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My rational mind informs me that this movie doesn't work. Yet I hear a subversive whisper: Since it does so many other things, does it have to work, too? Can't it just exist? "Terminal whimsy," I called it on the TV show. Yes, but isn't that better than half-hearted whimsy, or no whimsy at all? Wes Anderson's "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" is the damnedest film. I can't recommend it, but I would not for one second discourage you from seeing it.

To begin with, it has a passage of eerie beauty, in which the oceanographer Steve Zissou ( Bill Murray ) and his shipmates glide in a submarine past an undersea panorama of wondrous and delightful creatures. They are seeking the dreaded jaguar shark that ate Steve's beloved partner, and when they find it, well, they fall silent and just regard it, because it's kind of beautiful. This could have been a scene from "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" if Captain Nemo had been a pothead.

Zissou is, we learn, the auteur of a series of increasingly uneventful undersea documentaries, in which the momentum is sliding down a graph that will intersect in the foreseeable future with a dead standstill. "The Life Aquatic" opens with the premiere of his latest work, which ends with the audience gazing up at the screen as if it is more interesting now that it is blank. Zissou himself seems to be in the later stages of entropy and may become one of those Oliver Sacks people who just sit there on the stairs for decades, looking at you. His crew would seem slack-witted to SpongeBob.

On board the good ship Belafonte, Zissou has assembled his ex-wife Eleanor ( Anjelica Huston ), her ex-husband Alistair ( Jeff Goldblum ), the salty dog Klaus Daimler ( Willem Dafoe ), the plummy producer Oseary Drakoulias ( Michael Gambon ), and the financial guy Bill ( Bud Cort , so that's what happened to him). Along the way they collect Ned Plimpton ( Owen Wilson ), who thinks he may be Steve's son, although my theory is he's just another one of George Plimpton's unfinished projects. Their mission is to find the deadly shark, exact revenge, and film the adventure. Covering the expedition is Jane Winslett-Richardson ( Cate Blanchett ), whose surname suggests she is the result of an affair involving the matriarchs of two great acting families and a designated male, perhaps Ned's birth father.

These characters involve themselves in great plot complications, which are facilitated by the design of the boat, which looks like a rust bucket on the outside but conceals innumerable luxuries, including a spa. There is also a "scientific laboratory" with lots of equipment that looks as if it might have been bought at auction from a bankrupt high school in 1955. Anderson has built a wonderful set with a cutaway front wall so that we can look into all the rooms of the boat at once; it's the same idea Jerry Lewis used in "The Ladies' Man."

Events on the boat are modulated at a volume somewhere between a sigh and a ghostly exhalation. Steve Zissou is very tired. I suggest for his epitaph: Life for him was but a dreary play; he came, saw, dislik'd, and passed away. Ned makes an effort to get to know his father, a task made difficult because Steve may not be his father and is not knowable. Jane, Ned and Steve form a romantic triangle, or perhaps it is just a triangle. A folk singer performs the works of David Bowie in Portuguese, and the ship is boarded by Filipino pirates.

So you see, it's that kind of movie. The colors are like the pastels produced by colored pencils, and kind of beautiful, like the shark. The action goes through the motions of slapstick at the velocity of dirge. Steve Zissou seems melancholy, as if simultaneously depressed that life is passing him by, and that it is taking so long to do it. Anjelica Huston seems privately amused, which is so much more intriguing than seeming publicly amused. Cate Blanchett proves she can do anything, even things she should not do. I forgot to mention that Steve's friend is played by Seymour Cassel , who I think I remember told me one night in Dan Tana's that he had always wanted to be eaten by a shark in a movie.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou movie poster

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

Rated R for language, some drug use, violence and partial nudity

119 minutes

Bill Murray as Steve Zissou

Owen Wilson as Ned Plimpton

Cate Blanchett as Jane Winslett-Richardson

Anjelica Huston as Eleanor Zissou

Willem Dafoe as Klaus Daimler

Jeff Goldblum as Alistair Hennessey

Michael Gambon as Oseary Drakoulias

Directed by

Wes Anderson
Noah Baumbach

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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

B ill Murray's face: so droll, so deadpan, so subtly eloquent of a hyper-satirical sensibility to everything around him. He is an Easter Island statue of hip comedy, and now age has added melancholy to the mix and even a certain grumpy vulnerability, a hint that under the cynicism and pessimism there's an urgent need to be loved.

