Life of Pi (2012) Stoner Movie Review

I’ve been on holiday this week and haven’t had chance to watch anything of note. But I didn’t want to miss a post, so apologies that I’ve had to use a post I wrote a while ago! It’s still a really interesting film that I’m sure a lot of you will have seen and one that brings up a lot of great discussion!

Life of Pi (2017)

Director: Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, Hulk)

Starring: Suraj Sharma (Million Dollar Arm, Phillauri) Irrfan Khan (Jurassic World, Slumdog Millionaire) Gerard Depardieu (The Man in the Iron Mask, Cyrano de Bergerac)

If you like this you’ll also like: Lion, Slumdog Millionaire, Cast Away, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

IMDb Rating: 7.9/10

Rotten Tomatoes: 87%

My Rating: 7/10

The plot of the movie surrounds a boy stranded on board a lifeboat with only a Tiger for company in the middle of the ocean. This thought alone is enough to keep me entertained for hours, let alone the 127 minutes for which Director, Ang Lee, decided to keep me.

Now this would have been an amazing experience.

People I know had been throwing superlatives at it left, right and centre so I sat down and watched it with my girlfriend and a joint. I think for about 110 minutes both of us thought that it was a pretty damn good film. Visually it was absolutely stunning; for the most part you wouldn’t have known that whenever Pi (the boy) was in the boat that it was a CGI tiger- other than common sense obviously- but the CGI really was very good.

It was also for me, one of the few films in which, despite the story being as ridiculous as it is, I felt completely encapsulated by it. I was almost treating it as if it was a completely normal thing to be happening, which like I say, does not happen very often with me. Kudos to Ang and his crew there.

Director, Ang Lee

However, I think for both of us, the ending was really quite underwhelming. Leaving the ending so open for interpretation for the viewer didn’t work at all for me (I’ll call Spoiler alert here for those who haven’t seen it).  My choice interpretation of the ending was that the whole story of the tiger was made up and he made it up because it was a much more interesting story- as if being stranded on a boat for however long it was (weeks I think) wasn’t interesting and that was supposed to make him believe in God? I understood all the symbology of the animals, the emphasis on the choice of believing the logical story or the outrageous one, questioning our faith and belief etc. but I just didn’t bite onto it. My girlfriend felt the same way.

Don’t get me wrong; I did think that it was a very good film and I enjoyed it a lot, especially the debate with other people about it, but I couldn’t help the feeling of being underwhelmed because of the ending. In fact, it reminded me a lot of Ernest Hemingway’s novel ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ which I happened to have read a couple of months beforehand and I found that to be a more well rounded story than the ‘Life of Pi’. I realise that’s completely irrelevant but it was a fantastic book, I would definitely recommend reading it.

It was a beautifully crafted film

The IMDB community has given it an 7.9/10, I’ve given it a 7/10. Definitely worth watching, it is very good but ultimately I think for me it fell a little bit flat at the end.

Have you seen Life of Pi? Let me know what you thought and feel free to tell me if I’m being an unimaginative idiot about the ending! I’ve had some really interesting discussions about it and I know a lot of you have some strong opinions on it and feel completely the opposite about it, so I’d love to hear your views on it!