The mathematician as paranoid obsessive migraine sufferer.

Rating: 4/10 (15 March 2000)

This is a pretty disappointing affair, which is a pity given the interesting premise. Max, a mathematician who lives in a tiny apartment in New York which houses a large computer he seems to have built literally out of spit and bale wire is attempting to understand how the stock market works, not to make obscene amounts of money but simply because he finds it a beautiful problem. His life is a pretty dismal affair, as he suffers terribly from migraines, and has no friends apart from his retired supervisor whom he plays Go with. As he gets closer to the answer, all sorts of strange things start happening to his computer and various parties, i.e. a shadowy brokerage company and a very far out sect of Conservative Jews start paying an inordinate amount of interest in his work.
Unfortunately, apart from a reasonable understanding of high school mathematics, a thundering jungle soundtrack and lots of grainy black and white cinematography "Pi" desperately wants to be another Frankenstein movie : a rather condescending attitude that the attempt to understand the world is inherently dangerous and we'd all be much happier if we didn't fill our heads with nasty hard thoughts, to keep the audience interested there should be lots of gratuitous violence, blood and gore (given the budget of this movie, much of this is just plain ridiculous and doesn't in any way move the plot forward). In the second half of the movie, the script-writer really loses faith that the audience can keep up with the hard math and instead of Max's enlightenment becoming more complex and deep, it is irritatingly simplistic. I would consider the ending is a complete cop-out, which any Hollywood script writer would be proud of.
A wasted effort, alas.