LIFE OF PI, MOVIE REVIEW BY A SEAFARER- CAPT AJIT VADAKAYIL

LIFE OF PI BY YANN MARTEL, BROUGHT TO LIFE BY DIRECTOR LEE ANG,  OSCARS IN ORDER FOR THE CGI TEAM WHO CREATED THE TIGER  RICHARD PARKER, CANNIBALISM IN LIFEBOATS -  CAPT AJIT VADAKAYIL

Life of Pi is a sea survival, Booker prize winning novel penned by a Canadian author Yann Martel and published in 2001.  

It has to be a  fantasy as ocean currents cannot carry you from the Mariana Trench to the West coast of Mexico and that too in 227 days.  The novel was initially rejected by at least five London publishing houses.

The movie under the same name is a super-grand tale of endurance, faith, friendship, and indefatigable human spirit.  This movie has the most astonishing and impressive ‘ 3D visual effects movie’ ever made.  

--what more could you ask for.  

Says adult Pi,  Irfan Khan, who appears to be at peace with his past  "You don't know the strength of your faith until it's tested."  

And this forms the basis of the entire plot from the point when Pi fights for survival on sea with a ravenous and famished tiger till the end of his adventure-filled voyage. For intelligent people , this movie provides abundant food for thought. 

David Magee's script is steeped in spiritualism, and Ang Lee's mastery of the computer graphics technology elevates the script to dizzying heights.  Wrestling with spirituality onscreen can often be exhausting and unrewarding.

This is one time, where the movie is better than the book. This type of a movie out of a book would have been “inconceivable” a decade ago due to technological limitations.  It succeeds thanks to new visual effects possibilities and director Ang Lee's mastery in his chosen craft.

The fact that we already know that adult Pi ( Irfan Khan ) has survived  the ordeal  doesn't make the story any less harrowing or devoid of suspense.

The main character  Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel,  is a 17 year old Indian boy from Pondicherry, who uses his wits and  survives 7.5 months  after his ship sank in the Pacific, near the 11 kilometer deep Mariana Trench.

Suraj Sharma, a non-actor selected by director Lee from a field of 3,000 candidates, plays Pi of the lifeboat sequences, which is really the heart of the movie. He has for lone company a fierce adult Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.  

Pi finished off his 227 day ordeal in a lifeboat at sea on a note of heartwarming self-awakening.  

The story shifts back and forth between two perspectives-- that of present-day Pi as he narrates the story to a novelist looking for a new idea, and through teenage Pi's eyes as it's happening first hand at sea .

Life of Pi is divided into three story telling sections.  In the first section, Pi as an adult ( Irfan Khan ) reminisces about his childhood, to a  character called Writer (Rafe Spall) in the kitchen of his Montreal home.

Writer has made the pilgrimage because in his travels in India, he met Pi's godfather who convinced him that that Pi had a story so astonishing it could make him believe in God.

The Indian boy of Piscine Militor Patel , takes the initiative to change  his name to "Pi" when he begins secondary school, because he is sick and tired of being taunted with the nickname "Pissing Patel".  

Young Pi declares himself a Catholic, a Hindu, a Muslim.  He starts to follow all three religions as he "just wants to love God.  He doesn't truly understand the meaning of faith  until he's alone at sea , battling all odds and pleading for a sign from God.

His love of God, of beasts and a first love back home in the dancing class at Pondicherry endear.

The whole story from the beginning has an undercurrent of faith versus. reason. Pi's father is a practical atheist while his mother is a traditionalist who holds onto her Hindu religion as something that connects her to her past.

His rationalist father who owns a zoo in Pondicherry, had provided Pi some elementary understanding of Bengal tiger  psychology early in life.. One day when Pi as a child attempted to feed the fierce tiger in the zoo while sitting outside the bars, his father gets upset,  at his faith in God . 

His father ties up a lamb at the same place , where Pi was sitting with a piece of meat outside the bars.  . “Why not start with reason?” he taunts his son.  The tiger named Richard Parker, a name given only due to clerical error, suddenly with an infra sound blood chilling roar,  pounces on the tethered lamb and pulls the carcass with its paws through the bars and carries it away for a meal. 

