Gorgeous CGI Into Fantasy

Rating: 7/10 (21 March 2013)

I think this movie might be more appreciated if I had read the book, which I have not. Still, I find appreciation here because the film uses a fantasy novel to create a fantasy on screen. Most often when you view a film based on a fantasy, you appreciate it more with knowledge of the source. Still, this movie rises above the typical conversion.
It starts off with a story the viewer can follow and interests the viewer and this film does it with the journey theme.Ang Lee does manage to get that feeling over. The scenery is the strong point. There are a couple of things wrong. There is one scene where it gets extremely obvious that the light in the scene is from a spot light. Since this is not a stage play, it is an obvious error.
The other thing is that the entire sequence on the life boat gets a little far fetched. To match some of the comparison's - this is better than Avatar because the love story in this one is more realistic and much less hokey. The second advantage is that this one is a lot shorter than the bloated Avatar.
There is another fantasy tie in this movie with the excellent "Finding Neverland", a Johnny Depp vehicle early in Depps career. This movie falls short to the Depp film which is just plain excellent. Granted it has better special effects, but the imagination of Neverland is just at such a high level, that the fantasy here falls short.
There is some parallels to the Old Man and the Sea. This is a fish story or is it? The viewer is left to wonder if there is any reality in where Pi is story telling versus where the book fantasy is at.
I enjoyed the film because it made me think at points about the predicament of the main character. What make him keep going when he has lost almost everything there is in the world. That is why this is a fantasy, as it stretches the reality into fiction rather than having severe depression which would be the normal.
I enjoyed the effort and the thoughts going into this ambitious project. There is some excellent work here. It is better than Avatar.