Superbly Intelligent.

Rating: 8/10 (4 January 2013)

"Life of Pi", directed by the Oscar winning Ang Lee, is a film, at first glance, of survival, as Pi (Suraj Sharma) attempts to live on an open-top boat in the Pacific after the ship the Tsimtsum sinks. However, it is in fact a philosophical drama about religion that only rarely becomes heavy handed.
Based on the Booker-prize winning 2001 novel by Yann Martel, this exploration of faith is anchored in Suraj Sharma's performance. Apart from one scene with Gérard Depardieu as the ship's cook, Adil Hussain as Pi's father, there to spout scientific platitudes about religion that fail to organically grow from his character, and Rafe Spall as a writer to give a trigger to the telling of the story, this is Sharma' film. With only a perfectly CGI-created tiger to work with, he manages to evocatively to bring out what it would be like to be stuck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and is a tour-de-force, a true feat that never falls into actor's tricks.
The special effects for the tiger, Richard Parker, the other member on this boat of literally lost souls, are incredible. Every hair and every sinew is present and his eyes, previously a difficult proposition in the realm of effects, make him look like a real Bengali tiger. A triumph, this construct is groundbreaking in terms of what can be achieved with a computer and surely will be capitalised on in years to come by Hollywood and its environs.
The cinematography by Claudio Miranda, a man who has worked on many of David Fincher's films, is ineffable and will surely with the Academy Award. Overhead visions of water, still as glass, showing us the tiny lifeboat as the sky is reflected is brilliant not just for it's beauty but also serving a story telling purpose to: not only does it shown how alone and isolated Pi is, but also immediately tells us the audience what time of day it is from the colours of the sky.
The 3D is well used, giving the sea an ethereal quality and a scene with flying fish demonstrates how the medium works at its best.
Ang Lee's direction is sensitive but he can handle the big set pieces like the sinking of the ship excellently. Being based on a book, a few novelistic things are held over and do not works completely and sometimes, early on in the film, the discussions on religion are too blunt and direct. These are minor quibbles though; this is a major achievement in filmmaking, its $120 million budget well spent and the $300 million it has made so far has been well earned, showing to Hollywood that there is an audience for superbly intelligent, contemplative movies.