A young man who survives a disaster at sea is hurtled into an epic journey of adventure and discovery. While cast away, he forms an unexpected connection with another survivor ... a fearsome Bengal tiger.
A fabulously beautiful and faithful adaptation from director Ang Lee.
There’s less than meets the eye in Lee’s ultimately unsatisfying fable.
A beautifully realised journey that goes right off the map.
Pi Patel can tell a story that makes you believe in God, but Ang Lee has gone one better: he has made a film that restores your faith in cinema.
The simplicity of the story also gives Lee plenty of room to embellish it with some of the smartest use of CGI seen in a contemporary blockbuster, so it’s all the more frustrating when he stops trusting cinema as a visual medium and tries to transform it into a literary one by having characters explain things he’s already done a fantastic job of showing us on screen.
To produce a coherent film from Martel’s tricky novel would be achievement enough, but Ang Lee has extracted something beautiful, wise and, at times, miraculous.
Magical cinema.
Stories of isolated but resourceful individuals may do well in depressed and uncertain times. Its spirit is defiant but its substance is deficient.
It may ultimately be a little too elusive for its own good - “why should it have to mean anything?” asks the grown-up Pi – and is perhaps a little overlong but it succeeds magnificently in its aim to inspire both the head and the heart.
The digital effects are mindblowing, but the ending of Ang Lee's magic-realist fable is exasperating.
For all its magnificence, Life of Pi is a serenely odourless experience.
Magnificent.
Imagine Richard Parker is pursuing you from the back row, if it helps. Because if you hang around for Spall and Khan’s pat summations you’ll be as sick as a Bengal tiger sailing choppy waters.
A spiritual, magical-realist blend of Slumdog Millionaire and Cast Away, Life Of Pi is one of the year’s most striking films. Another triumph for Ang Lee.
Ang Lee: Filming Life of Pi was far from easy as pie
Ang Lee: interview: how he filmed the unfilmable for Life of Pi
General release. Check local listings for show times.