Should have been better...

Rating: 1/10 (27 November 2012)

This story had all the makings of something great... and it was expertly destroyed.
The entire aspect of this being a story told with religious intents should have been removed. The religious messages in the actual story told by Pi are perfectly fine, but the messages the movie itself tries to send with the building and falling action doomed the movie to mediocrity.
If you remove the first and last ten minutes or so of the movie, it would have been absolutely epic.
The visual effects, the emotional turmoil, the life-in-the-balance struggles, the twists, all were superb... if only it didn't begin and end with whispers and whimpers... You could remove the intro and ending add just a minute to the story and make this an epic tale of survival in the most incredible of circumstances, albeit with a rather fantastically mystical ambiance at times, but the attempts to weakly convey a religious message ruined the entire drama.
More telling, perhaps, is that it even failed on delivering on its own religious message. Not so much as causing one to think for a second as to its initial claims... except to wonder when the big moment was to come, only to be greeted with the closing credits.