Life, According to Life of Pi

Walking into the cinema to watch a movie adaptation of a book you haven't read has its perks. In my case with Life of Pi, not knowing what to expect at all was like free-falling – an alternating wonderful and somewhat painful experience.

Directed by Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain) and with a screenplay by David Magee (Finding Neverland), this film adaptation of Yann Martel's critically-acclaimed novel of the same title (published in 2001) tells the incredible story of Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, a free-spirited boy from Pondicherry, India and his survival at sea for 227 days after tragically being shipwrecked somewhere in the Pacific. Accompanied only by a Bengal tiger and his then unripe yet beyond-his-years set of philosophical beliefs, the story is as spiritually and emotionally as it is visually stunning (better bring your own Kleenex).

The plot unfolds through a series of flashbacks that spans most stages of Pi's life (as effectively portrayed by four different actors); from the origins of his remarkable name, to how he got around to merging Christianity and Islam with his Hindu upbringing, to meeting the girl of his dreams, to being forced to move out of his homeland, being tossed around by the sea for 227 days and living to tell the tale to a local novelist in Montreal, where he settles down in his latter years. The novelist, whose career stands at a crossroads of sorts, hopes to hear a story that would make a good book and supposedly "make him believe in God", as the common family friend who led him to Pi put it. And Pi does just that – tell an incredible story about a perilous but triumphant journey. But does it succeed in making the writer "believe in God"? We'll leave that question unanswered.