-D could be a double-edged sword unfortunately. This is a movie that requires you to think and look beyond what’s on the surface and I’m afraid the 3-D might distract from that.
Life of Pi is movie that should be seen by all and hopefully could teach us a thing or two about ourselves and how we can live in cohabitation.
8 out of 11
Follow Jim on Twitter: Redsixx
Check out the trailer below:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZEZ35Fhvuc]
Watcher of movies. Writer of books. I love doing both and sometimes I even write about movies. Follow me on Twitter so you can keep track of my boring and uninteresting life @redsixx.
