Review of Pi

Introduction

Pi was one of those films of last year that was known to a relatively small percentage of the cinema going public. It is a low budget arty picture.

The film portrays the troubled life of Maximillian Cohen, a brilliant mathematician whose life work focuses on cracking the code of the Stock Market. As he nears his goal, he is relentlessly pursued by an aggressive Wall Street firm who are hell bent on becoming ‘number one’ in the financial world. Added to this, are the Jewish Kabbalah sect who are also after the sequence of numbers which they believe will unlock the secret of their ancient religious writings. Max continues his work to crack the code, all the time being chased by these two factions, bringing the film to its conclusion.

The film is classified as an original science-fiction thriller, and its director Darren Aronofsky won an award for his efforts on Pi. The film is actually quite short, only 80 minutes long.

Video

The box of the DVD proudly shouts that the film is “WIDESCREEN” at the top of the inlay, but whether a 1.66:1 ratio can really be called a widescreen presentation is open to debate.

The film was shot in black and white, presumably for ‘art’ purposes (!) but generally the movie seems to have been hastily shot and seems over exposed half the time. It can get very tiring to watch especially during the faster action scenes – the combination of over exposed black and white soft images with fast moving jerky camera work makes you feel quite ill!

No anamorphic transfer here – but given the source material, does any one care?

Audio

Only a Dolby Surround 2.0 soundtrack is present, presumably a consequence of the film’s low budget. Admittedly it isn’t really an ‘audio’ movie, so it is no real great loss.

Features

Here is where Pi gets (some) brownie points.

The DVD actually contains quite a few extras. Admittedly they are all wrapped up in some incredibly boring static menus that look like they took 2 minutes to design.

You get some deleted scenes, a music video that has the look of an extended trailer for the film, and a ‘behind the scenes’ montage. This is basically a camcorder record of the moments when the director and the leading actor introduce the audience to their film crew buddies. Fascinating.

The theatrical trailer is included, as well as two separate commentaries – one by the director and one by Sean Gullette who plays the lead role of Max.

Finally there are cast and crew biogs – but they’re all unknowns so whether you’ll want to read them is another matter.

Conclusion

Generally, the word we are searching for is… PANTS.

The film seems to fail dismally in what it tries to achieve. The combination of over exposed black and white images with a stupid plot leave the whole DVD floundering, even if they did try to redeem themselves where some care went into the extras for the disc.

It’s a shame because it is a very original storyline, that could have been so much more.