Thursday, December 6, 2012

Life of Pi

Suraj Sharma in Ang Lee's Life of Pi
**** out of ****

I was moved by Ang Lee’s new movie, Life of Pi which achieves it’s beauty from all the state-of-the-art digital utilities imaginable. It is a mysterious spiritual journey, which invites the audience to experience something interpretive.

I found the computer-generated imagery in Life of Pi to be the kind that is so immersive, that my concept of its artificiality faded away. It’s the kind of visuals that are tailored to evoke emotions and make the achievement of photo-realism a second priority.

Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain) has made a variety of different films and most of them are sad stories. This is the most hopeful and life affirming of them all. Based on Yan Martel’s 2001 fantasy novel, it follows the adventures of a shipwrecked Indian boy stuck in a lifeboat with a hungry tiger. His struggle to co-exist with the tiger in a survival situation is filled with symbolism in a way that makes me understand why many readers thought this to be an un-filmable story. It is almost abstract in concept.

I’d be interested to know what fans of the book found to be lost in translation because I got a lot out of this story. It had the kind of euphoric effect I crave from cinema and rarely find in a 3D movie like one should expect.

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