Surviving With A Tiger In The Pacific Ocean

Rating: 8/10 (16 June 2019)

The movie 'Life of Pi' (2012) is written by David Magee and based on the original novel 'Life of Pi' (2001) by Yann Martel. It is produced and directed by Ang Lee and stars Suraj Sharma in the main role as Pi Patel. The picture can be categorized into the genres adventure, drama and fantasy.
Before jumping straight into this review, I am going to give you a quick synopsis for the movie.
At first, Pi Patel and his family live in India and his father is the owner of a zoo. Their biggest highlight is the tiger with the name of 'Richard Parker'. Our main character Pi lives his teenage life as a Hindu, Catholic and Muslim which is contrary to his scientifically minded father who doesn't believe in God thinking that "religion is darkness". After some time his father decides that the Patel family will move from India to Canada on a cruise ship. Instead of a comfortable ride on the ship, the passengers and crew members are involved in a thunderstorm. In the following, the ship has to be evacuated however only Pi manages to get on a lifeboat as well as a few animals that he gets on board with, such as a zebra, the orangutan 'Orange Juice', a hyena and the tiger 'Richard Parker'. Unfortunately for the innocent and helpless herbivores on the boat, the impatient carnivores start eating them. As a result, the tiger Richard Parker kills and eats the hyena as well, leaving only Pi behind who is in constant danger of getting himself killed whenever he approaches him or nears himself to the wild animal. Over the course of time, Pi builds a relationship with the tiger trying to survive the sea together while also hoping to be rescued.
As 'Life of Pi' (2012) unfolds, the viewer really gets to appreciate the artistic vision of the director. Ang Lee did a fantastic job at making his story believable, grounded and realistic. His great directing is further on emphasized by his incredible visual effects team who did an outstanding and visually astonishing job with the animation of all the animals included plus the animation of the cruise ship and the animation of clouds being reflected on the surface of the water during gorgeous sunsets. In the making of 'Life of Pi', Ang Lee had his crew build an entire set for this movie. He tried to do as many things with practical effects as he could, even bringing a real tiger and hyena on set for 2 weeks in order to make the animals and the scenes look as realistic as possible. The visual effects team used the real tiger to animate the CGI animal. The CGI is some of the best I have ever seen in a movie. Deservedly so, 'Life of Pi' (2012) won the Oscar for 'Best Achievement in Visual Effects' besides the other 3 wins for 'Best Original Score', 'Best Achievement in Cinematography' and 'Best Directing'.
The heart of this movie is first-time actor Suraj Sharma who plays Pi Patel in a very realistic way knowing how to act in completely different situations. He masters his scenes with great acting giving a believable and emotional performance that resonates with the audience. Another strong point of this picture is how the character-driven storytelling can be a real tear-jerker for the viewer.
The screenplay seems to have been translated very nicely onto the big screen. The concept of this story is great and the execution of the idea from the script was also very well handled. 'Life of Pi' dives into really dark and mysterious thematics in its own mythology. However this movie does leave me slightly empty-handed because it should have spent more time on the developing relationship between Pi and the tiger. Instead of a strictly cohesive, unfolding story, we get a smidgen rash plot that definitely explores the relationship but it treats the philosophy between the two characters in a too superficial way.
On the other hand, the story is nicely compelling and fascinating, but the viewer already knows that the protagonist makes it out alive because throughout the entire movie an older Pi Patel tells his life story to an author who is interested in his dangerous, traumatic experience, just like the audience, which makes the ending kind of predictable. Unfortunately this undermines the tension created by the filmmaker. There is also an odd mixture of great dialogue and superficial conversations with deep content that should have been dug deeper into. The editing and the transition between two scenes were very smooth. The director of photography Claudio Miranda did incredibly effective work with his astounding cinematography by using a lot of wide shots in the limelight. These amazingly shot sequences are very frequently supported and underlined by the visual effects team with 1226 members being involved in the process. One of the absolute strengths of this motion picture is the very melancholic, atmospheric and beautiful score by Mychael Danna, Rob Simonsen and Mike Nowak. The music switches from cultural and traditional Hindi music to epic Hollywood blockbuster type of music in appropriate segments of the movie.
'Life of Pi' is mostly well paced which is really pleasant to watch and to experience. This also comes in very handy since it is an adventure movie. However this movie also suffers from slower parts that drag the film down quite a bit and feel even a little bit jarring for the viewer. But this is more of a nitpick instead of a huge problem.
Overall, 'Life of Pi' is a very good motion picture with an interesting philosophy on religion that I won't go into further on because that would result in me talking about spoilers which I want to avoid for this movie specifically.
It is also refreshing to see that 'Life of Pi' is a movie that resonated with audiences in its theatrical run while being a smash hit at the box office making 609 million dollars on a 120-million-dollar production budget.
I definitely recommend 'Life of Pi' to everyone who hasn't seen it yet. 8/10