Roaring: There's a couple of mild spoilers beneath the surface!
The book of ‘The Life of Pi’ is probably a lot better than
the film. Without having read it, the adventure we see here is astounding, even
jaw dropping. Despite the gobsmackability of the picture, it seems that there’s
an awful lot included that the movie doesn’t really need, bogging it down
either end – which is a shame, because the proper meat of the story is magical
and exciting and beautiful and has a tiger in it… So, yay for the tiger! But if
a lorry load extra filler nonsense was chopped from the edit, we’d have a more
concise, less jarring movie to watch! However, bear in mind that a lot of what
comes across as needless in the film is probably smashing to read in the book,
because it’s no doubt fully explored. Here, it just serves to make everything
seem surprisingly long winded, making the ‘oomph’ factor a little trickier to
find - but rest assured it’s in there somewhere!
It all starts with old Pi telling a bizarre journalist about
his life as young Pi, growing up at school and the jokes that were made at his
expense, which is all pointless filler shit - until it hots up when young Pi
begins to experiment with religion, grows close to the animals in his zoo and
turns vegetarian. This builds to when teen Pi’s father sells the zoo, taking his family and all of the animals on a boat
out of the country which then sinks catastrophically leaving Pi as the only
survivor… Or so Pi thinks! The bizarre journalist is left hanging on every word
of old Pi’s story and goes on a walk with him – to nowhere! We never see where
the two of them end up before suddenly popping back up in Pi’s flat again, but
that’s not until we’ve experienced the actual proper uninterrupted story, sandwiched
between two slices of utter bollocks. Thank fuck for all this story, story,
story, we’re thinking. Young Pi and his voiceover trapped on a boat in the
middle of the ocean – that’s the story, what we really want to see. Oh – and
yes – he has only a ferocious Bengal tiger for company. Intense stuff,
especially as said ferocious Bengal tiger has already eaten a fully grown monkey,
a rat, a hyena and the remains of a long dead zebra. Altogether, this means
that Pi is next on the menu, naturally. Unless of course he and his new
aggressive stripy friend suddenly start getting on, but that seems unlikely
somehow…
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| Pi was furious that he wasn't able to Instagram a picture of the moody clouds to all his friends. |
Hilarity ensues! Not really – emotions do. Survival does!
And although it’s all very dramatic, there’s still time for a chuckle or two.
Let’s face it, if TV channel Dave had come up with idea first, The Life of Pi
would be quite a nifty situation comedy. Alas, they did not. If they did
though, they’d have more than likely addressed the issue of ‘where does the
tiger take a shit?’ – a question you’ll never receive the answer to here
unfortunately. Faeces related burdens aside, try to think of it as 127 Hours or
Buried, but set at sea and with a fondness for wildlife. Pi is definitely in
‘that’ genre of film – trapped in such a way that death is almost certain. Pi,
however, asks bigger questions and has a much bigger heart than its competitors,
asking some majorly important questions about animals and if they actually give
a shit what we think, and about religion – whether or not God gives a shit what
we think.
A film that asks so many humungous questions can’t help but
look beautiful! There’s a pretty opening sequence to get you going, pleasant
transitions aplenty - it’s definitely worth the extra
charge to access all three dimensions from behind a cheap pair of plastic
goggles. Gawp at all the weird and wonderful animals! You will eventually find
yourself becoming so engrossed that you’re completely oblivious to the fact
Richard Parker, the tiger, is totally CGI. So much so that you may turn to
google after having seen the movie to confirm that he’s a fake, and then you’ll
realise how unlikely it is that Ang Lee would insist that his scrumptious
looking lead actor should sit in a confined space with a hungry adult Bengal
tiger for the amount of time it took to complete the film. Impressive nonetheless
and far more convincing than Rise of the Planet of the obviously computer
generated Apes.
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| Pi wasn't pleased at all when he found the mess Richard Parker had left in the bathroom. |
The bottom line is that this movie should blow you away, but
it doesn’t because the story has to be told to us through an awfully forced
conversation between two men, who are strangers to each other. Rewind to
Haywire and remember how for its complete entirety it was merely the big jugged leading lady ‘telling’ the movie to some bloke whose car she’d thieved. Every single time
it cut back to her absurd present day charade you rolled your eyes and thought
– are they still in that fucking car?! If the story being told by whoever’s
telling it is good enough for the victim of a car theft or a random journalist to
sit through, it’s also good enough for us to enjoy without having to be forced
to watch them react to it all too. It takes you out of the moment. Cut Pi's ends off and you’ve got something
well worth the trouble.
★★★★☆
Roo