PI, OH MY! (THE LIFE OF PI)
They're coming at us like a swarm of bees.
Oscar contenders are buzzing around our multiplexes, vying for our attention as we head towards 2013.
And one of those movies wooing us is 2006 Academy Award winner, Ang Lee's 'The Life of Pi'.
Adapted for the cinema by David Magee from the best selling novel by Yann Martel, trailers for Lee's movie exploded onto our screens around the time of 'Skyfall' with a splash of vibrant colour and the pomp rock of Coldplay.
Fans of the book will no doubt be intrigued how the Taiwan-born director of 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' and 'Brokeback Mountain' could take on a story largely set on the sea featuring a young actor and a number of animals.
But thanks to the wonders of digital animation, Lee has delivered a movie that is certainly one of the most visually impressive works this year.
His adaptation begins with Rafe Spall's struggling author turning up at the Montreal home of Irfan Khan's Pi Patel, on the promise from a mutual acquaintance in India that he will find an amazing story that would make a great novel.
Patel takes the author through his life in the once French controlled town of Pondicherry in India.
We learn Pi's real name is Piscine - the French for swimming pool - and as a result he is the butt of many jokes about urination when he first goes to school.
At the start of his second year, he bravely faces down his detractors by declaring from now on he will be known as Pi and stuns his teachers and fellow pupils by neatly and accurately writing out the many digits that make up the mathematical symbol.
An intelligent and curious boy, Pi not only adheres to the principles of Hinduism but dabbles in other religions like Catholicism and Islam - much to the consternation of his father, played impressively by Adil Hussain, who runs a zoo in the Botanical Gardens and extols science over religious belief.
Pi is fascinated by a particular tiger in the zoo, who the family have named Richard Parker because of a clerical error.
However his father reminds the boy that the tiger is not to be messed with and will kill at will.
After a brief teenage romance with Anandi, a beautiful dancer played by Shravanthi Sainath, Pi is heartbroken to learn his father Santosh is selling the zoo and is uprooting the family for Canada with the blessing of his mother Gita, played by Tabu, and brother Ravi, played by Vibish Sivakumar.
Santosh intends to sell his animals in North America to fund the family's move and they board a Japanese freight ship where they encounter a racist cook (a brief appearance by Gerard Depardieu).
The ship, however, is engulfed by a storm off the Philippines and sinks with Pi losing his family. He escapes on a boat with a wounded zebra, an orangutan, a hyaena and the fearsome tiger, Richard Parker on board.
Ang Lee and his screenwriter David Magee take time to establish their story, with a methodical opening half hour.
However the movie goes up several gears with the stunning storm sequence. Pi's curious excitement about the storm soon turns to horror as he realises the ship is sinking.
The sequence is deftly handled by cinematographer Claudio Miranda (who conjures up many luscious images throughout the movie) and Tim Squyres' thrilling film editing.
In fact, as we follow Pi's uneasy adventures at sea with Richard Parker, the most impressive aspect of the whole venture are the computer generated images by visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer and chief animator Erik Jan de Boer.
Viewers watching in 3D are treated to kingfishers flying out of the screen, zoo animals desperately swimming for survival, whales leaping out of sumptuous neon green seas, a spectacular sequence involving 40,000 flying fish and another with 60,000 meerkats staring at Pi.
In his screen debut, Suraj Sharma has to carry the bulk of the film as the late teen version of Pi and he acquits himself well in a performance that sometimes recalls Tom Hanks' in Robert Zemeckis' 'Castaway'.
We watch Pi suffer everything Nature throws at him, become more dishevelled as the film wears on and dramatically lose weight in a performance that requires a huge amount of commitment from an inexperienced actor in a potentially star making role.
However, like a lot of Ang Lee's films, one cannot help feeling that while the movie is technically dazzling, there is one ingredient missing.
Lee's innovative 3D images (which have justifiably been hailed as groundbreaking by James Cameron) only highlight the rather conventional and staid nature of Magee's narrative.
The reliance on flashbacks between the present day and Pi's amazing tale and the use of voiceover seem a bit too stale for a movie with such breathtaking scale and ambition.
Lee's film wrestles with big ideas such as belief in the Divine or in science, truth versus fiction which is commendable but for all the sense of wonder the movie evokes, it is ultimately the thrilling battle of wills between the boy and the tiger that keeps us on the edge of our seats.
'The Life of Pi' will no doubt be a contender on Oscar night and could well prize away visual effects Oscars from 'Marvel Avengers Assemble', 'Prometheus' and 'The Dark Knight Rises'.
But one is left wondering what the movie would have been like if Ang Lee was prepared to break loose from the straitjacket of conventional film storytelling.
Nevertheless it is a visual feast and a decent addition to the 3D cannon alongside Martin Scorsese's 'Hugo' and it is worth a visit to the cinema.
'The Life Pi' opens in the Movie House and other cinemas in the UK and Ireland on December 20, 2012.
(This review originally appeared on the EamonnMallie.com website in December 2012)
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