Question: Can a film be successful, loved, a massive hit, and still be under-rated?
Answer, in the case of this movie, yes, somehow, it can.
Based on a book first published in 2001, and hitting the cinema 11 years later, Life Of Pi is a bit of an odd beast.
The film was nominated for 11 Oscars, including Best Picture (which it lost to Argo), and picked up four of them, including Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Visual Effects.
It had a very healthy budget to put together the once-in-a-lifetime visuals, and every penny of that $120 million is up there on the screen. It was expected to be a major financial bomb, lost in cinemas by trying to compete against the first of The Hobbit Trilogy movies.
However, director Ang Lee knows how to makes things beautiful and interesting – just look at Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain or Lust Caution – and the audiences paid him back to the tune of $609 million worldwide.
That is blockbuster money for a very expensive art-house film; one in which the lead is a completely unknown 17-year-old Indian actor; in which the biggest recognisable name is Rafe Spall (Prometheus, Hot Fuzz), who only pops up sporadically as a modern-day structure to the re-telling of the protagonist’s story.
Critics loved it as well, with the movie showing up in over 20 best of the year lists, for outlets like Indiewire, Rolling Stone and The AV Club.
So why, after all that love only five years ago, does it feel like Life Of Pi has already been forgotten about?
Clip via Fox Star India
There are possibly a few reasons for this.
One is the Avatar-effect: watching such a visual movie, one which pushed the 3D angle so heavily when it was first released, that maybe viewers are concerned that the same effect won’t take hold at home.
However, unlike Avatar which sold itself on the visuals and not exactly a whole lot else, Life Of Pi does have a uniquely brilliant story pinning everything together, one involving Pi (played by that unknown Suraj Sharma), as he escapes a sinking ship and finds himself lost at sea on a small boat with an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena and a tiger.
How the young boy figures out how to survive alongside these animals, as well as everything they encounter along the way, is the spine of a mystery you didn’t know you were watching until the very end.
Yep, that ending, the same gut-punch as the book, is the other reason why people find it so difficult to come back to this movie.
Don’t worry, we won’t spoil it for you here, but how the story folds back in on itself just when you think it is all coming to end is one of those moments that will rattle around your head for days afterwards. Deeply satisfying and very upsetting all at once, even if you have seen it before, it most most definitely rewards with a rewatch.
And if you haven’t seen it yet, Life Of Pi is on E4 on Monday 8 January at 8pm.
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