The story itself is never as adrift, as periodically the film reverts to scenes where an anonymous author (Rafe Spall) listens to the older Pi (Irrfan Khan) recount his journey years later.
The film's stunning effects remind viewers of existential themes at play, yet none are ever executed with a view to being crudely symbolic or, worse still, hypnotic.
The most notable coo from Friday's audience was that shortly following Pi's entrance into a second storm at sea when his lifeboat sits in perfect symmetry to a ruby sky.
Importantly, Life of Pi isn't screened in 3D purely for the sake of it. Lee's direction of one scene in particular - a tense lifeboat tussle between Pi and Richard Parker - shows how well the technology can work when centered on a 360-degree axis from which neither characters, nor the audience, have any means of escape.
Though the film might not please Lee fans used to the director's trademark gritty adaptations, he delivers an engaging adaptation of a widely believed "unfilmable novel."
In Brokeback Mountain (2005), Lee third-wheels viewers on a painful journey of two suppressed homosexual wranglers in Wyoming. In Life of Pi, he reintroduces this tender suspense between characters - boy and beast - as they struggle for placid coexistence.
As readers will attest, Martel's novel tells two stories that should be cherished equally for what they represent, rather than what they contain.
Admittedly, this is where the film stumbles - its inability to make sufficient impact by revealing what lies beneath appearances in Pi's tale.
The film's flow is strong enough to keep audiences sluggishly resisting Lee's tide of visuals.
But to discover the heart of Pi's story, viewers must first suspend disbelief, and then suspend belief in all that is seen.
Suffice to say Lee might have sidestepped this issue had his 2003 superhero flick Hulk marked his debut break into cinema's fourth wall.
Then again, what a shame it would have been had he blown all that beguiling wizardry on a raging mutated humanoid monster.
Bullet train attendants receive trainings in China's Shenyang
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