Life of Pi
Yesterday on December 22nd, Dad and I went to the Cineplex Galaxy Theatre to choose which movie we were going to see, The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey or The Life of Pi. We came a little late, so we had to watch the Life of Pi. I kind of wanted to see The Hobbit because it was action-packed and adventurous, but oh well. When I saw the movie poster, it was a man stuck on a boat and raft with a tiger hogging the boat. I thought maybe there would be not that much fun, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to see it.
The story goes that one boy named Piscine Molitor Patel, named after a swimming pool in Paris, France. He had to make a nickname because he was teased a lot when his classmates started calling him "Pissing". So he called himself Pi, and explained in the new school year that he was named after the number to calculate circumference of a circle.
Later in life, he started following many religions and he fell in love with a girl named Anandi, little that they know that the zoo was running out of business and they were moving to Canada. Pi was furious hearing this because he loved his life in India and the animals like Richard Parker, the tiger. Richard Parker was named after the hunter who caught him, that his ticket to the zoo turned out that the named were switched to Richard Parker, the tiger. Anyway, Pi's father promised Pi that he would bring the animals onto the boat until Canada where they will sell them. And so Pi was about to start a new life, but in the middle of the night, they had a huge storm on the Pacific Ocean. That it was so powerful that the Japanese freighter ship sank to the bottom of the sea, but God let him live on a safe boat with a zebra, a orangutan and a hyena.
After a day or so, Pi discovers that Richard Parker was hiding under the sheets and ate the hyena whom killed the orangutan and the zebra. And so Pi and Richard Parker are all alone on the sea. I found it pretty funny because the Bengal Tiger hogged the boat and Pi had to build his own raft. The tiger and the boy only could fish, drink, eat and sleep. They lasted for a long time for 227 days out on the open sea until he found a carnivorous island where meerkats accompanied him, he knew he had to leave before he was going to be eaten. He set out again looking for more land. He was getting so hungry that he was going to die. He had finally made it to a Mexican shore and was taken to the hospital, but Richard Parker, when they found land, he just left without looking back.
This was a story that the older version of Pi was explaining his story about on the sea with God guiding them to a news reporter that Pi knew. I found this story really inspiring and adventurous at the same time. I found it funny when Pi was at the hospital, two insurance inspectors came to know what happened to their ship. They didn't believe him about the story of then tiger, so he explained the story that the zebra was a sailor with a broken leg, the hyena was the cook, his mother was the orangutan and Pi himself was Richard Parker.
Since I watched this inspiring movie, it has made me want to read the book by Yann Martel. I felt the relationship between Richard Parker and Pi that each has tried to look after each other and never gave up hope. I can relate this to my everyday life because Pi has many religions and I have to learn about Catholic religion, about where he has French class and I am learning about Circles in my math unit where I need to use pi/π.
I also so amazed of how the director, Ang Lee, had distributed this movie and how the screen shots were taken, like the glowing sea where all the jellyfish floating around with the whale jumping in the air. I found that Ang Lee, even that I didn't know him, he is one of the greatest directors in my book like James Cameron or George Lucas. I decided to look him up and found out he directed many movies that I didn't know about, like Hulk, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Sense and Sensibility. Anyway, some parts of this movie was made by CGI, but nowadays, it looks so realistic! Because maybe the tiger would have been too dangerous for the actor. I thought that this movie was brilliant and that I wish there were other movies like this so I can keep reading, watching and writing.
