Ang Lee takes on the book widely dubbed as unfilmable, and while it wholly succeeds in the areas people thought it would struggle, the narrative instead serves as the big letdown.
Cast adrift after the cargo ship his family and their zoo’s worth of animals sinks amid a huge storm, Pi finds himself in the middle of the ocean with no one but an over-eager Bengal Tiger to keep him company.
A fantastical adventure, some of the visuals are truly stunning and tiger Richard Parker is as believable as real flesh and blood, but the purpose of the tale gets lost along the way.
By the time the credits roll it all feels like a whole lot of stress for no good reason. The morals of the story don’t come through, while the film’s extensive metaphors are belatedly rammed down your throat like a get out of jail free card.
Suraj Sharma wonderfully portrays Pi, although the same can’t be said of his adult self in Irrfan Khan. Yet even with Sharma in the lead, the central character arc falls way, way short as the experience on a whole is very difficult to latch onto. The 3D too brought absolutely nothing, when again this was a film talked about as revolutionising use of the technology.