Sofia Coppola brilliantly exploited the resource that is Bill Murray's face in Lost in Translation, but no one has done more to cultivate it than Wes Anderson , who cast Murray as the depressed older guy in his high-school comedy Rushmore, gave him a cameo in The Royal Tenenbaums, and did so much to create the late period in Murray's career.

Murray is the star of Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic and he hardly needs to crack an expression playing Steve Zissou, the autocratic oceanographer and has-been star of his own self-produced marine documentaries. Zissou is a weird mixture of Jacques Cousteau, Captain Kirk and Captain Bligh, but mainly the French legend Cousteau, to whose calmly paced and lugubriously narrated television shows the movie is a lovingly detailed tribute.

Like the dysfunctional Tenenbaums, the Zissou crew is family, a family that doesn't see anyone from the outside world and has developed its own inbred habits and mannerisms. The family's kit, craft and uniform are quaintly marooned in the 1960s of Cousteau, while Zissou's hated enemy and rival explorer Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum) luxuriates in state-of-the-art gadgetry. Willem Dafoe plays Zissou's trusty crewmember Klaus; Anjelica Huston is his semi-estranged wife Eleanor, "the brains behind Team Zissou"; and Owen Wilson is aboard as Ned, a huge fan of Zissou and also his illegitimate son.

The captain, with his old-fashioned ways, is pretty much washed up in the modern undersea world. But just as his career is about to go under, Zissou outrages naturalists everywhere with a quixotic new project. Team Zissou's much-loved cinematographer Esteban (Seymour Cassel) was eaten by a rare jaguar shark. So Team Zissou is going to track down this shark - and kill it. "For revenge," as Zissou crisply announces to his astonished public. This exciting mission is to be chronicled by a frightfully British magazine writer Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett), on whom Zissou naturally develops a monumental crush.

This is one of the most thoroughly and elaborately designed movies I have ever seen - even more so than Anderson's last film. That was credited to a different production designer, so the look and feel of The Life Aquatic, drenched in knowing eccentricity, can only be Anderson's own vision. He really does create an all-encompassing world of wackiness. The design of Zissou's rickety-rackety ship, the Belafonte, is a work of art in its own right. The captain takes us on a guided tour, and the ship's various cabins and state-rooms are laid open to us in cross-section. If The Life Aquatic were a prog-rock concept album (and in a way it is), then the map of this beautiful and strange ship would open out on a double-gatefold.

If only it were a bit funnier. It is such a brilliant idea, and everything looks so great, especially the way the film is constructed on Cousteau-esque lines, with the calm deliberation of a nature documentary from a more innocent age. There is an extraordinary, surreal sequence in which Zissou has to rescue a crew member from a pirate Filipino gang holed up in a ruined, deserted hotel on one of the "Bing Islands". This scene culminates in a chaotic firefight (Team Zissou are routinely issued with Glocks) and the zane factor simply goes through the roof. It really is one for connoisseurs of high comedy, but the characters and plot never quite take on a real life of their own.

Perhaps it is obtuse to complain about this, considering its stoned, glassy-eyed immobility is an undeniable part of the film's charm. Despite some wildly dramatic happenings, Anderson puts himself at one comic remove from any sense of action and danger, humorously loyal like a Zissou crew member to Zissou's tatty, unsexy world of scientific detachment. It might also be something to do with the fact that Wilson has not actually worked on the script, and for once his performance has maybe a teaspoonful too much smirking conceit. Having said that, there is one superbly funny stretch of dialogue, when Zissou surfaces in his scuba kit, having just witnessed Esteban's horrific death thousands of feet below, and screams up through the churning froth to his uncomprehending crew: "Esteban's been eaten!" "Whaat? Esteban's been bitten?" "No, eaten!" "You mean, swallowed whole?" "No! CHEWED!"

