An Amazing Adventure

Rating: 8/10 (13 April 2013)

With four people bringing the life of Pi Patel to the big screen, no wonder no Oscars were given out in the Best Acting category. All four seem to function as a unit as the oldest one tells the story of an amazing adventure to a writer who has been told that Pi has an incredible tale to tell. The lack nominations in the acting categories is made up by the four Oscars Life Of Pi won this past year in the technical categories. The computer graphics are something else.
Like Gloria Stuart retelling her life as a Titanic survivor and the audience seeing Kate Winslet playing it out on the big screen, Irrfan Khan recounts his surviving a shipwreck where he and his family are taking a bunch of zoo animals from India to Canada where the Japanese freighter they're on is sunk with all hands lost.
Young Suraj Sharma manages to swim to a floating and empty lifeboat which turns out not to be so empty as a few of the zoo animals also make it there. Including a young and hungry Bengal Tiger cub who is very hungry.
I won't say more because at this point the computer graphic special effects takes over. Some miracles are provided, but maybe the biggest miracle of all is that the tiger and Pi decide they really do need each other. Pi who checked out all forms of religious beliefs calls on all the Deities he's learned on for help. The biggest help granted is if not a change of nature, a curbing of the carnivorous nature of the tiger to save the Life Of Pi.
I was kind of lost at the message part, just what director Ang Lee was saying about nature and nature's God to use Jefferson's phrase. But the technical achievements of the film truly do dwarf whatever message that was being told about life. Those achievements have vaulted Life Of Pi to the top of the cinematic world and it's likely to remain there.