Daily Trailer: Why 10 Seconds From Life of Pi Make Me More Excited Than All of 2012 Combined

Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi has been getting some of the best buzz out of any film for years, after snippets have been shown at industry shows. “The word” out of these screenings is that Lee might just have his biggest hit ever in his hands, with rave reviews for both the visual side (design, 3D) and the story glimpses in the scenes screened.

That’s not what makes me pumped, though. I’ve been high on Life of Pi for years. In fact ever since reading Yann Martel‘s novel for the first time. A story about a boy stranded on a lifeboat for 450 pages might seem like a drawn-out premise, but by the gods, how wrong an assumption that is. Life of Pi sets up perhaps the highest possible goal in the prologue, where a man tells our author that he will tell him a story that will “make him believe in God”.

I am a Norse pagan, and a post-modern one at that (I subscribe to the values of mutual respect and an inescapable bond with nature rather than the metaphysical existence of a one-eyed scheming bastard and his highly dysfunctional family in a world far above Earth). But by Odin’s ravens, while reading Life of Pi, I started to believe in god. I literally lost my breath at various points in this magnificent story. It has Richard Parker. And it has the greatest final chapter I have ever read in my entire life.

I have had such a strong relationship with Martel’s story for almost a decade that the prospect of a film has never actually bothered me. I am the sort of person who reads something and if I like it I automatically think to myself, “I would love to see this as a film,” consequently setting myself up for an endless series of disappointment at Michael Crichton adaptations, for example.

Of course, someone would eventually film Life of Pi, and I have always remained highly interested in the prospect, even when M. Night Shyamalan (gasp!) was circling it. Deemed “an unfilmable story” until Ang Lee finally took it on, Life of Pi: The Movie could for all I care turn out as a bad TV movie and it wouldn’t bother me, because I would always have the book.

But then this 5 second clip appeared (you see it when you open the official Life of Pi site):

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They’ve done it.

They’ve really done it.

Richard Parker is perfect. The boat is perfect. Even Pi himself, glimpsed from only a single reaction shot, is perfect. I just know it.

I know it in my heart.

I now go to bed every night hoping tomorrow will be November 21. Because on that day I will meet them both.