Life of Pi 🎥 2012 Movie Info

Plot Summary

In Montreal, Canada, a writer meets Pi Patel, whom he has been told would be a good subject for a book. Pi tells the writer the following story: Pi’s father names him Piscine Molitor Patel after Piscine Molitor, a famous French swimming pool. In secondary school in Pondicherry, he adopts the Greek letter “Pi” as his nickname to avoid bullying, because his first name Piscine sounds like ‘pissing’. He is raised in a Hindu family, but at 12 years old, he is introduced to Christianity and then Islam, and decides to follow all three religions as he “just wants to love God”. Pi’s mother supports his desire to grow, but his rationalist father tries to secularize him.

Their family owns a zoo, and Pi takes interest in a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After he gets dangerously close to Richard Parker, his father forces him to witness it killing a goat. When Pi is 16, his father announces that due to “The Emergency”, they must move to Canada, where he intends to settle and sell the animals. The family books passage with the animals on a Japanese freighter. During a storm, the ship founders while Pi is on deck. He struggles to find his family, but a crewman throws him into a lifeboat. A freed plains zebra jumps onto the boat with him, breaking its leg. The ship sinks into the Mariana Trench, drowning his family.

After the storm, Pi awakens in the lifeboat with the zebra and is joined by a Bornean orangutan. A spotted hyena emerges from under a tarpaulin, forcing Pi to retreat to the end of the boat. The hyena kills the zebra and later the orangutan. Richard Parker suddenly emerges from under the tarpaulin, killing the hyena before retreating to cover. Pi fashions a small raft which he tethers to the lifeboat to be safe from Richard Parker.

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