Life Of Pi 3D - movie review

Life of Pi (2012). In 3D. Let's make a note right at the start that I have NOT read the book. I have NOT read the book. So all of the opinions and remarks are solely based on the movie (in 3D) as I have NOT read the book. Did I mention that I have NOT read the book, yet? Also, it's been over a week since I went to see this movie, so my memory of it is getting a wee bit shaky. Excuse false information if I get my tid bits mixed up.
There. Now that's out of the way, everything from this point on can be considered a spoiler.

***SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOLERS*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS***

The movie goes thusly:
Young writer (Rafe Spall) wants to interview Pi Patel (Iffran Khan: adult Pi) on how he survived the ship he was supposed to travel to Canada on sinking and being ship wrecked for 227 days. Everyone keeps saying the story will make him believe in god. We start at the very beginning of Pi not even existing yet, but how his parents' friend like a swimming pool and that's why Pi was named after it. Then we see little Pi (Gautam Pelur) at school, a little older Pi (Ayush Tandon) trying to feed a tiger and finally the young adult Pi (Suraj Sharma), that's the main protagonist, having a crush and thinking deep. Pi has a brother, but we don't much talk about him except that he's a bit of a weenie. Pi's dad (Adil Hussain) is the logic-worshipping non-godbeliever. Pi's mom (Tabu) is the über-sexy perfect woman who is both gentle, smart and god-fearing. The family owns a zoo. They come to hard times and hatch a plan to sell the zoo to Canada where they will all go on a cargo ship. Gerard Depardeu is the chef on the ship. There are buddhists on the ship too. There's a storm, the entire ship up and sinks. Pi wakes up in a life raft with a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and a tiger. The hyena eats the zebra, the orangutan beats the hyena but then gets eaten and the tiger gets sick of the noise the hyena makes and thumps it. Pi and tiger sail along and catch fish. Nothing happens. There's a storm. They find magical island shaped like a hindu god with meerkats. They find land. Pi is saved, tiger buggers off into the wild. The company that owns the cargo ship interview Pi. He tells them two stories, only one of which includes cannibalism. This is all very magical and then the movie ends.

The good bits first. The cinematography is very very pretty. If you saw the trailers, you'll already know that this includes some astaunding images. Beyond the obvious one where the magic of creation is reached for, there are beautiful street images of India, of the wildlife at the zoo, of the sea. The sea is amazing, whether dead calm or raging, it's an entity on itself in the movie. So is the image of the god-shaped island floating in the middle of two oceans, the one with water and the one with stars. The tension and pacing are for the most part, well-crafted. You wont be bored. Being that the bulk of this movie is the boy and the tiger in the middle of the ocean, it could've very well become tedious to watch. Though the same thing could be said against the movie in that since we're talking of uncomunicative isolation for 227 days, you don't really get a sense of that much time passing, nor the desparation (or insanity) such a situation would create. All the acting is at the very least competent. Iffran Khan shines. So do the melee of buddhists with their amazingly short amount of screen time. They almost seem like the only three dimentional people in this. The opening credits with the animals at the zoo will make you smile. Well, hopefully, unles you're a sociopath with no heart.