In a rare moment of father-son intimacy, Ned reminds Zissou of the fan letter he wrote him when he was just 12 years old, and of a question he asked. Did Zissou ever wish he could breathe underwater? His answer was yes, always (underlined), and the exchange is a poignant expression of distance and inadequacy. The Life Aquatic is immersed in its own sea of comic detail and it too cannot quite breathe underwater. The weightless comedy of quirkiness offers its own compensations.

Anjelica Huston
Wes Anderson
Owen Wilson
Cate Blanchett

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The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Reviews

While it would be nice to be able to laugh a little more (acoustic-guitar versions of David Bowie classics sung in Portuguese only go so far), the film delivers a metaphor for the death of romantic and robust boyhood imagination with great subtlety.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 9, 2023

While most Anderson detractors point to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as why they don’t like the filmmaker, even arguably his weakest film is still pretty outstanding.

Full Review | Jun 28, 2023

It may be impossible to love The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, but it's remarkably easy to drown in its sea of eccentricity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 8, 2023

The production design of the ship is impressive and the cinematography by Robert Yeoman is full of whimsy but none of that matters if the story isn’t interesting.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jul 21, 2022

The resulting film is as much an exploration of fading youth and mortality as it is a dazzling dive into the wonders of the ocean.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 8, 2022

The Life Aquatic deals more skilfully in majestic moments than human drama, though, and it's these that will stick with you.

Full Review | Apr 28, 2021

Anderson's film is not an entirely successful effort, but there is something liberating and deeply affecting about his method of work and that of his collaborators.

Full Review | Mar 5, 2021

It's hard to fault Anderson for striving - with clearly considerable effort - to create a film world more complete and satisfying than the real one.

Full Review | Feb 3, 2020

This is Murray and Anderson at their most irreproachable and beguiling. In short, it's a bit of a minor masterpiece.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 24, 2019

And spending time in the company of Murray, the deadpan brilliant humanist clown and his washed-up but still-seeking sea explorer, is an existential hoot.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 1, 2019

For the first time Anderson is distancing us as much as he's charming us. What's charming, though, ensures Life Aquatic is no failure.

Full Review | Apr 1, 2019

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, lacks heart, offering up in its place an aquamarine world sinking due to a near-terminal case of whimsy.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is so knowing and so arch: the first part striving for a faux-grandiosity that the second part tries to undercut by its pseudo-geekiness... but ends up being plain annoying.

How much of this will work for you depends on your appetite for the picturesquely dysfunctional.

It is such a brilliant idea, and everything looks so great, especially the way the film is constructed on Cousteau-esque lines, with the calm deliberation of a nature documentary from a more innocent age.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2019

Seems to stagnate. [Full review in Spanish]

All the stylized performances in stylized sets work to kill the film's emotional content. It's not that we don't like the characters; it's that Anderson won't let us get involved with them, a fatal flaw in something this strenuously whimsical.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2019

A deliberate and irritating absence of dramatic momentum is accompanied by delicious, often magical, moments.

Orson Welles said a film studio was the best train-set a boy could have, but The Life Aquatic is something else: Anderson uses the sound stages of Cinecittá like a kid playing with toy boats in the bath. He makes one hell of a splash.

Anderson never manages the difficult art of switching from put-on to pathos. And even the straight-faced performances of Wilson and Blanchett don't help.