His father (Adil Hussain) forces him to watch this scene. His father concludes this gruesome demonstration with some terse advise  “A tiger is not your friend.”

Pi is open-minded about his spirituality, despite the pleas of his rationalist father to settle for one set of beliefs.  By believing in everything, perhaps the boy believes in nothing, his father rightly cautions his mother.

Having fallen into hard times, one fine day his father decides to shut down the zoo and move to Canada. So in the  second part of the novel, Pi leaves Pondicherry where he spent his childhood and had his first love . He embarks a small Japanese ship to Canada with his family carrying some of the exotic animals from their zoo. Their sea voyage soon takes a tragic turn.

In the middle of the night, woken up by the ship’s movements in rough seas , Pi goes out of his cabin and foolishly opens a water tight door ( which is the real reason why the ship sank ) . He goes on the upper bridge deck and starts a  foolhardy dance,  in a building typhoon , sliding around here and there with every roll of the ship.  

A huge wave causes water to enter the accommodation via the open water tight door.  The Japanese ship Tsimtsum takes a list and capsizes. His parents, the ship’s crew, and the rest of the animals meet a watery grave in the dark and deep Mariana trench..  

Taiwanese director Ang Lee does an amazing job of creating this typhoon.  I have been at sea for 40 years , trust me on this.

After the storm, Pi regains consciousness in a small 26 foot lifeboat with a small menagerie – a vicious spotted hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutan and of course the Bengal tiger Richard Parker.

The starving hyena tears into the disabled Zebra and gorges into its flesh. When the sea sick Orangutan kicks up a loud row in protest the vicious hyena now targets her next and kills her too. Natural instinct I must say. 

Probably this is why the movie got PG rating because Director Ang Lee chose to avoid bloodletting.  

Suddenly the tiger who was hiding under the bow awnings leaps on the hyena with a blood curdling roar and kills it . 

Totally frightened,  Pi constructs a small raft out of lifejackets , oars and lifeboat bilge wooden gratings , tethers it to the boat using the painter , and retreats on to it.

Man and beast must work out a uneasy truce—first out of need, then out of unstated respect. The tiger's weapons are his teeth and claws, against which  man has to pit his brain . The tiger needs Pi to keep him alive and NOT vice versa.

Circumstances eventually force Pi to forge an uneasy co-existence with the tiger. He provides food and water to the tiger using his mental faculty.  The sensitive relationship between man and beast evolves in front of your eyes—fraught with danger and fear of the unknown.

"Maybe Richard Parker can't be tamed," Pi tells himself in a soliloquy, "but with God's will he can be trained."

He now sets about proving that he is the master to the tiger. He rocks the boat till the tiger feels terribly seasick and starts puking all over the place. While the tiger is in acute discomfort Pi blows on the life jacket whistle. 

The whistle is now a signal –  rather an evil omen to the tiger, shape up buddy, or you are due for some real bad treatment.  

The majority of the film is one long sequence in which Pi and the tiger get to know each other and co-exist on the boat. 

Eventually, our Richard Parker learns to forge a wary co-existance with Pi's presence and they both live in the boat for several months.  

I must digress here. This year’s best performance honors must go to an animal -- a TIGER named  Richard Parker .  

His expressive eyes bores into your soul.  You could almost tell exactly what this grand creature was thinking or trying to express . Once he tried to catch a big fish and jumped into the sea. He could NOT climb back onto the boat due to exhaustion. 

While about to drown with only his eyes and nose above water with NIL aggro, his imploring eyes , eyeballing Pi’s eyes, spoke volumes . Till then Richard Parker had only looked at Pi as emergency lifeboat food rations. 

The computer graphics imaging ( CGI ) work here is absolutely amazing.  I am an artist myself and I do understand this poignant scene. The whole cinema hall audience went slack jawed after this emotional scene , where Pi keeps the tiger alive, till the end of the movie, giving it food and water using his initiative.

