A boy, and a tiger, and a vast, endless ocean. Ang Lee makes a film out of material that seems almost unfilmable, and a lot of it is quite wondrous.

While you are bathing in all the beauty, you are waiting and waiting and waiting for this film to say something, yet when it finally does... it all just feels empty somehow.

Lee shows his hero's imperilled position as a mixed blessing. By tottering on the ledge of his mortality, Pi gains a front-row seat on the miracles of creation... All this is, in a word, Awesome.

The gravity and weight of that experience, even as fictionally parable and symbolic in nature as "Life of Pi" intended, is treated very well by Lee and never comes across as cheesy or overwrought whatsoever.