Beautiful and engaging enough...but not much more.

Rating: 7/10 (29 December 2012)

So, a young man, Pi, en route to Canada with his family and the remains of the zoo they have left behind in India, is shipwrecked along with a Bengal tiger. The focus of the movie is on Pi's manner of survival and his relationships with the vastness of the ocean and 'Richard Parker' - the tiger!
This is a beautiful film - but in much the same way that an Attenborough documentary is beautiful. There are one or two spectacular effects which justify the use of 3D. But I'm not a fan of 3D and rather than increasing the feeling of involvement, I find it has a distancing effect, particularly when watching ordinary scenes of conversation between Pi and the writer, or Pi's family round the dinner table. The added perspectives seem artificial. Add to that the fact that you know from the beginning that he is rescued and the dramatic potential of the story was, for me, diminished. Whilst this meant that you could concentrate on his relationship with the tiger without distraction, it left me by the end wondering whether what I'd been watching had much meaning. The 'twist' in the tale seemed rather an afterthought, as did the notion that the whole movie had been some kind of allegory. Pi's question to the writer at the end - "Which story do you prefer?" - seemed to carry insufficient weight for it to be the heart of the film. Although I enjoyed it, I nevertheless felt somewhat underwhelmed by it.