A Magnificent Cinematic Experience not to be Missed!

Rating: 10/10 (26 October 2014)

Ang Lee isn't thought of as an Asian auteur in the class of Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou or Lee Chang-dong. He's actually more of a commercial director than a personal artist, but what he does in this masterpiece is miraculous.
Perhaps no director has ever captured the beauty and fear of the power of life, and when you look deep into the eyes of the tiger "Richard Parker", you see what Marlowe saw in Kurtz's eyes in Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness": a power so vast it dwarfs you into an awareness of your mortality, showing you your own inescapable insignificance beside the powers of all life.
The acting is wonderful, primarily Infan Khan, one of India's greatest actors who plays the adult Pi. Khan provides an entire acting course just in the way he uses his face, displaying a smile in the film's climax that rivals the Mona Lisa's in its ambiguity. You see the world of pain, guilt, joy and sadness in his delicate expression.
While the film is supremely spiritual in every frame, if one is paying attention, it winds up as somewhat of a Trojan Horse in what it ultimate reveals about religion. I'm not going to provide a spoiler here, but there are five words spoken by the adult Pi at the end of the film that viewers seem to miss that spell it out.
But moving away from its theme, no film I have ever seen in my life comes close to "Life of Pi" in relating the sheer force of nature (making you really experience first-hand the beauty and terror in the soul of a tiger) and the cosmic splendor of our world, both inner and outer. Using 3-D more brilliantly (and essentially) than any film to date, this film burned into my mind incredible visual sights impossible to find anywhere else, showing me beauty I will remember the rest of my life. 10/10.