LIFE OF PI – a movie review

The Life of Pi was our chosen movie today…we started watching the movie after breakfast/brunch at around ten am. I thought my daughter would soon get tired of the movie because it lacked some action and was only about a young boy’s adventures on a boat…but I was wrong since she watched the entire film and was really interested with what happened to him in the movie. The movie is actually about an Indian boy named Pi Patel, he tells his story to a novelist/writer in Canada and he starts about his childhood in India. Pi relates that his family owned a zoo and that he was particularly fond of animals, in particular a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. One day, he tried feeding the tiger but his father angrily shoved him away and told him that the tiger is dangerous. As proof, he made Pi witness the tiger killing a goat and made him promise not to go near it again. But then his father came home one day with sad news that the municipality cannot support the zoo anymore hence they needed to sell the zoo and its animals. The family will be also be relocated to Canada and so they rode a Japanese ship. One night while Pi is on deck, the ship is met with a heavy storm, he tries to find his family but a Japanese crew member throws him out into a lifeboat and he watched as the ship sinks killing his entire family. The next day, he discovers a zebra with him on the lifeboat. They later discover an orangutan floating at sea who they also take into the lifeboat. Then, suddenly a hyena emerges from under tarp covering half of the boat and kills the zebra. It also kills the orangutan and tried to approach Pi when suddenly a tiger comes out from underneath the tarp and kills the hyena. So Pi decides to get out of the boat and use the flotation device to stay at a safe distance from the tiger. He gets some emergency food rations and water that he found on the boat. He starts to fish and also collects rainwater for him and the tiger. After many days, Pi teaches the tiger to accept him inside the boat and it was then that he realized that caring for the tiger was what kept him alive. But despite his survival efforts, the two almost die of starvation until later on they reach an island filled with many edible plants, fresh water pools and thousands of meerkats. They eat and drink what they could find in order to regain their strength. But come nightfall, they soon discover that the island turns onto a carnivore, since Pi sees dead fishes floating in the now acidic water and discovers a human tooth inside a flower. So the next day, he and Richard Parker decided to leave the island. Soon, they reach the coast of Mexico and as Richard Parker walks away into the forest, Pi looks on and expects him to look back at him to acknowledge him. But instead, the tiger walks on and goes into the jungle. Pi cries as he is rescued and brought to a hospital. After some time, insurance agents come to interview him but do not believe his story and ask him to relate what really happened and so he makes up a story about being on the boat with his mother, a Buddhist sailor with a broken leg and the cook. In this story, the cook killed the sailor in order to eat him and use him as bait then Pi's mother pushed her son to safety on a smaller raft before the cook stabbed her and threw her overboard. Pi later returned, to kill the cook with a knife. Pi then asked the writer what story he prefers and he responds ‘the one with the tiger’ as it is the better story. Later on, he sees the insurance report and notes that the insurance agents wrote that Pi survived 227 days at sea with an adult Bengal tiger so I guess it seems they believed his story after all. What was originally a quite boring story about the adventure of a young boy with a tiger came truly alive with the 3D effects that this film used. In fact, many critics described the movie as a 3D masterpiece since you just don’t watch the movie, you live it. The film is visually amazing, the effects that Ang Lee made in the sky and the water makes it so much interesting. The movie is filled with so much marvelous things that you may even doubt what you are already seeing with your own eyes. And in the end, it makes you even wonder if you have seen anything at all. In fact, if you read the making of the film, the tiger and all the other animals in the film is not real at all and just the product of magnificent visual effects. But then again, this draws us back to the story’s real ending – which is the story that truly happened? The one with the tiger? Or the one with the humans? But I guess it does not really matter, as it depends on what you prefer to believe as a moviegoer: if you are someone who only believes what he sees and touches or someone who believes in miracles and accepts things based on faith. What matters is that the movie made me believe in the majesty and miracle of God and believe in something that would have been thought of as impossible.