'Life Of Pi' movie review

Life Of Pi is Ang Lee's family saga of a boy who found himself stranded in the middle of the ocean on a small boat, shared with a tiger. The movie is nominated for several Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and pretty much every technical category to exist on the face of these marvellous awards. Now I've heard a lot about this movie, from the first trailer I even remember an article in the Huffington Post or The Guardian or some other serious newspaper like that saying this is 'the most controversial movie of the year'. I haven't heard anything similar about this adventurous drama since, and I sincerely hope that was some really weird typo, or the editor might have embarassed himself a bit. What I've heard about from the book that it's based on and after seeing the trailer, the film looked remarkably cheesy and I wasn't even planning to see it. And how is it really?

Well...it's still very fucking cheesy. Honestly, I went seeing this movie with a handful of doubt. The whole story of a boy bonding with a tiger semt really cheesy and stupid, and after the first 30 minutes, I genuinely tought to myself, hmmm, maybe this isn't as bad as I tought it would. Really, the first half an hour is great, there are these amazing underwater shots, the story starts to revolve in an interesting way...and then he gets on the boat. And there is nothing wrong with getting on the boat...besides it being very boring and cheesy. The movie is 2 hours long and I knew the boat part would probably be very long, and it wasn't too long, it was plain boring. And then, well then came something that crushed this movie even more. I must warn you, that these are major spoilers, so if you don't want to get the movie spoiled for you, do not read on. But seriously, I woudn't care if it was spoiled for me. Your call, it's really tough to explain this without spoilers.

So basically the titular character and the tiger bond over the boat or whatever and I didn't really care much about the movie failing to emotionally connect me with the tiger's character, because I rarely emotionally connect with characters, but the moment Pi says "The tiger broke my heart" and "I love you, Mr. Parker", the film lost all credibility to me. Seriously, and then this gets a Best Screenplay nomination?! And then in the end, Pi actually reveals, that he made the whole tiger story up. In the movie, we see the hyena eat the zebra and scare the monkey, and then the tiger scares them both off or something, and basically the hyena was the evil cook, the zebra was the sailor, the monkey was his mom and the tiger was Pi. Okay, that's really great and everything, I really like the twist and all, but if he was the tiger, WHO THE HELL WAS HE?!??! I mean, who was he in the tiger story?! If you don't undestand, read through it all again or try to live through the not-exactly-misery-but-not-exactly-fun-time-either that this movie is.

I mean, honestly, it's not really that bad, as you might have got the impression. But it's far from what I've expected, what it deserves from all those critics and Oscar nominations. I mean, visually it is one of the most stunning films I've ever seen. The way the CGI tiger blends into the screen, the mesmerizing meduses and suricates and whatnot, the film is really a feast for the eyes at its finest. And I would honestly wish it would be weirder, that it would go more into the hallucination territory, with more green whales and other breath-taking visuals. But it didn't. You have a bit of these spectacular scenes, but mostly boring boat scenes. So the result is a heavily overrated, visually groundbreaking, remarkably cheesy, in many ways unlogical, for the first 30 minutes very cool and the middle 45 minutes very boring tale of an Indian named after a number and his weird trippings in the ocean.


Total rating: 6.5  /  10


So what did you think of Life Of Pi? Did you see it, like it, dislike it, why? Do you think it deserves all the praise and awards? Comment below, let me know!