“Life of pi” movie review
Ang Lee’s film “Life of Pi” dares viewers to believe in many things that there are many Gods and no Gods those humans are rational and animalistic and Gods themselves, and that God is a force of nature. It’s a story designed to test the viewer’s ability to hold many perspectives, and none at all.
Piscine molitor Patel is raised a Hindu, but as a fourteen-year-old he is introduced to Christianity and Islam, and starts to follow all three religions. He tries to understand God through the lens of each religion and comes to recognize benefits in each one.
The movie discusses religion and faith in a very mature way. All of them are represented equally and we are shown it through the eyes of a confused teenager
Religion helps define what a person is supposed to do in life .The message of Christ was that we must help and aid one another. The same message applied to Mohammed and to Moses and to Krishna and to Buddha. The idea is that we must help one another, and Pi lived by that principle. He is a vegetarian, not because of Hinduism, but for his value of the lives of GODs creatures.
The first enchantment is the town of Pondicherry, a former French colony in southern India that looks like paradise on Earth, zoo run by his father of young Pi. The nimble and faithful script by David Magee packs a good deal of character and cultural background into the first half-an hour, neatly relating his uncomplicated adoption of Hinduism, Christianity and Islam at age 12; portraying the warm family life he enjoys with his parents and older brother; and topped off with a taste of budding first love Anandi.
As years pass, political and economic factors force the Patel family and Pi (Suraj Sharma) to travel to Canada in hopes of selling the animals in turn for a better life.
His first days on the lifeboat, he almost gives up, unable to bear the loss of his family and unwilling to face the difficulties that still await him. When a storm sinks the ship, Pi soon finds himself in a lifeboat with a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, dwindling rations, and despite efforts to keep him out of the boat, Richard Parker (Bengal tiger). Soon only Pi and Richard Parker are left, battling each other and the ocean for survival.
At that point, he realizes that the fact he is still alive means that God is with him; he has been given a miracle. This thought gives him strength, and he decides to fight to remain alive.
Throughout his adventure, he prays regularly, which provides him with solace, a sense of connection to something.
Pi tries to negotiate his relationship with an irritable and very hungry carnivore. It’s an evolving relationship without any communication then he tried to teach how to understand each other so for more than an hour, the movie floats in place.
In every aspect of the film, all three actors playing Pi are outstanding. Ayush Tandon is captivating as the sponge that is young boy got fed up when his classmates taunt by pronunciation of his name piscine between pissing.He finally adopt his nick name pi, but absolutely imperative to the film’s success are the heart, lucidity and gravity Irrfan Khan provides as the grown-up Pi looking back at his experiences as a central narrative telling his story to the struggling writer.
The algae island might be the second weirdest part of the It's an island made entirely of seaweed, full of meerkats and freshwater ponds. It gets even stranger: dead fish rise to the surface of the ponds at night and disappear by morning. Initially Pi thinks the island is a delusion.
On a theoretical level, Pi defends himself well. But the knockout punch happens when he tells an alternate version of his story to Japanese investigators interview Pi during his convalescence in Mexico. They want to know the story is already happened. He retells the shipwreck, his survival, and his 227 days at sea without the animals. In their place, he puts himself, a Taiwanese sailor, his mother (Bollywood actress Tabu), and a cook. The story is horrific. Even ghastly.
It’s great that a major studio threw a big budget behind a movie with a weird story like this with no major stars. But in the end, Life of Pi is more about the nuts and bolts of a teenager surviving at sea and bonding with a tiger than a spiritual quest that asks hard questions about the wisdom, will, and existence of God and why he seems to enjoy inflicting so much suffering and death on unoffending humans.
Rating 3.5/5
by Aashna Singh