Like being mugged by a concert pianist. Visually stunning but culturally questionable.

Rating: 4/10 (30 April 2013)

I thought I would review this title for the release of Life of Pi on DVD and blu-ray in the UK.
As with all book to movie adaptations the inevitable comparisons will be made. As I've mentioned in other reviews, I feel this is pointless. The two mediums are so different and loaded with their own workable protocols that, in my view, both should be viewed as separate entities based on the same root mythology - the difference, to pluck an analogy from the air, between the bible and Charlton Heston's Ten Commandments. For this reason, I find no flaw between the film and book versions of Life of Pi. This is a review specifically of the film.
Visually, LoP is as near to perfection as a moving picture is likely to come, a treat for the eyes and senses in almost every scene. The only comparably stunning visual treat currently able to match LoP is Rise of the Guardians, an animation but also inspired by the epic visualisations of novel writers and an equal in terms of imagination, spark and wit.
Character development is ponderous but fun. The retrospective narration has flavours of Forrest Gump while the juxtaposition of modern style and epic Indian colour with old world vibrancy add greatly to the establishing scenes. Irrfan Khan is a tour de force as the self possessed guru of Pi's elder-self and brings both pathos and realism to an otherwise textbook cast of caricatures (Rafe Spall's skeptical hipster is an off-the-shelf model, fast becoming a tiresome clichÃ©, while the skinny wild-haired Indian boy made popular in Slumdog still seems appealing enough to sell seats to bums but may also be reaching its use-by-date).
On a core level, none of this matters particularly in terms of the story. The same tale could be told on a shoe-string budget, though the CGI sugar coating does wonders in tipping off-guard the casual viewer.
Because at its root, Pi is a cynical and oft bitter story about withdrawal. The central character is a fantasist and his tendency to embrace the irrational over logic is, nestled secretly in the bosom of the film where it rarely shows its face without a veil of mystery (cowardly really), the heart of the film's message to its audience.
Pi is an atheist grandstand for a contemporary audience weened on the outspoken repetitions of modern anti-theists, an opening movement fuelled by the despicable acts of fundamentalism and misguided far right theism. It panders to the popular, but, at the expense of the integrity and purpose of its characters, the picture it paints is surprisingly bleak, smeared as it is in the colour, light and spectacle of religious iconography.
The grand majority of the film sets the scene not for some startling revelation about the existence of God, as determined by its main protagonist's early suggestions, but in order to paint a sorry picture of a disillusioned child scrabbling through his imagination in an effort to impress the cold, robotic facade of the modern day mind.
Pi's choice of religion (and he chooses many) is irrelevant come the story's conclusion. Faith has nothing to do with god, spirituality, personal inner-revelations or esoteric connection with eldritch systems of belief and everything to do with choosing that which fires the imagination more than the cruel and the mundane. In short, faith is a cop-out, a crutch upon which the weak and pathetic are wont to lean.
Bolstering the core theme is the scientific undertone of pi itself, an inescapable aspect of our hero's personality and name. The rational, as Pi's obnoxious father is keen to point out across the dinner table, is worthwhile - all else is mere distraction.