In Defense of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou , 10 Years Later

In his two decades of filmmaking, Wes Anderson has developed a style so idiosyncratic, it's easily identifiable by a freeze frame or sound byte—the warm color schemes, the extended zooms, the deadpan dialogue, the stuffy narration, the carefully coordinated montages. Eight feature films in, "Wes Anderson" is basically a genre, from the doomed love-triangle hilarity of Rushmore to the Oscar-nominated family meltdown of The Royal Tenenbaums to this year's thrilling caper Grand Budapest Hotel . But for many fans and critics, that formula went momentarily haywire with the 2004 oddity The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (which was released widely 10 years ago today), a divisive dramedy about a depressed, over-the-hill deep-sea explorer-documentarian (Bill Murray) who seeks revenge on the infamous jaguar shark that ate his friend, while, just maybe, redeeming his broken personal life in the process.

The film opens with Murray's arrogant title character (decked out in his trademark beanie) at the premiere of his latest documentary, which climaxes with the death of his best friend, Esteban. After a tepid reception, the glazed-over Zissou announces his plans for a new project: "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go on an overnight drunk, and in 10 days, I'm going to set out to find the shark that ate my friend and destroy it." He secures financing from Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson, employing a terrible Southern accent), a Kentucky-born pilot who believes Zissou is his estranged father. Joining them on their research vessel, the labyrinthian Belafonte, are Klaus (Willem Dafoe), the filmmaker's jealous right-hand man; a frequently topless script girl; a crew of unpaid college interns; and pregnant reporter Jane (Cate Blanchett), who becomes a romantic interest of both Zissou and Ned.

The cartoonish plot—featuring the previously mentioned (and surprisingly graphic) pirate attack, the crew rescuing its kidnapped "bond company stooge," the father-son love triangle—seems to grasp for a concrete direction, and that exploration makes sense, as Aquatic marks Anderson's first collaboration with a new creative partner, co-writer Noah Baumbach, following three scripts with Wilson. It's also appropriate, considering the frantic circumstances of the film's shoot. Anderson and crew traveled to Ponza, a small Italian island, where undesirable weather and lighting conditions led to weeks of stagnant and improvised filming.

But Aquatic 's free-flowing eccentricity is anchored by the emotional realism of its cast, particularly Murray. The actor, fresh off a mesmerizing dramatic turn in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation , brings disheveled melancholy to every distant gaze and dry turn of phrase. On the surface, Zissou is a washed-up asshole: envious of his would-be son; blatantly rude to his deep-sea skeleton crew; emotionally distant from his wife, Eleanor (Anjelica Huston). But beneath that hard exterior is a vulnerable child, and Murray balances that line expertly throughout, wringing out the pain in his hot-air balloon conversation with Ned and his petty bedside dismissal of Jane. At one point early in the film, Zissou and Ned share a glass of wine in an upscale restaurant, as a pair of onlookers whispers insults about the explorer. "People say when someone says something like that about you, it's because they're jealous," Zissou whimpers, in a crucial line. "But it still hurts."

Of course, the film's most resonant moment is the climactic meeting between Zissou and the vividly animated jaguar shark, with the disparate crew united in awe for this near-mythical beast. "I wonder if it remembers me," says the leader, fighting back tears, as the strings of Sigur Ros's "Starálfur" swell in the background. The character, so hardened and disillusioned by life's endless shitstorm, finally drops his guard.

"I remember Scott Rudin, our producer, saying to me when I was writing it, 'What is the metaphor with the shark?'" Anderson told the Huffington Post of the scene earlier this year. "I said, 'I don't know, but I like that we're thinking of it as a metaphor. Let's just let it be a metaphor.'"

At his most by-numbers (2012's Moonrise Kingdom ), Anderson's distinctive quirks feel like crutches, a point made by a memorable SNL sketch from 2013. The Life Aquatic features all the filmmaker's hallmarks, but in its own spastic way, it also takes creative chances that many of his other films don't. Ten years later, this unfairly maligned mess-terpiece deserves a fresh look.

As Zissou himself would say, "This is an adventure."

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‘the life aquatic with steve zissou’: thr’s 2004 review.

On Dec. 10, 2004, Wes Anderson unveiled his latest ensemble comedy in theaters.

