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!