Pi (1998)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

It's fitting that this should be Darren's debut work, seeing as how this is the first of his filmography that I'm personally seeing. The film itself is alright, but there are things that hold it back.The pros specifically lie in the film's style and direction. The grainy black and white aesthetic compliment the oppressive and obsessive tone of the film. And the same goes for Darren's directing. While I personally wouldn't call it anything 'groundbreaking', the composition of the shots themselves are great and again play along with the film's tone and theme of obsession and paranoia.The film's cons however lie in its writing and structure. The film's structure is scatterbrained to say the least. While the story isn't difficult to follow, the way the story is presented and concepts that are dotted throughout make the film a bit harder to process. And the surrealist elements while not exactly intrusive don't really help alleviate this confusion. The writing as well isn't really much to write home about, and in some instances can be written off as pretentious.As I said before "Pi" was my introduction to Darren Aronofsky's works and from what I've seen, I can't really say that I'm too impressed. Granted I have yet to see "Requiem" or the highly controversial "mother!", so hopefully my mind will change then. The central idea of this film is certainly fascinating despite its loose math, and based on the direction and style alone is certainly worth a watch or two.

A cocktail of disturbing images and sounds. This is meant to be deep and abstract story but it fails in delivering that. The disconnect between events and various scenes don't add up. I tried hard to enjoy this but couldn't. A sat back and chilled but it annoyed me. The sounds and graphics have me a headache,p. The black and white doesn't help either. Wouldn't recommend it for any occasion

A strange film that just don't do anything for me. It's called Pi but at the start you can see that it's not about mathematics since the number Pi as is shown is wrong. Maybe it was deliberate and there's a hidden meaning or it could be when Pi was displayed on a calculator it was only shown to a certain number of digits so the rest was made up. And then there's the line the mathematics "genius", Max, comes out with during some rambling monologue to a Rabbi, i.e. "It's just a number. I'm sure you've written down every two hundred sixteen digit number. You've translated all of them. You've intoned them all. Haven't you? But what's it gotten you? The number is nothing!" Well it seems that there's 9.9*(10^215) permutations of 216 digits and I leave you to work out how long it'd take to write them out but it's longer than Aronofsky thought.So it wasn't a film about the wonders of mathematics or why Pi is such a mind-blowing number when all it's just the length of the circumference of a circle divided by it's radius. However at some positions within the number Pi will be every possible sequence of 216 digits. Is it just about a man going mad, as some mathematics geniuses did, but without the distraction of mathematics? Whatever it is it's a film that many like but for the life of me I can't see why.

How do movies like this get a 7.5 rating and cause me to waste 84 minutes of my time? I'm not a mathematician but I know a little about science, I already know about the Fibonacci sequence and how it appears in nature, PI, etc. They just threw a bunch of mathematical clichés and threw it all together into a stupid, irritating mess that made no sense.I was waiting and waiting for something interesting to happen, nothing ever did. The ending was completely ridiculous and unbelievable.What I want to know is how does a movie like this get a 7.5 on IMDb? OK I started out giving it a 1, but in retrospect, since I'm still thinking about it, I'll up it to a 3.Unless you really like artsy movies I'd skip it...