The real star of the show is the tiger who is forced by circumstances to be in a symbiotic relationship with a human.  Their face-off, and the ambivalence Pi feels toward the beast — both drawn to him and fearing him.
 Created from a mix of CGI and four actual Bengal Tigers, the animal character is an alternating mix of house pet lovability and blood chilling beastly impulse. 

The switches between real and CGI tigers are imperceptible most of the time. Once the tiger leaps out of the 3D screen on to your face, making some in the audience sh#t in their pants , or petticoats , as the case may be.  

When we saw the movie, there was a half wit who cried AIYYYYOOOOO so loudly out of fear and his family had to take him out of the hall.

Technical awards are in order for all those who helped create the most memorable movie character of the year.  I am a cat lover and I do know big cat behavior .  The tiger, fur ripples in the wind so realistically that you’d try to reach out and stroke it if you weren’t so alert to the animal’s fierceness.

The created graphically the ever changing ocean that’s alive with shifting hues and mesmerizing — sometimes swift and startling — sea life swimming past.  They created spectacular typhoons followed by turquoise serenity. The night time ocean aglow with luminescent sea-life may seem artificial to land lubbers , but having crossed the Pacific dozens of times I can tell you I have seen even better ones.…

Even after this scene there is never is a point where Pi can be sure he has made a friend of the predatory tiger, considering the lesson his father had given him in the zoo.  For 227 days, as he struggles to survive on canned water and tinned biscuits. One fine day finding no more biscuits , he had to break his vegetarian habits and start eating raw fish, to survive, at odds with his faith.

Pi recounts a chain of events  while adrift at sea , including discovering an island of carnivorous algae inhabited by thousands of  meerkats. 

The island was shaped like Lord Vishnu in recline. Pi and Richard Parker eat to their hearts content,  but soon discover that the island is home to a carnivorous algae that, at night turns the ground to a Methanetetraol acid trap. 

Pi realizes that eventually the island will consume them – so he stocks the lifeboat with edible roots , greens and meerkats and the pair sets sail again.  

He realised only because the tiger would NOT sleep on the island at night, and preferred the boat.  This is one time beast saves man.

After 227 days, the lifeboat washes up onto the coast of Mexico and Richard Parker immediately escapes into the nearby jungle WITHOUT CASTING A BACKWARD GLANCE. 

The significance of 227 days is from the common approximation of π using the fraction 22/7.

In the third part of the novel, two Jap superintendents from the Japanese Ministry of Transport speak to Pi at his Mexican hospital bed to ascertain why the ship sank.  Insurance matters have to be settled.  

When they do not believe his apparent cock and bull fantasy tiger story,  he tells an alternate story of human brutality, in which Pi was adrift on a lifeboat with his mother, a sailor with a broken leg, and the ship's cook, who killed the sailor and Pi's mother and cut them up to use as bait and food. 

Parallels to Pi's first story lead the Japanese officials to believe that the orangutan represents his mother, the zebra represents the sailor, the hyena represents the cook, and Richard Parker is Pi himself. 

Pi does NOT tell them that he opened up a watertight door in a typhoon , which is forbidden unless the Captain is informed,  by the watch keeper on the navigating bridge.

After giving all the relevant information, Pi asks the insurance adjusters , which of the two stories they prefer. Since the officials cannot prove which story is true,  and neither is relevant to the reasons behind the shipwreck, based on which they have to retrieve insurance moolah, they choose the story with the tiger.  

There are no answers . 

Pi thanks them and says, "and so it goes with God".

BUT THE FACT THAT YOUNG PI KEPT STRESSING THAT RICHARD PARKER WENT AWAY INTO THE MEXICAN FOREST WITHOUT CASTING A GLANCE BACKWARDS IN GRATITUDE , TO ACKNOWLEDGE THEIR 227 DAY STAY TOGETHER AND FOR FAVORS RECEIVED--  

---MAKES A PSYCHOLOGIST WONDER IF THE SECOND STORY OF CANNIBALISM WAS INDEED THE TRUE ONE.

The audience must decide which story to believe. 

