Don't doubt God: he is in you because you're human

Rating: 10/10 (31 December 2012)

This film is a marvellous adventure that is not done for little children who will get frightened but for children closer to 77 than to 7 years of age. But it is such a beautiful story that adults might like it too.
Frightening like hell not on earth but on the Pacific Ocean. A shipwreck that sinks a cargo boat with only one survivor, a teenager hardly able to use a razor to shave and three animals from his father's zoo, animals that were being taken away to Canada to be sold: a Bengali tiger, a zebra and a hyena. The hyena is ignominious and it attacks the zebra on the lifeboat without even hesitating. The tiger is another story and the teenager is still another novel all by himself.
But when you want to survive and you have in you the god that supports you, not a god with a trunk as long as a nose, or vice versa, not a god that dies on the cross for others, not a god that is hermaphrodite according to your capricious desires. Not at all. A god that is powerful in your soul, inspiring in your spirit, supportive in your mind and absolutely logical in your brain. Then you have the force with you and you can stand up against a Bengali tiger and tame it, and you can stamp your feet against the elements and organize your survival and that of "your" tiger.
Then you have the mysterious island of Doctor Moreau, a carnivorous island that is also slightly cannibalistic. It is all sweet and nice in the day time but it turns flesh voracious at night. Can you imagine a tender teenager with no hairs on his face and a Bengali tiger: that's what I would call a meat ravenous predator's delicatessen treat.
What is surprising but not so much if you know animals slightly is the tiger's taming. A wild animal will accept in some extreme conditions to be tamed when it feels you are the one who is going to help it survive if it lets you survive. Animals are intelligent and in extreme conditions they know their interest. I was told that many times in Sri Lanka where I used to walk in the jungle. I was told that if on your way a lion, a wild cat or an elephant comes to cross it towards its own destination, don't run, don't scream, don't make any brusque movement. The animal knew you were coming a long time before you ever knew it was there. If you don't block its way, if you do not produce the mammal hormone of fear that stinks like hell, if you look at the animal straight in the eyes and at the most slowly step back without getting your eyes away from its nor turning you back onto it, the animal will not attack you, and in fact most of the time the animal will avoid you and you will never see it though you might walk a few yards away from it.
Animals are intelligent and they are not necessarily man's predators, even Bengali tigers.
But when the animal will no longer need Pi it will just walk away back into its own animal life without even looking back. A wild animal can be tamed but it will never be the pet of a human being.
The second lesson is that the insurance company of the ship does not accept that strange story with a tamed tiger and a carnivorous island, but it accepts quite well the story of four survivors with the odious cook who eats a rat, cuts up a sailor to catch fish, kills the mother of the hero and is killed by the hero himself. That sounds absurd in a way but human beings prefer a gross and totally inhuman story to a marvellous story about a wild animal that accepts to be tamed to survive and then walks away.
The last idea or rather warning is that if some of you are secular minded to the point of negating any possible divinity or superior being or even superior force, don't go. This film is not about the gods we know in any religion but about the god that lives in your skull and animates you so strongly that it makes you able to survive in numerous situations without being a monster and using your fellow traveller as bait for sharks. Even if that fellow traveller is a wild Bengali tiger you have to tame it first. In fact if that god, like Jesus, you have him in your mind, brain, soul, spirit or whatever, dying on the cross becomes like an easy mission that you will not even try to evade or suspend or escape from.
Too bad for those who consider any religious or mystic belief is an alienation and a fairy tale for dummies, because I know so many people who are beautiful for others and empathetic for any suffering just because in them they have the gem of that transcendence.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAI