Kurt Loder on Life of Pi
Ang Lee's Life of Pi is an adaptation of an award-winning 2001 novel by Canadian writer Yann Martel. The core of the story concerns a 17-year-old Indian boy named Pi whose father runs a zoo in Pondicherry. When hard times come, he decides to relocate the family to Canada, along with all of the zoo's animals. When the freighter transporting them on this journey goes down in a fierce storm, Pi alone survives, and finds himself stuck on a lifeboat with an orangutan, a zebra, a nasty hyena, and a very large Bengal tiger. The hyena makes short work of the zebra and the orangutan; the tiger makes even shorter work of the hyena, and then begins eyeing Pi, who fashions a raft out of the boat's life preservers in order to maintain a prudent distance. Many spectacular CGI events ensue. As Kurt Loder reports, the movie is more than just a rip-roaring boy's adventure. Much more, unfortunately. And therefore quite a lot less.