With such deep philosophical issues, Pi is most profound when he asks, “What does it all mean?” then answers, “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

Was the obvious cannibalism suppressed by the Jap investigators as it would open the quintessential Pandora’s box? The tiger story would be less messy and more reader worthy.

IN ANY CASE WHEN INSURANCE ADJUSTERS COME IN , TRUTH IS ALWAYS THE FIRST CASUALTY AT SEA.

You don’t just watch this compelling  movie, you live it.   It is a richly drawn interior work, much of it spent inside Pi's mind or awash in his memories.

Rarely will you come across such a unique human journey filled with self-discovery, self-doubt,  denial and affirmation of faith. Such a grand accomplishment in storytelling on 3D screen – it is both visual and emotional. Technology almost falls out of the equation.

The team of CGI, created a really credible flesh-and-blood wild beast, convincingly ferocious and undeniably scary, yet vulnerable and poignant too.  The audience is slack jawed most of the time as they are trapped in and over awed by the unfolding spectacle.  

Mountainous waves reach out to engulf us while,  underwater, boiling currents writhe and seethe. The phosphorescent sea glows under moonbeams, as whales breach and sharks circle and an entire air force of luminous silver fish flies,  some bang into Pi chest leaving behind scales and red welts.  

Blooms of bio luminescent algae , the ethereal underwater world illuminated by phosphorescence, and star-drenched midnight skies lavishes astonishing visual beauty .

Many people say that the end was a disappointment.  I would agree with them. 

Ang Lee should re-edit this movie by putting some nostalgia at the end – like how the Titanic movie ended with the rotten barnacle encrusted ballroom staircase coming into life--

-- with the dead lovers once again in flesh and blood on the staircase looking at each other.  

Let me give you a review of this exquisite  movie which can be seen by a small child to an old man,  made by India’s major film critic Rajeev Masand— yeah the one who speaks like a chakka while sitting on a stool .  

He wields so much of power that even Aishwarya Rai does cootchie coo to him , sometimes poking his ribs, so that he gives a better future review. 

Check out his intellect and his grasp of the narrative.  

Ratings:3.5/5 Reviewer: Rajeev Masand Site: CNN IBN (IBN Live)

'Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee, is a film so fascinating and so stunning to look at, you don’t want to blink for fear of missing out on a moment. It’s the only film since James Cameron’s Avatar to exploit 3D so richly. Yet, Life of Pi is not an easy film, although it does deliver many pleasures. The payoff in the end feels slight and not entirely convincing, but what you can never deny is that this film is unlike any other you’ve ever seen.  

I’m going with three-and-a-half out of five for Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. It may not touch your heart, but it’s a feast for the eyes. Watch it for its sheer visual brilliance. 

SQUEAK   SQUEAK!!

Here is a movie , with spiritual underpinnings that dwells upon questions of human existence and man’s tangled relationship with God, flora, fauna and nature, with ridiculous ease. 

Life of Pi gives you a glance into the depth of this universe, while not allowing such visuals  to overshadow the substance of the narrative.

Find breathtaking enchantment in what is essentially a simple allegory about life, religion and survival in hostile circumstances. 

Here is a movie with a soul.

Grab a piece of this Pi action, made by a director at the top of his game.   

Along comes Ang Lee -- YIKES!

It is a must watch-- so says Capt Ajit Vadakayil.

Jealous and paid up DORKS keep away— complex themes of spirituality and self-discovery, in the guise of an accessible and engrossing fantasy , is not for you. 

EPILOGUE:  Our company had a modern Chemical tanker which was adrift sea without power for weeks.  In a hurricane, one crew member opened a watertight door like our man Pi.   A giant wave caused sea water to pour into the accommodation , and salt ingressed the emergency generator room.  The bus bar of the main generator was connected to ESB in this room by a clandestine connection and the ship lost the main switch board, with total loss of power and blackout.   Finally she had to be towed into port, and when the main power finally came back on after repairs , 42 days had passed.  When a ship loses power it starts rolling heavily due to beam swell.   Cargo in the holds of cargo ships shifts and the ship lists over and sinks.

 Grace and peace!

CAPT AJIT VADAKAYIL

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