Review of Pi (1998) by Diego T — 19 Feb 2014

To Jed, Driver, and everyone else who liked this shitpile: Read this whole review, please. I wrote it specifically for you.

Wow, I really do hate Darren Aronofsky. I never thought that a director could anger me enough to hit Michael Bay levels of awfulness, but wow, this guy takes the cake. The only thing worse than making a dumb movie is making a dumb movie that thinks it's smart. And that's precisely what Pi is: An empty, emotionless, and completely uninteresting "thriller" that fails to deliver suspense, good characters, the slightest semblance of a plot, or anything to justify its overly serious tone and self-important black-and-white filming technique. This movie thinks it's God's fucking gift to the world, doesn't it? Well, fuck that. This film is borderline unwatchable, and I was able to actually slog through it only on the third viewing. Seriously, it is under 90 minutes long and still feels ridiculously lengthy. Do not waste your time.

Pi is the story of a genius mathematician named Max Cohen who is on a neverending quest to find some meaning in the world. This movie is shot in ultra-saturated, 16mm black-and-white, which already makes it ridiculously pretentious. If this movie put half as much effort into actually being intelligent as it did into feigning intelligence, we might actually have a quality film here. But no, instead of trying for a realistic goal, it shoots for the moon and inevitably fails. I'm not saying that a movie can't have big intentions, but it can't when those intentions are coupled with sloppy filmmaking, an asinine plot, and a repetitive musical score that NEVER SHUTS THE FUCK UP! Simplicity is good. A lot of great indie films have come from simple premises and low budgets (see Sex, Lies, and Videotape). But the difference between them and Pi is that they didn't assume themselves to be the next Mona fucking Lisa just because they tackled tough subjects.

Pi really does have a good premise: A man believes that everything can be quantified in numbers, and discovers some kind of master key number that shows up in Pi, in religious texts, in patterns in the stock market, and in the Fibonacci sequence. Two groups come after the number, a bunch of Jews and some people from a Wall Street firm. This is a weird sequence of events, and makes the audience feel like Aronofsky has some kind of personal grudge against these two groups. I mean, sure, serve the story as you will, but the obsessive way in which he goes about it is unsettling to say the least. It doesn't help that this easily-told story is mucked up by pointlessly surreal visuals, one of which includes Max poking a brain in a train station. Literally poking a brain. This is where we've come to. Jesus Christ. And yes, I understood the symbolism in all the scenes. Ooh, he plays "Go" with his mentor (TIO SALAMANCA!!!). That's a wonderfully obscure math reference that nobody's sure to get (except me... dammit). This film goes out of its way to throw the audience off-track, but all those efforts are pointless. I don't need or want everything laid out in front of me, but at the same time, you can't just gum up the works of the movie by tossing everything and the kitchen sink in and assume that you can get away with it because your movie thinks it's more intelligent than it actually is. Also, numbers are not scary unless you are in 10th grade advanced algebra.

The biggest flaw in this film ultimately comes back to the fact that anyone with a fucking calculator or history book could easily disprove the nonsense being spouted by the characters in the movie. I'm all for messing around with religious history (my favorite movie is Raiders of the Lost Ark, for God's sake), but at least base it in some fact. "The number is 216 digits long? That's exactly how many letters long God's name is!" FUCK! Why even bother writing a script if you're just going to make this stuff up as you go along? It's all so fucking random! The main character just pops pills and does a monotonous voiceover for an hour and a half about staring at the sun and numbers and shit, and then he plunges a fucking power drill through his forehead! Okay, so he believed that nobody should know the number, because it should not belong to any one man. Good for him. But just like the Jews in the movie said, he's just a vessel for this explanation. The character is a simple, emotionless prop set up as a blank canvas for Aronofsky to throw his incoherent mumbo-jumbo on. We don't ever care about this character through the course of the film, and when he dies, there is no emotional response elicited from the audience. Fuck. This. Movie.

I could go on, but let's end it here before I really lose my shit. Final Score for Pi: 2/10 stars. It dealt (skinnied) with intriguing concepts and had a good story, and I'm sure that it could have been made quite well in the hands of someone who was not a pretentious asshole. However, with Darren "The Butthole" Aronofsky directing, the thing absolutely reeks of self-importance, daring the audience to dislike it just so it can look down upon them for "not understanding it." The dialogue is laughable, the characters are cardboard cutouts, and the story, although intriguing, is absolutely ludicrous. If you value form over content, this is the film event of the century for you. But if you actually give a shit about what gives a movie its heart and soul, steer clear of this completely uninvolving load of horse shit.