Now on to the questionable bits. The CG tiger is for the most part terrible and not necessary. It's used in all the wrong places, with seeming effort to get it appear wise and godly and connected to the universe which just makes it come off as incredibly hokey. It looks computer generated and it's there to bate you with "ancient wisdom". Brain says "Nope!". The tiger kills a goat through some metal bars, somehow managing to catch it, kill it and then swiddle it through the narrow bars without damage to the goat. Brain is going "Nope" again. Young adult Pi doesn't come off very worse for wear having been shipwreked for over 200 days with no proper nutrition. He also takes his parents' passing (we're not taking notice of the brother here) remarkably well. Almost as if it didn't happen. The sinking of their ship is tragic but the way things are handled, the only real surprise you'll experience is when the parents AREN'T already in Canada, just waiting for Pi to get there. There's little emotional impact there. The worst you'll feel is when none of the buddhists make it and when the hyena kills the orangutan. The 3D is pointless and annoying (and I'm not just saying that because I have to wear the 3D glasses over my own glasses and they hurt my nose and ears). All of the Depth Of Field tricks could've been done to better effect with simply playing with the camera's depth of field without any forced 3D effect. Fluffy animals don't magically become cuter when viewed in 3D! Srsly. Can we just be done with the 3D now? Depardeu stands out like a sore thumb. Your first instinct is to wonder what sort of a luxury liner this is when they can afford to hire international actors as chefs to be mean to the customers. Pi's parents moaning about the lack of vegan food on the cargo ship comes off as priviliged whining instead of the anxiety felt by someone forced to leave their home country it was probably supposed to be. For whatever reason, the Patel family speak english with a stereotypical indian accent to each other. Uncomfortable whinges of racism swept through the audience. Hindi wasn't an option? All the "wonder of nature" shots were already in the trailer. So if you're going to see this expecting it to be all that but more.. it's not. That was it. Don't watch the trailer, you'll get more out of those shots that way. And by now you're probably saying "But this is all kind of nitpicking, the point of the movie isn't in these details" and you'd be right.

Ok, the biggest issue I have with this movie is the terrible, pseudo-spiritual philosophy it tries to pass off as something meaningful. The central idea is that this incredible story of survival is supposed to make you believe in god. This is repeated several times throughout the movie. "It will make you believe in god". So you go ok, let's see what you've got, I'm all eyes and ears. I think the object of the movie is to be god-positive. I think. There are 2 specific sequences here that are supposed to make you into a believer. The first is Pi finding that floating island with all the meerkats. He says that without the island, he would've died. Yet the very next scene after he leaves the island is him finding actual land and getting saved. The way the events are sequenced, he was just a hop and a skip away from actual land, so being on the floating island for a night makes absolutely no difference to his survival. "But the island was shaped like a hindu god and had teeth inside flowers and pools of water that turned acid at night and all those meerkat!". Yeah, that sounds like hunger induced hallucination to me. Also, he would have no way of seeing the shape of the island. And meerkats don't live in tropical climates. Which makes all of the island a giant pile of hallucination rather than something that "saved his life but would have killed him if he'd stayed". Was he in a coma that he was magically awakened from so he wouldn't die? I'll buy the coma explanation, but really, none of this requires the existence of a god.
The second sequence comes when Pi is at the hospital getting interview by the japanese representatives of the cargo company. They don't believe the story we've just seen as a movie, so Pi tells them another story which involves his mum, Depardeu and one of the buddhists surviving the ship. Depardeu kills the buddhist for bate and for eating. Then he and Pi's mum get into a scuffle and both die. Pi survives on fish and eating people. He asks if this is the story the investigators want to hear. The story with all the animals is reported as the official one, everyone smiles like there's some great magical mystery being revealed here.
This is supposed to be the bit that makes you believe in god because everyone chooses to believe the story with all the cute animals doing animal things and meerkats instead of humans being cannibals. Tell me what the moral of this is? The story of cannibalism is very specific, in a way a trauma survivor tells their story, recalling some things in vivid detail and not knowing how other things even happened. The reporters even point out that all the people in the cannibal story are represented by animals in the other. Hyena The Noisy Asshole is Depardeu, the kindly orangutan (who had a baby with her before the shipwreck) is Pi's mum, the wounded zebra is the wounded buddhist that gets eaten first. Pi is the tiger who remains on the boat alone and eventually goes off to live a full life in the jungle. The way this is set up, it screams THERE WERE NEVER ANY ANIMALS JUST THE PEOPLE EATING OTHER PEOPLE but we just don't want to think about that or talk about it, so everyone chooses to believe the story with the cute animals, because it's cute and easy and it nicely gets you off the hook of thinking about cannibalism and survival and any really deep thoughts on the interconnectivity of life and people and actions even when they're not cute and fluffy. And yet, the wisdomous smiles everyone keeps sporting at the end are supposed to give the impression that there really were animals and oh isn't it wonderful how those corporate investigators too came to see how amazing life is when they put the cute animal story in their official report. Whichever one of the stories you believe to be The Real One, it doesn't require any sort of specific belief in a god. In the animal story, the animals act very much like animals do, in the cannibal one humans act like humans.
Two conclusions I can make of this mess: 1. the makers of the movie hate religion and all faiths and want to point out how religion is a way for people to lie to themselves in order to avoid dealing with reality OR 2. the makers of this movie just don't really grasp the implications of thinking about their metaphors and genuinely thought that this passes as spiritual and well-thought out philosophical piece.

