A Journey into the Soul

Rating: 7/10 (26 November 2012)

This is one of those movie that you go see and afterwords it stays in your head for a good long while. Not because it makes you think, not because it is revelatory or life changing in anyway, but because it has a strange cerebral effect. It is a movie you feel, and those types of movies are the hardest to shake, whether you want to or not, whether they are good or bad.
Life of Pi lives and breaths in the spiritual world. It challenges us to face certain questions that have always been at the forefront of humanity: questions about our existence and what governs that existence. Through the long journey of shipwreck and days upon days of hunger, heat and fear aboard a small life boat, the audience, along with Pi, goes through a long period of soul searching. However all the time we have a deadly and ferocious companion staring us in the eye. For Pi this is an adult Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker, for the audience it is doubt. Doubt in the existence of a higher power, doubt in the existence of a world that is more then billions upon billions of years of accidents and improbabilities that randomly resulted in the world and the universe around us. Life of Pi reminds us that the beauty of this world is no mere accident. It is all apart of a greater piece. A piece that was intricately woven by a force beyond human comprehension. This is where the power of the movie lives and where it should have spent a little more time.
The story is told by a much older Pi to a writer, and through this amazing story, Pi seeks to prove the existence of God. This is the weak part of the film, that almost ruined the whole of it. After Pi finishes his amazing story, he offers the audience a different, but more plausible story and he asks the writer as, well as the audience, "which is the better story?" The writer of course answers, "the one with the tiger," to which Pi responds, "So it is with God!" This revelation of sorts compromises everything the film worked so hard to set up. You cannot spend a whole film defending religion and a higher power, and end it by saying we should believe in God because it's the better story. We should believe in religion because it makes us feel better. We should believe in God, because it sounds nicer then no God. This significantly dampened the experience for me and jolted me out of the spiritual world, forcing me back into the logical one, where answers like that don't fly. This is not a movie that challenges us to believe in the better of two stories. It is a film that asks us to look around us, and see the world for what it is. It is an irrational world, a world of astounding beauty, a world of improbability. This film does not (or at least shouldn't) ask us to believe in God necessarily, but to believe in something. It asks us to tap into our spiritual side, because it is only through the soul that we can see the world clearly, and begin to understand it more fully.
Despite this one flaw, the film is worth a watch, if only for the beauty of the film which presents us with a dazzling array or bright colors and astounding feats of visual effects, particularly the life like CGI tiger. But most importantly, this film is a journey into the soul worth taking. Maybe you can even walk out of the movie early and miss the small part at the end that almost killed the film.