Life of PI

Finally watched the highly anticipated Life of PI. It is certainly a good movie. There are times when the visuals are pretty stunning, the Blu-Ray transfer is exceptionally sharp, and there are times when the story is very compelling. However, I think Life of PI falls very short of being a great film predominately because the story as a film is simply not that engaging. It is another great example of how novels truly are a different medium and one that proves that not every book can be properly transferred into a film without major changes. Roger Ebert in his review discussed how many people believed the book to be un-filmable and after watching the movie I can now see why. First and foremost Hollywood films need to have an engaging script and the narrative must be engaging more often then not and after a very lengthy set up the real brilliance of the movie is the shipwreck scene which got all of it's visual clues from Titanic. After that watching PI on the boat for over an hour felt like an eternity which is an accurate representation of what a real person would go through in such a terrible situation, however for a narrative film it gets quite boring and the visuals although impressive were not constant enough or dazzling enough to keep the pace of the film at the speed it needed to be. There was no urgency in this film and yes Ang Lee at times tends to slow down the pacing in his films. Yet In Brokeback Mountain that worked to his advantage where in my opinion it was not as successful here. Another thing I admired about the film was that there were many visual references to other Hollywood films. it is hard not to recognize references to Titanic, Castaway and Forrest Gump. In fact this is one of the few films that directly uses visual iconography from the movie Titanic. As far as the tiger goes at times it was done exceptionally well but since it was mixed with CGI it looked a little off at times. Gladiator is a movie that I thought meshed a CGI tiger with a real one slightly better then they did here but keep in mind the tiger is a central character in this film and hence they had a much harder task. I did not see this film in a 3D or IMAX format so I must say I thin the experience would have been much more immersive in that format. Lastly, many people have said that is a great spiritual movie and in the beginning I thought they were doing a great job with that. It was one of the rare mainstream Hollywood films to not demonize Muslims in the film. It also does a pretty good job of explaining the Hindu religion as well as explaining the basic tenants of Catholicism and it was nice to see this all done in a positive light. However, I do not think the film delivers a powerful spiritual message with it's narrative after that. Yes if something like this really happened no other word other then miraculous can be used to describe how PI survived simply because fate or luck had to be involved along with his will to live and his smart use of resources. However, movies lie The Shawshank Redemption, The Passion of The Christ, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Slumdog Millionaire, The Exorcist, Schindler's List, all in my opinion do a much better job at making the audience feel a strong emotional connection to religious ideals. There certainly is a lot to comment on with this film and Ang Lee at the very least has created a great film for academic discussion which I respect. As much as it seems like I am picking the movie apart let me remind you that it was a good film. I just think that it was not one of the best films that I have ever seen. My two favorite films of last year remain The Perks of Being A Wallflower and Flight.