In conclusion: should you see this? Sure. Go see it. It's very pretty, it's very entertaining and it probably should be viewed at a theater rather than a TV/computer screen. Don't watch the trailers. Don't expect it to be anything other than very pretty and occasionally engaging. Enjoy the cast that is for once, filled with actual people of colour rather than Hollywood name actors in latex/CG trying to pretend being members of another race. It's not terrible. It's just not nearly as deep as it likes to think.
Now I probably should read the book.

Prometheus

 
First a fair warning: this blog post will most surely spoil the movie for anyone and everyone who hasn't seen it and wishes to go in knowing as little as possible in order to form their own opinion. I'll let you know at which point the spoilers start rolling so you can stop reading.

The non-spoilery part of the review is as follows: I have mixed feelings about the movie.
The trailer seemed interesting.
And now SPOILERS!!!! *** SPOILERS!!!*** TURN AWAY!!!!***DO NOT READ PAST THIS POINT IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW!!!*** I WILL SPOIL EVERYTHING EVER FOR YOU RIGHT NOW!!!!***RUN AWAY!!!!

The plot goes thusly: Muscly albino humanoid drinks goop at the edge of a waterfall somewhere while a space ships takes off. Humanoid (henceforth known as Mr White) has convulsions and falls into the water where he promptly desintegrates. Que opening credits. Archeologist couple have been compiling a record of a certain constellation reoccurring in images created by various different cultures throughout Earth history. Heap Big Future Evil Corporation Weyland Industries funds their research trip to said constellation and specifically to a moon there that has vaguely Earth-like conditions. We meet the crew and pic out the red shirts. David The Robot has been artistic and sensitive and taking care of everything on the ship while the humans have been in cryostasis. The ship reaches destination and quickly discovers a bunch of humps in straight lines that might or might not be buildings. Crew goes in, finds a bunch of faces and stuff carved everywhere. Probably buildings then. Crew splits, there's a storm, some people get stranded in the building and some stuff from there is smuggled on the ship. The stranded crew members die, love-interest archeologist is infected with nasties, Noomi gets preggers, Weyland is NOT dead but on the ship and Charlize has sex. Love-interest archeologist dies, one dead crew member turns into a crab-zombie and kills a bunch of others and it turns out that Mr White and his mates are total dicks for no reason whatsoever. Noomi gives herself a caesarian, Charlize is Weyland's daughter and there are no xenomorphs. Mr White kills Weyland dead and rips David The Robot's head off and tries to fly the Space Croissant to Earth to smash puny humans. The good ship Prometheus crashes the Space Croissant, Charlize gets squished, Giant Squid Of Anger hugs Mr White to death, Noomi flies off to have amazing adventures with David's head (and the body.. but we don't talk about that) and there's finally something resembling a xenomorph, though not quite. End credits.

Since this is a mixed bag I'll start with the things I did like: The movie is very well paced. It kept me sitting and wondering and not wanting to skip ahead and at least the first act is quite brilliant in building the movie and the story arc up. There's a distinct lack of unrealistic assholes in the cast. These feel like real people, with real dialogue and real depth. Yes, the ones who lose their shit can be picked out from the get go, but they never act out of character or have unreasonable motivations. The first act is brilliant. There is so much set up that you start to genuinely appreciate how intelligently the movie is made. The look of the film is perfectly in-keeping with the first one and it seems like they might even have used further sketches from Giger to complete the set up of the cultures presented here (the structures they find on this foreing moon look like a take on the designs Giger did for Dune before leaving the project, though the giant faces are more reminiscent of Patrick Tatopoulos's work). The characters are given time enough to grow on you and become human. And there are gentle giggles. You genuinely don't want any one of these people to just die already even though you know that that's what's coming.
It's an Alien-film. If you go in not thinking that everyone or at least most of these people, are going to die, then you probably got tickets to the wrong movie. By the time the first seeds of destruction have been planted, that is by the start of the second act, you start feeling that this might be one of those unpleasantly good movies where you don't have quick bloody deaths, but you're going to have to watch these people that you care about slowly and painfully (literally) come apart.