By Sheri Linden

Sheri Linden

Senior Copy Editor/Film Critic

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'Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou' Review: 2004 Movie

On Dec. 10, 2004, Wes Anderson unveiled his latest ensemble comedy, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, in theaters in New York and Los Angeles. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below.

Although still fond of oddballs and eccentrics, Wes Anderson moves past the merely quirky in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou , his wonderfully weird and wistful adventure-comedy about a fish-out-of-water oceanographer. Following his Oscar-nominated turn in Lost in Translation , Bill Murray brings his singularly edgy ennui to the unlikely role of a modern-day Ahab.

The writer-director’s most recent film, The Royal Tenenbaums , was a museum collection of character types that never coalesced into an affecting story. Here, sharing scripting duties with Noah Baumbach, Anderson still struggles to fuse character observation with feeling, and most of the proceedings unfold at an emotional distance. But, in the helmer’s most expansive project yet, the cast’s commitment and the inventive milieu, rendered with enormous care, keep the story well afloat. Given Murray’s heightened box office profile and Anderson’s loyal following, Aquatic , which goes wide Christmas Day after its New York/L.A. bow Friday, should reel in high midrange receipts.

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Why 'The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou' Is Secretly Wes Anderson's Best Film

ESTEBAN WAS EATEN!

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was released 15 years ago today, the fourth film from the now-iconic director of melancholic whimsy Wes Anderson . His previous three movies - Bottle Rocket , Rushmore , and The Royal Tenenbaums - were critical darlings, singling Anderson out as a young filmmaker to watch. Then he made a movie about sad Bill Murray scouring the ocean for a killer shark, and boy howdy did nobody care for it. And that’s a real shame, because not only is The Life Aquatic easily Anderson’s funniest film to date (in particular some truly excellent supporting performances from Willem Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum ), but it’s also one of his most ambitious and most emotionally raw.

In a nutshell, The Life Aquatic follows Steve Zissou, a Jacques Cousteau analogue at the end of his career facing the possibility that his best years are behind him and he really has nothing to show for it. Steve begins the film by losing his partner and best friend Esteban in an attack by the rare and elusive jaguar shark. Steve is hell-bent on tracking the shark down and killing it, and finishing what he believes will be his last documentary film in the process. Along the way, an airline pilot named Ned Plimpton ( Owen Wilson ) shows up claiming to be Steve’s illegitimate son, and a pregnant reporter named Jane Winslett-Richardson ( Cate Blanchett ) tags along to write a feature article about the aging oceanographic legend.

It’s the first film of Anderson’s that wasn’t co-written by Wilson, although Wilson contributes one of the best performances of his career as the thoughtful and earnest (and, sadly, doomed) Ned. Anderson’s co-writer on this film was Noah Baumbach , who has since made several excellent films about imploding personal relationships ( The Squid and the Whal e and this year’s Marriage Story ). And while Anderson’s films tend to focus on sudden death, familial disintegration and absent fathers, The Life Aquatic was the first one to combine all of those elements into a single character (surprisingly, Ned). All Ned wants is to be a son to Steve and a father to Jane’s unborn baby, and he is emphatically denied the chance to be any of those things thanks to a fatal helicopter crash. In a cruelly ironic twist of fate, the crash was caused by Steve’s negligence, which was the driving force that brought Ned out on the voyage in the first place. Steve never wanted to accept the responsibility of abandoning Ned, because he doesn’t want to face what it means about him. When Ned finally asks Steve why he never tried to get in touch with him, Steve answers bluntly, “Because I hate fathers and I never wanted to be one.” Presumably Steve’s own father was also an absent one, but moreover his deadpan battle ax of a response further illustrates the degree to which Steve hates himself - he never wanted to be responsible to anyone so he could be allowed to guiltlessly self-destruct in peace. And folks, that is a feeling I am familiar with.

