A Visual Feast with Substance

Rating: 8/10 (25 May 2016)

Life of Pi follows a young man who becomes the lone survivor of a major shipwreck and gets stranded on a small lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.
It's a really interesting idea right from the get-go, but you wonder how it would actually work. It sounds like maybe it'd be really short-lived or just simply impossible, but there's actually a lot to this movie. There's quite a bit of symbolism involving religion in particular, and it's really interesting to see how it all plays out, whether that be in the symbolic aspect or simply the plot itself. Not only that, but the movie is excellently paced. For a movie that takes place almost entirely in one small area you'd think it drag at least a bit, but it didn't.
Throughout the movie the development of the relationship between Pi and the tiger is actually pretty great, which I really didn't expect. Again, you wouldn't think a movie with this premise would be able to make you care this much about a carnivorous animal, yet it did.
And of course there's the aspect that everyone notices first: the special effects. Most of the time they were pretty fantastic. Not just in the fact that the tiger looked real (sometimes it was), but that it was just a very pretty movie to look at. At times I felt like it was pretty obvious that something was fake or on a green screen, but for the most part everything looked pretty stellar.
Overall Life of Pi is a really great movie. The characters and their relationship is great, the plot is presented in a way that never gets old, and of course the special effects are fantastic nine out of ten times. In the end I would definitely recommend this movie.