And then it all gets silly.
So the things I really disliked about in this movie: let's start with cloak-wearing humanoids from alien planets wearing tighty whiteys. Yeah. That happened. I guess alien peen was too much to be tastefully covered up by random objects on the screen. So humanoids shop Walmart before getting their druidian cloaks on.
The tone of the movie is frustratingly uneven. The first part promises a wonderfully moody and thoughtful piece where the bits with violence are short and shocking and blunt and where the focus would be on keeping you invested psychologically and emotionally, making you think heap big thoughts about life, universe and everything. And then you're given a Guy Pearce with a bald-cap and a Giant Squid Of Anger and you quickly realize that this isn't as smart as it promised to be. It's actually pretty terrible if it wasn't for the wonderful pacing that keeps you from stopping to think about how silly it's getting for too long.
Peter Weyland of the Weylands That Are The Root Of All Evil In The Corporate World is played by Guy Pearce. Guy Pearce in the most unconvincing old age make up since Radu from Subspecies. And that's Peter Weyland as opposed to Charles Weyland who we've seen being played by Lance Henriksen in all the other movies, because.. Lance Henriksen isn't in this one. So we get Peter The Less Handsome Weyland Brother. Who looks like an actor doing a terrible job pretending to be old. And I'm not saying Guy Pearce is a bad actor, it's just that that amount of latex would make anyone look like a muppet. And I doubt it's a huge surprise to anyone that Weyland isn't really dead, but on the ship and that Charlize Theron's Meredith is in fact his daughter. Some spectacularly clunky dialogue follows when exposition is delivered on things that everyone already guessed (but for some reason the writers felt needed to be hammered home) and when plot points that require some huge leaps in logic are pointed out since the movie failed to show rather than tell. The famous croissant-shaped space ship is immediately identified as a space ship underground, even though no motors or control rooms have been located. It's shaped like the croissant from the first movie, so it must be a space ship.. that can fly. In space. Because.. croissants from space! The cylinders and the gunk in them the crew find are recogniced as Weapons Of Mass Destruction and the structure they're in is obviously a weapons manufacturing facility, because.. well, that's just how the universe rolls. We haven't even met the people who made them, but yeah... they're all weapons as opposed to foreing food that might have gone off in the 2000 years it's been sitting around. And the people who made them hate us. Because of The Reason.
In some of these cases (like the fact that there are several buildings found on the moon the crew land on and that this movie doesn't actually answer any of the questions it, or the first movie, poses about the nature of The Space Jockey Guys) the movie is fully aware that it doesn't deliver and has the characters plainly say so. "We don't know why they created us and now want to kill us". "I have to find out why they hate us". Yeah, we the audience were sort of asking the same thing. There's no motivation for being violent and evil and ripping androids' heads off. And the movie agrees. And then gives an ending that would've been better suited for something with a lower budget. Shaw (Noomi Rapace) goes off with the head off Michael Fassbender in one of the other ships the big nasty aliens left, to go find their home planet and presumably ask nicely why they hate us just before getting stomped to death under their giant albino feet.
So if the humanoids who hate us and made these bio-weapons that have oh-so-many-ways of killing us accidently kind of had an accident in one of the weapons' manufacturing facilities and died in that one facility, whatabout the guys in the other facilities? We see a bunch of the factories at the beginning. Were the other facilities already empty when they had their booboo in this one? Did they get bored of their work in 2000 years and think "Well fuck this killing-all-the-earthlings shit. I'm going fishing in my cabin in Alpha-Centauri."? Did they all die at work of old age? Boredom? And then the Space Jockey continuity got completely screwed when he wasn't killed by a xenomorph in his seat but by the Giant Squid Of Anger.
And what's with carving giant faces in your storage lockers and on top of your factories? It's like the biggest fan club of Skeletor was in charge of your weapons industry.
The xenomorphs we know and love turn out to be a bug created specifically as a bio-weapon. It's an interesting concept but the idea is a bit all over the place. Is it a parasitic thing that you put in the ecosystem that then proceeds to adapt to all other species and kill them off? Is it a zombie virus that re-animates dead crewmen and their cameras and makes them into bendy berserkers? Fucking bio-weapons, how do they work?! In 2000 years these highly adaptable little buggers that killed ya'll guys (the humanoids that made them) didn't manage to evolve any further? They had a whole planet to play with, you know. Nope, they're just gonna swim along in their black, unexplained goop and look phallic and vaginal all at once.
Oh yeah, there's a ginger rage-zombie who stalks his victims from a crab-position for no particular reason but because it makes for a neat visual. Ugh.... hate it when that happens. Or when you only know a crew member is alive (or undead) when their personal, helmet-mounted camera works.
There's further stupid when Noomi's love interest Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green) heroically commits suicide because he's infected and would burst all over his space suit at any moment. So he forces Charlize Theron to burn him alive. Which would be terrible and effective.. if he wasn't wearing that space suit that can take quite a beating. The end result is a burst scientist in a a hot, but intact, space suit. Clever, that.
And because of his sexytiem with Noomi just before turning to goop, our heroine is now preggers with a squid. Not a xenomorph, but with what will eventually turn into a Giant Squid Of Anger with some serious vagina dentata. Squid-silliness aside, this is an interesting premise, which is immediately and unceremoniously resolved by her performing a caesarian on herself and then proceeding to jump and run all over the place. This bit was probably written by someone who didn't quite grasp what happens when you have a baby and  need to cut it out of a uterus.
Oh and Noomi manages to beat some people up to get to the operating table and no one seems to really mind that. Eh, just another day in space camp.
Speaking of the Giant Squid Of Anger: it should be noted that CGI and squids should only be used together when the intention is to cause hilarity.