Released just a year after his Best Actor Oscar nomination for Lost in Translation , The Life Aquatic features the most soulful and challenging performance of Bill Murray’s career. (Personally, I think it was better than his work in Lost in Translation .) But the movie was a box office bomb, wasn’t particularly well-reviewed at the time, and got zero attention during awards season. (It has since received a critical re-evaluation because it is, in fact, very good.) Steve Zissou is a mostly unlikeable disaster of a man. He’s a completely selfish womanizer who has lived a life of fabricated adventure thanks to his undersea documentaries. It’s implied that the movies might be largely staged, and Anderson poses the meta-question of whether or not anything we saw actually happened or was just made up by Zissou to make his movie more exciting. But the answer to that question ultimately doesn’t matter, because the way Zissou feels about his life and career is very real. He’s adrift, his best friend has just died, his movies are declining in popularity, and he barely has enough money to finish his final film. And Steve feels like a fraud - in a particularly brutal scene wherein Steve demonstrates himself to simultaneously be a figure worthy of both pity and revulsion, Jane tells Steve that she had a heroic photograph of him as a little girl. He knows the picture, and recreates his pose for her before saying, “Well maybe it’s just me, but I don’t feel like that person. I never did.” And then he goes in for a thoroughly unearned and unexpected kiss, which Jane rightfully denies. Steve isn’t a good guy, but he’s not a bad guy either, not really. (See “challenging performance,” above.) He’s a sad, defeated, imploding man, and all of those superlatives are self-induced. He’s the kind of guy who has a moment of profound self-reflection and immediately has to smother the feeling it creates by oafishly trying to initiate sex with the closest human woman.

This idea of staged reality creating true emotion is also reflected in Ned’s character, as Zissou’s ex-wife Eleanor (the delightfully aloof Angelica Huston ) eventually reveals to Jane that Steve is sterile, and therefore cannot be Ned’s father. Whether or not Ned is actually Steve’s biological son is irrelevant, because both Ned and Steve believe that it’s true, and the consequences of that shared belief profoundly affect both of their lives (and ultimately contributes to Ned’s death). The idea to tell a story about the legitimacy of perceived reality in terms of how it affects how we feel and act through the lens of documentary filmmaking was a brilliant choice by Anderson, and the surreal quality of all the undersea life in the film is a beautiful extension of that choice. The Life Aquatic is the first time Anderson fully crosses the line of heightened reality. The Royal Tenenbaums had some surreal elements, to be sure, but nothing on the level of “the ocean is populated by impossible stop-motion creatures.” None of the animals Steve and his team encounter can possibly be real, and yet they are, which further blurs the line between reality and fantasy in the film. But Anderson is never trying to blow your mind like Christopher Nolan . He’s merely posing the question, “Does it matter if any of this is real, if what it makes you feel is undeniably so?” Ultimately, that’s the same question asked by every single movie ever created.

The scene wherein Steve finally faces the jaguar shark is, I believe, the only time Bill Murray has ever cried on camera (please correct me if I’m wrong, and I'm not counting the single tear he squeezes out in Scrooged ). And I mean a for real, serious cry. It’s an utterly devastating moment, too. Steve is given the chance to destroy the animal that killed his best friend Esteban and also, indirectly, Ned, the son he refused to acknowledge for decades before finally accepting him only moments before his tragic death. And rather than killing the shark, he decides to make peace with it and ultimately with himself, and everything he’s lost because of his selfish, self-destructive behavior.

The Life Aquatic might be Wes Anderson’s darkest film behind The Grand Budapest Hotel , but it’s not dark without purpose. It’s a movie about regret and old age, but it’s also about hope, and about getting a second chance to mend those relationships in life that we damage or estrange (or completely burn to the ground). It’s a story about aging that gets more poignant with time - this film hit me in the face when it came out, and it only kicks my ass even harder now that a decade and a half has gone by and I’m considerably older, with a ruinous wake of broken relationships left behind me. The Life Aquatic was also the first time I realized that Willem Dafoe was hilarious, and truly, I cannot think of a better endorsement.

