Life of Pi - Film Review

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An exceptional tale of survival of a boy who is forced to share a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. The music is beautiful for every scene and the visual effects are stunning.

Life of Pi is an extraordinary 2012 movie based on Yann Martel's 2001 best selling novel of the same name. It stars Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Rafe Spall, Tabu and Adil Hussain in lead roles.





It is about the story of Piscine Molitor, named after a beautiful swimming pool in France, Piscine Molitor. He is also called Pi and he lives with his family in India. His family owned a zoo with amazing animals, but the zoo goes bankrupt. Pi's father intends to relocate in Canada and start a new life there. The animals are loaded on a Japanese freighter to transverse the vast Pacific ocean.

On a storming night, the Japanese freighter sinks with Pi's family, the crew and many of the animals on board. Pi gets thrown on a lifeboat, a zebra jumps on the boat breaking its leg. After a while, Pi is joined on the boat by an orangutan. In the lifeboat, there is also a hyena that kills the zebra and the orangutan. But under the tarpaulin of the lifeboat, there is also Richard Parker, an adult Bengal tiger which manages to kill the hyena.

Pi and Richard Parker start together an incredible and perilous journey of survival in the sea, facing starvation, dehydration and more storms at sea.



Life of Pi relies on many spectacular visual effects to deliver a great movie full of emotions. In particular, the tiger Richard Parker, flying fish and a breaching whale are all fantastic computer-generated images.



Life of Pi's stunning effects helped to create a beautiful and moving film. It was complex to make the animals and the ocean. The movie used some real tiger but there was no way to use even a real trained tiger in the boat with the actor. The digital tiger was created and it was made as real as possible.



Coordinator Donald R Elliott shot many of the spectacular visuals in Life of Pi in the ocean but also in the largest self-generating waves tank ever constructed for a movie. The tank is more than 7 metres long and 3 metres wide with a capacity of 1.7 million gallons and it is located in an abandoned Taiwan airport hangar.

Many pivotal scenes for the movie were shot in the tank which allowed to create the special effects. The director of the movie, Ang Lee, wanted the movie to be as real as possible. The sinking of the Tsimtsum freighter with Pi's family onboard is due to giant waves formed in a big storm and with strong winds and rain.



Pi is adrift in a lifeboat with the Bengal tiger Richard Parker. For the rolling and the tossing of the boat in the sea, the boat was mounted on a gimbal that rocked and spun and it was called the rotisserie.



Personally, I think Life of Pi is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. The movie is well balanced and the narration is perfect. There are many scenes in the movie I like.

One is when Richard Parker, in the attempt to catch some fish, throw itself overboard but then the tiger cannot return on the lifeboat. Pi in a first moment wants to take advantage of the situation and kill the tiger. But then Pi looks in the eye of Richard Parker and lets it back on the boat. It is a very touching scene when Pi shows compassion and love for the tiger, despite the tiger being so dangerous for him.

The scenes of the storm are also incredible. In particular the sinking of the Japanese freighter in the Mariana Trench and the storm that hit Pi and Richard Parker in their lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. The lifeboat is shaken violently with lots of water coming on board. Again, it is the tiger that wakes up the feeling of
sadness and compassion, seeing the poor feline try to hang on but the waves are to fierce and toss the tiger around.

The scene of the whale breaching out the water is fantastic and magic, with amazing music.

Life of Pi movie reminds me of two other great movies, Titanic and Avatar for the amazing story, visuals and sound effects.







Life of Pi was the recipient of many Academic Awards, BAFTA Awards, 3 D creative Art Awards and AACTA International Awards.

The movie is 2 hours and 7 minutes long.

It has excellent reviews with 86% of positive reviews out of 253 on Rotten Tomatoes, 7.9/10 on IMDb and 4/5 on Common Sense Media.
Cast
Suraj Sharma as Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, age 16/17
Irrfan Khan as Pi Patel, adult
Gautam Belur as Pi Patel, age 5
Ayush Tandon as Pi Patel, age 11/12
Rafe Spall as The Writer
Tabu as Gita Patel, Pi's mother
Adil Hussain as Santosh Patel, Pi's father
Ayan Khan as Ravi Patel, Pi's older brother, age 7
Gérard Depardieu as the Cook
Wang Po-chieh as Sailor
Jag Huang as Sailor
Andrea Di Stefano as the Priest
Shravanthi Sainath as Anandi, age 16/17, Pi's girlfriend
Mythili Prakash as Anandi, adult, Pi's wife
Raj Patel as Ravi, Pi's and Anandi's son named in honour of Pi's brother
Hadiqa Hamid as Adita, Pi's and Anandi's daughter
Elie Alouf as Francis



You can buy the movie or renting it on iTunes.

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