Giant Squid Of Anger by Coahtemoc

And in the end Charlize is squished by the Space Croissant because Flying Space Croissants can only fall on witch-like protagonists and not anywhere else on the planet they're above.

So do the cons outweight the pros? I honestly don't know. The first act is brilliant and then it gets really silly and careless and non-xenomorphic and inconsequential. But it's still not a bad film. It's just scitzophrenic. Like after the beginning someone said "Wait, we're making an Alien-movie. We need to kill everyone right now! The world is a terrible place! We can't have all this pondering philosophical stuff.. it'll make everything lame! More Giant Squids!".
Final thoughts? A lot of people are going to like this and I'll continue on getting more and more angry about all the little things that were wrong with it because it could have been thoroughly brilliant. It could have been genuinely intelligent. But then someone took scissors to the script and glued a whole other script where the last 2 acts were supposed to be.
I'm happy for the Giant Squid Of Anger finally getting a role (s)he could sink their teeth into.

And that's all I have to say about that.

The Avengers

So.. yeah. I went to see the Avengers.

What can I say? It's exactly like all the Avengers comics ever. Well, the better ones at any rate. I'm trying very hard to ignore all the ones with the "strong female characters" (oh the T&A.. it's fracturing my fragile little spine!) or the cannibalism or the incest or other foolery that gets mistaken for dark and edgy.

If I could just make one request here on superhero comics in general it's would you please please please forget that you ever heard the words "dark" or "edgy". There, forgotten? Good. Now let's never ever use those words ever again when it comes to superhero comics.

The movie? It's not brilliant or deep or multilayered. It's superheores. It's fun and power poses and Hulk Smash and basically just the things that drew you to read those comics before those two words we've now forgotten were introduced to the canon. All that's missing is black hats and mustaches.
And the ending tickled my geek-bone silly.
And I definitely can't say anything more about that because it would spoil everything if you haven't seen the movie.

More of this sort of thing, please.