Reader Recommendation: Pi (1998)

After I watched The Wrestler, I was told I should see pretty much every single other Darren Aronofsky movie made. Today I watch Pi. Pi actually came up from several sources, people at work, friends on twitter like @sinnasaurus, even our very own Puneet. This is a black and white movie, about a mathematician with the theory that everything has an underlying order, and everything, including the stock market, can thus be predicted. The closer he gets to the answer, however, the more severe his migraines get. I was told it was weird, and I'm a fan of Aronofsky's other works that I've seen, so I was looking forward to seeing this. Find out if it all adds up after the jump!


Well I may as well get this out there right now. I didn't understand the movie. At least, I don't think I did. I got the basics at least, but just like the mathematician's underlying code, it seems like there was possibly an underlying message I just wasn't getting. Everyone seems amazed by this movie, but I found myself just kinda puzzled and a tiny bit bored.

Maybe most people are fascinated by the idea of the perfect ratio which the movie explains. Things like the "golden spiral" and the "golden rectangle" and various mathematical theorems. But I've heard of these things ages ago and so they're not new or surprising to me.

Maybe the interest comes from all the various groups that are after him for his knowledge and numerical abilities? How it seems he is always being watched. But this isn't exactly a new concept or plot in movies.

Maybe it's some possible artistic values people have placed on the film. It's in black and white, key lines in the film are repeated several times throughout the movie, and he has weird hallucinations that aren't really ever explained. Well, one interpretation I suppose is that he's getting so close to knowing the final secret to the universe, to knowing God, and that his body and brain can't handle the strain? I don't know.

In the end, I didn't really care for the movie. It just couldn't hook me. There's plenty in there to point at and go "ooh look how strange that is", but I never saw it as anything other than that, and I'm fine with that. The acting and sound design were good at least, conveying the oddness of his life around him and letting you experience his migraine seizures. Is this movie weird? Yes, it most definitely is. Would I recommend it to my friends to watch? Probably not.