Life Of Pi (2012) Review

In a film that is as visual as this film, it is hard to balance the visuals with substance, something that can lead to a disaster if not done right. Luckily for us, Ang Lee does a great job of balancing the two, giving us a visual wonder that is still very substance heavy.

At the beginning of the film it almost felt kind of like Forrest Gump, with the protagonist telling someone, a writer, about his youth through teens. Here the film does everything very well, setting up the character and introducing themes, while making us laugh. That being said it still felt somewhat strange, as it was quite short and a lot of it didn’t seem to matter all that much onwards in the story. The focus of the film is clearly about the shipwrecked boy and tiger and so when nearly half an hour or so is spent telling how the boy grew up, I eventually felt some scenes and subplot were unnecessary. Pi is followed in three different ages of his youth, but when we got to third one, which is the one on the boat, it rushed out to see and so I didn’t get a sense of what the character was like at this point and from this I had trouble connecting with him. The lack of connection to the main character became the main issue for with the film as the emotional scenes really lacked a punch, which they were clearly going for and so the very emotional scenes just felt sappy.

Another part of this may be that I felt Saraj Sharma (Pi), overacted a little. He was my no means bad, he was in fact pretty good, but according to Imdb, this was his first film and it really shows in some scenes. It is important to keep in mind that for a majority of the film he is the only human character present and so his performance has to carry the film and while he was good, he never reached that level.

Our other central character is Richard Parker… who is a tiger. From what I understand a majority of the shots were CG, though four real tigers were also used during the production, but I honestly could not tell that the tiger was at any point CG. The tiger was incredibly life-like throughout, as were all the other animals, arguably some of the best use of CGI to create animals ever.

The film in general is a visual wonder, with beautiful cinematography mixed with CGI to create some visually incredible scenes. There are many scenes in here that I would dare to say that you have never seen before and these moments are a joy to watch. I was worried going into the film that it was going to be pretty for the sake of pretty, but the way the story was presented it was very justified.

Never before has the 3D added so much to a film. For me there is no other way to watch this then in 3D and I absolutely despise 3D, but Ang Lee found ways to make it interesting and immersive. There were a couple of sequences where he added black bars either at both sides or top and bottom, in order to allow objects to move outside the screen, which could be really cheesy, but it was amazing. In fact the person I saw it with said he didn’t even realize it until I told him. There was even a scene where I started wondering why something was dripping from the roof right in front of me… it was raining in the film, that’s when you know the 3D is done right.

While in the end I may have been a little disappointed, I am still very impressed with the visuals and managing to balance it with substance and use the visuals in a way the reflects the themes. That being said there was more to be desired from the main character whom I never fully connected with, and I did feel he was a bit shallow, which may either be due to the writing, or performance that felt like it wasn’t quite what it should have been. Nonetheless it is a film I enjoyed and recommend that you go watch while it is still in theatres so you can witness the gloriousness of viewing it in 3D.

3.5/5