Life of Pi is cooler than pi

Rating: 9/10 (16 January 2019)

Life of Pi is a magnificent film incorporating beautiful scenes in tragic and hard times. It is a movie about the aftermath of a shipwreck where everyone but one person dies. In the beginning of this movie they say how this story will make you believe in God and this is a perfect description of it as a whole. The most beautiful scenes that I have seen in movies comes from this movie and the filmmakers play around with the idea of loneliness to create a certain kind of atmosphere.
They start the movie off as most older movies do, with a long intro with no words, but somehow still conveys the upcoming theme of the movie. Although, five minutes may be too long for this, I think they should have made it two minutes instead because I felt the need to skip through this whole beginning part. However, unlike most movies they do something similar in the middle of the movie to show how he feels like everything that once was is now gone, which is a smart idea on their part. About ten minutes in Pi, the narrator, starts his story that started many years before, he talks about his dad and how his name came about. Also how he had to change it to Pi from the french for pool, Piscine, because he got made fun of for it. He explains how his father named him this because he swam in a very very clear pool in France that changed his life, the movie replicates this moment, when they shoot the scene from underneath, multiple times throughout the film. A main theme throughout this film is how religion isn't completely a set fact or thing to believe.
This movie is the king of transitions. It uses the sky, clouds, stars, fade-in and outs, and more. All of these show the connections between what is happening and what is going to happen. For example, one can tell Pi starts to act weird and is bored through having strange scenes like the filmmakers cut him out(only to him) and put that over a film of him cutting up a fish with his voice over and they keep on fading in and out certain parts of the picture. The filmmakers also use this movie to show the how different their culture is from ours but also how the older Pi has kept a lot of his past traditions or cultures of India, like how and what he eats.
Then they finally show the elegant orange and slack tiger that is very important in the story and the filmmakers introduce him slowly coming from a shadow to show how mysterious he is. Also, they use music to intensify the slowly moving tiger toward the hunk of meat shaking in the young boy's hand. His dad later proves that the tiger could have lunged at him but he didn't, despite this the dad still conditioned the boy to believe tigers don't feel the same emotions as humans.
The makers of this movie used the use of stunning scenes to their advantage, they show them right after something bad happens or to add the effect of God's beauty in the face of hardships. Most of the time these scenes are accompanied by peaceful music to symbolize hope. At first when the ship is sinking they show how most people's first thought wouldn't be that the ship was going down but that it is cool, so he laughs having fun in the rain for sometime until he someone die on the deck, then realizing the severity of it all. This movie uses animals in this time to exemplify the craziness of this moment, perhaps they were trying to get at the fact that everyone was running around like wild animals. Also, they use the underwater view to symbolize calmness, they also use calm waters to show this same sense. Another thing they filmmakers do many times throughout this film is use low and high angle shots to show dominance. For example, when it is just the tiger and Pi in the scenes at first they show the tiger with more dominance using high angle shots on him and low angle shots on Pi, but as the movie progresses the roles flip. But they also use high angle shots when he is speaking to God asking why. Lastly, the filmmakers show hope coming and going by showing how small he feels through zooming out to show him looking how he feels.
The one big thing Life of Pi does really well is make you question what you would do in that situation, would you lose hope, would you go crazy, it is impossible to know but still so tempting to wonder.