One of the best underground films

Rating: 8/10 (4 July 2004)

I try to measure all films by the same scale. I do not care that much if it took 60,000 $ or 60,000,000 $ to make a movie. At the end of the day I will probably pay the same price for the ticket, or DVD rental, and it will take the same 90 minutes of my precious and too short life to see it. What I care about is the emotion, or the intellectual pleasure I took from watching the film. According to this criteria 'Pi' gets an 8 out of 10 on my personal scale.
However, one cannot refer to this movie without taking into account that it was made with the lowest budget possible nowadays - a real underground or garage movie if you want. Do not look for smart expensive effects here. Even the computer equipment looks like eightish, although the film was made in 98. The cheap production, the black and white filming gives the whole movie an atmosphere of roughness and sincerity and lets us viewers focus on the story. And the story - well, the story is original and strong. Finding a common mathematics pattern in nature, economy, God has always been the ideal for many geniuses and lunatics. It is hard to say to what category does the main character belong. He gets close to the supreme mathematic or maybe metaphysics truth - at the same time he gets deeper and deeper in what seems to be the darkness of obsession and madness. The films succeeds with that little means to provoke so deep thoughts to the empathic viewer about science, and truth, and madness, and being different, and refusing to plat within the rules of the society.
The director, Darren Aronofsky seems to be one of the most original directing voices today. I admire him for not giving up to the temptations of commercial cinema. If and when he does it, I hope he will not do something like 'Blair Witch Project 2', nor 'Matrix 2/3', but rather keep expressing the strong and original voice he lets us hear in 'Pi'.