Castaways: LIFE OF PI

There’s a moment early on in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi in which a little boy stays up past his bedtime with a flashlight under the covers, regarding a comic book with seriousness in his eyes. The panel he finds most fascinating shows a boy opening his mouth and inside can be seen the whole universe. Lee pushes his camera in until this drawn universe fills the frame. The compelling image can be read as the film itself in microcosm: a finely rendered but rather ordinary sight that opens up to reveal untold unexpected wonders. It’s a story within a story and the set-up moves along just fine, but it’s all rather standard stuff. It doesn’t really take off until its quite literally adrift.

This visual marvel of a film starts simply enough with a young author (Rafe Spall) arriving at the home of Pi Patel (Irrfan Khan), a man who reportedly has a miraculous story to tell, a story so good it’ll make one believe in God. Those are lofty (unattainable) ambitions and although the scenes with the writer fall flat (through no fault of the great Kahn), what follows in between interview and narration are charming flashback sequences in which a young boy (Gautam Belur and Ayush Tandon) grows up in a small Indian town with his zookeeper father (Adil Hussain), mother (Tabu) and older brother (Mohd Abbas Khaleeli and Vibish Sivakumar). The little boy has a curiosity about animals and about spiritual matters. His father’s an atheist; his mother’s a Hindu. Soon enough the boy’s a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim. His father tells him believing in everything is no better than believing in nothing. Later, talk turns to the zoo’s inhabitants. “Animals have souls,” the boy says. No, the stern zookeeper replies. All you see in an animal’s eyes is your own soul’s reflection.

So, the film has set up a rather heavy-handed, if good-natured, exploration of the intersection between spirituality and the animal kingdom. That it locates this thematic terrain in a quaint little period piece elaborately embellished through visual trickery only adds to the slight charms. By the time the boy is on the cusp of adulthood (now played by Suraj Sharma), circumstances are such that the family is preparing to move to the United States. The animals are sold to American sanctuaries, placed in cages and loaded aboard a freighter that will give the family free passage. Pi is saddened by such a move, but must go along. The journey is unremarkable, at least until one dark and stormy night the boat suffers debilitating mechanical problems.

In a sensationally staged sinking, terrifying and convincing, the boat crashes through unforgiving waves, takes on water, and ultimately disappears beneath the waves. Pi, the only survivor, is left all by himself in a lifeboat with nothing but ocean as far as the eye can see. Soon enough, he finds that he’s not alone. He’s stuck at sea with a full-grown tiger, a situation that only compounds the teenager’s problems. In shock and mourning, he must learn how to survive at sea, make a small amount of food and water sustain him until rescue, and, of course, not get mauled by an enormous feline. Through fully believable effects work, this wild beast growls and stalks about the confined space, becoming a character without quite becoming humanized. He remains frightening throughout.

Largely wordless, the film’s framing device is gone, leaving only stunning images and phenomenal filmmaking. The expressiveness of the camera, the precision of the special effects, and the terrific, physical performance from young Sharma add up to an extraordinary portrait of extreme loneliness and the expanse this character must survive in order to achieve a return to society. Ang Lee, a versatile visualist capable of wonderful invention in many a genre picture from drama The Ice Storm and Wuxia Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon to superhero Hulk and tragic romance Brokeback Mountain, brings to what could be visual monotony a kind of breathless visual storytelling that creates indelible images. The reflective properties of the water creates striking vistas of multiplied sights and shifting color patterns; one nighttime shot doubles the starry sky so that the tiny lifeboat appears to float on a sea of stars. At one point, Pi nods off and dreams a hallucinogenic kaleidoscopic deep-sea vision that could almost be part of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s finale. A moment in which Pi is first confronted by the tiger and reacts by scrambling up over a canvas tarp and sliding around the bow of the boat has a scary/fun edge carefully regarded, the understated physicality of Sharma’s performance reminding me of nothing less than Jacques Tati or Buster Keaton. These images and more like them add up to a terrific cinematic experience.

By the end, though, the drifting boat – and drifting plot – comes to a resolution that I fear works slightly better as prose than on screen. Though I recall finding the conclusion of Yann Martel’s novel, upon which this film is based, of some interest, here it serves to underwhelm with it’s attempt to provide an alternate explanation in words for what we just saw so stirringly portrayed visually. I don’t think it adds up thematically in the ways the characters literally explain to us and it certainly didn’t affect any ideas I have about God, but that doesn’t much undercut the pure cinema at the film’s center. But for the majority of its runtime, Life of Pi is a transporting, enveloping feast of visual inventiveness and expressiveness, nestled inside a less satisfying film.

Alien Origins: PROMETHEUS

Prequels are tricky things. Give the audience exactly what they think they want and they might be superficially satisfied at first, but your film is ultimately a trifle that explains away the original film’s mystery. Throw the audience a curveball and they’ll be frustrated and discontent. The trick is finding the right balance, which is precisely what director Ridley Scott and screenwriters Damon Lindelof and Jon Spaiths have set out to do with Prometheus, a film set some years before the events of Scott’s 1979 film Alien, that classic of science fiction horror. What Scott and his writers do here is not describe the backstory of Alien, showing what created the distress signal that led a space freighter and its crew to certain doom from extraterrestrial infestation, but to layer on extra mysteries. This is an engrossing production that operates from a similar stylistic point of view – stately and patient pacing and carefully detailed design – but, aside from a shared fictional universe and a plot that loosely sets the stage for the franchise that follows its events, Prometheus is very much a work that creates an identity of its own.

