To much CGI window dressing

Rating: 5/10 (3 January 2014)

First off I have never read the book. If a film is going to work it has to function by itself, that is why the Lord of the Rings movies work and the Harry Potter ones don't (not that i've read either of those franchises either). To understand a film's basic plot it should not be necessary for me to go and do some wider reading afterwards. If it's required then the director simply did a bad job at telling the story. I say this not to claim that Life of Pi does not work as a narrative, but only to point out that my interpretation of that narrative will be based on the film alone and not on what I think the original author was trying to say.
When Life of Pi was released it was heralded as a ground breaking visual effects movie which would change the way we looked at 3D for years to come. Of course they said the same about Smurfahontis (Avatar) a few years back, and that actually changed little once everyone realised it was a silly story wrapped up in some fancy CGI (sad to think that James Cameron hasn't made a movie I've enjoyed since True Lies in 1994).
For me the same could be said for Life of Pi. While the visuals are impressive, I can't help but conclude that they are little more than window dressing which mask a story which failed to engage me. Nevertheless I can still appreciate the work which went into it and the resultant aesthetic.
There are several reasons why it failed to engage me. As a survival story it has no tension given that it's told through flashbacks, so we know Pi made it out alive. No doubt many would claim that i've missed the point by saying this, that rather than a survival story Life of Pi is actually a deeply spiritual movie about the nature of being, memory and God, rather than simply one about someone trying to survive a shipwreck with a tiger.
But while I appreciate that the film may be attempting to address these issues I found the way it did so utterly superficial and uninteresting. Pi begins his tail by setting out the claim that his story will make an author believe in God. How continues to be a mystery for me as even if you accept his initial telling as reality, I failed to see anything remotely divine in its contents. To me there was simply nothing there which needed a God to explain its existence (well except all the continuity errors).
However, the film's final scenes perhaps get to the root of this question better than anything before it, and are perhaps the trump card the movie decides to play. In simple terms it decides to acknowledge all of its own flaws by offering the viewer an alternative version of everything we have seen and highlighting the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that the other version of the story is any more valid that the one we have seen. Further to this it then implies that the decision we make as to which story we choose to believe answers the question of whether we make the choice to believe in God, given the lack of proof on either side.
Now at best this is an extremely flimsy philosophical argument. Presenting the viewer with two options (a seen but implausible one, and an unseen but more plausible one) and then suggesting that their choice is symptomatic of how they interpret their own wider reality is deeply questionable if not dishonest.
But perhaps I am just disappointed that I didn't get to see a film about the human drama of four starving shipwreck survivors drifting across the Pacific Ocean. However, while that may sound a lot less impressive visually than what Life of Pi delivers, it is nonetheless what the film's own logic claims to be if you remove all of its CGI trickery. So maybe it was just window dressing after all?