Part of what made Alien so great was the way it was about characters who had a job to do and set out doing it. They just happened to be interrupted in a spectacularly frightening and entertaining way. Similarly, Prometheus follows a crew of professionals aboard a spaceship (also called Prometheus). They’re off to sort out the mysteries of the universe. It’s a routine exploration, or so the crew assumes. In the group of seventeen are scientists, doctors, pilots, and security. We come to know some of them as the spacecraft arrives at its destination and the hibernation chambers open up. There’s an all-business, sharp-tongued company leader (Charlize Theron), a grizzled captain (Idris Elba), and an ensemble of mostly likable researchers and technicians (character actors Sean Haris, Rafe Spall, Emun Elliott, Benedict Wong, and Kate Dickie). Watching over them as they slept, ensuring nothing went wrong with the ship, was the android, David (Michael Fassbender), who moves with stiff precision and speaks in a way that’s not quite flat. During the trip, he was taught information pertinent to the expedition. Now, he’s eager to help. He’s programmed that way.

Leading this team, at least on the scientific front, is a couple of archaeologists (Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green), partners scientifically and romantically. They’re the ones with the theories that have convinced trillionaire Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) to fund this exploration into deep space based on a theory that involves a lot of research a big leap of faith. All around the world they have found hieroglyphics from many cultures depicting giants pointing towards a planetary grouping in the sky. These researchers have somehow extrapolated a map through the universe that they’re sure will lead them to the origins of the human race. They think they’ll find the “engineers” of humanity, but that’s just one possible outcome. When the crew is informed of their true mission, they’re skeptical, but get down to business. The movie proceeds as a terrific rush of jargon, a jumble of pseudo-scientific, quasi-spiritual, pop-philosophical inquiries as the explorers land on the planet and find a structure that is most definitely not naturally occurring. It’s filled with cavernous, craggy halls and echoing chambers filled with massive carvings, oozing containers, dusty control panels and, most frightening of all, large alien corpses.

The film follows the exploration as it slowly, inevitably, falls to pieces through human error, hidden agendas, clashing personalities, and, of course, the mysterious things lurking in the shadows. It doesn’t all make sense by the end; push a little against the plotting and it starts to unravel around loose ends. But the characters are so convincingly acted and with personalities so clearly drawn that I didn’t interrogate their decisions in the moment. I was eager to see what they would discover and how they would react to shifting conditions and information and grew worried for them as new dangers arose. While the film was rolling, it caught me up in a spell of masterful filmmaking. I found it gripping, creepy, and mostly fascinating. This is an intense movie with a slow, inescapable crescendo of suspense played meticulously, soberly and earnestly.

That’s the approach that Ridley Scott has brought to so much of his work as director and a big reason why the quality of his output is so spotty. For every Alien or Black Hawk Down there’s a G.I. Jane or A Good Year. With Prometheus, though, he’s back working in the genre for which he’s most beloved and which he hasn’t been seen since 1982’s Blade Runner. Sci-fi is a genre suited for his detailed approach of complex visuals and serious-minded skimming across the surface of deep topics. (This film’s thematically complicated, or maybe just muddled.) It’s a film about the origins of the universe, but is really only interested in that topic insofar as it provides the opportunity to show off incredible imagination, riffing off the iconography of Alien to find its own great images.

This is an attractively photographed film, a powerful feat of visuals. It’s without a doubt one of the best looking blockbusters in recent memory. It feels out-of-time in style and approach in the best possible way, a cold melancholic 70’s sci-fi mood (a bit of Silent Running, perhaps, or, further back, 2001: A Space Odyssey) in a story told with modern tools. The cinematography from Dariusz Wolski is lush and gorgeous, with impressive 3D depth and a steady sense of space and scale, drinking in the wholly convincing effects work from a small army of artists and Arthur Max’s intricately detailed production design. These images are allowed time to resonate, to be absorbed into the larger texture of the piece in a satisfying way. (See it on the biggest screen you can find!) It’s so dissimilar in approach to the shaky-cam chaos cinema technique so popular over the past several years, even among Scott’s own films, that to see such restraint, such lovingly displayed visual skill, is some kind of marvel.

That’s why, as much as I retroactively doubt my response to the film as I sit here poking through some of its flimsy plotting and unexplained character motivations, especially in the last twenty minutes or so when the aftermath of a virtuoso sequence of body horror goes curiously unacknowledged for a while, I can’t shake the feeling that the movie had a powerful contemplative undertow. The robot man, so scarily, perfectly inhabited by Fassbender, is a created being fully aware of that status, observing humans who are embarking on what is perhaps a futile and, in this case, self-destructive, search for their own creators. There’s a powerful exploration of creation myths stirring half-formed under the gripping style and enthralling pace of Prometheus.

The wordless opening sequence, striking, beautiful, horrifying, could be taken as metaphor or dream or literal truth. The camera soars over a seemingly untouched wilderness until it finds a pale pure-white human-like being standing over a waterfall. This humanoid slowly begins to tear apart at the molecular level and topples over into the water, drifting away as a black mist dissolving into the water. Only then do we jump ahead into the film proper. So, real or imagined within the world of the film, what’s going on here? Is this a creation story? It seems to fit the expedition’s thesis. This immediately arresting curtain raiser announces the film as one that’s out to slip around audience expectations. By the end, though, it’s sure to please those out looking for xenomorphic clues, while still becoming something all its own. It’s a non-prequel prequel that uses a franchise’s groundwork without using it as a crutch, and sets off to explore its own massive ambitions. It doesn’t quite realize them to the extent that perhaps it should. (I might change my mind upon a second viewing, which will happen very soon.) But there’s no use denying how stunning, absorbing, and effective a piece of filmmaking it is.