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Movie Review - The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, from eccentric writer/director Wes Anderson, never completely sinks, but for the first time in his career, Anderson seems to have put his creative steamship on autopilot. As his body of work, beginning with 1996’s lovably lost Bottle Rocket through 1998’s academic oddball Rushmore and 2001’s family jewel The Royal Tenenbaums, has gradually gained cohesion and complexity, the sloppy ponderousness of The Life Aquatic reveals an ambitious talent in desperate need of a better editor.

On paper, the film’s narrative structure sounds like the most straightforward Anderson (with new writing partner Noah Baumbach) has ever composed. The story begins as the revenge fantasy of the titular oceanographic filmmaker (Bill Murray), whose grief over his closest comrade’s death at the hands of the elusive jaguar shark has spurred a crowded but lonely journey to snare his friend’s marine murderer. Announcing his quest to a roomful of shocked patrons, he is asked, “What would be the scientific purpose of killing it?” to which he replies, in perhaps the best example of the film’s deadpan humor, “Revenge.”

But almost immediately, the central storyline is shoved out by a series of subplots that meander in and out of the movie’s consciousness, rarely gaining enough thematic momentum or significance to justify their existences. A rivalry with fellow oceanographer Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum) offers a handful of barbed laughs, but ultimately devolves into plot-driving filler. Utterly superfluous segments about the expedition’s financial woes cheekily squander the ample talents of actor Michael Gambon (Gosford Park). To decry an Anderson film for its sideline prattling may be missing the point, but where seemingly nonsensical scenes might have served to amplify Zissou’s tragic failings or better explain his often whimsical actions, they instead pack the film with tedious dialogue.

While Anderson’s previous scripts were rich enough that his quirky characterizations did most of the developmental legwork for the performances, The Life Aquatic seems all too willing to use its actors as ottomans. Even within the mammoth ensemble in The Royal Tenenbaums, each character is given room to breathe, stretch and shake; heck, even the family’s butler Pagoda taps an emotional nerve as he stabs deceptive employer Royal Tenenbaum in the stomach, then loyally drags him to safety. But multi-dimensional characters are nowhere to be found aboard the cramped Life Aquatic, where the equivalent manservant role of Klaus Daimler is played with one-note efficiency by Willem Dafoe. Owen Wilson (as Zissou’s alleged illegitimate offspring) and Anjelica Huston (as Zissou’s dedicated wife) play their roles with such maddeningly detached insincerity that even their supposedly emotive scenes are one thin ironic line away from bad line readings at community theater auditions.

Of course, the film puts the heaviest weight on Murray, and the actor is never quite invested enough in the performance to support it. In creating Zissou, Murray cleanly cuts out the weary heartache of Lost in Translation’s Bob Harris to offer a shell of a man too sterile and smarmy to lend any real gravitas to Zissou’s gradual realization of his own mid-life impotence.

The film does offer some savory situational comedy (particularly when a gang of pirates invades the crew’s ship) and the soundtrack—largely composed of Seu Jorge’s soulful Portuguese reworkings of Bowie classics—is one of the year’s best. The set design on the ship is truly stunning, and a pair of scenes that capture the bustle on board while panning across a cross-section of the entire ship are jaw-dropping in their brazen gaudiness. But, as The Life Aquatic ends with Anderson’s trademark last-call denouement, where each character closes shop with a sharp one-liner, the viewer is reminded that Anderson has sailed this course before, but never without his characters’ humanity as an anchor.

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The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Review

18 Feb 2005

118 minutes

Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The

Just in case you hadn't noticed, that Wes Anderson's a bit of a quirkaholic. In the excellent Rushmore, we had the bizarrely violent school stage productions of The Max Fischer Players. Then, in The Royal Tenenbaums, there was the unnecessary but inspired inclusion of dalmatian mice scampering around the edges of all those elaborately dysfunctional family dramas. Anderson's dives into leftfield have always suggested self-indulgence, but have been well-executed enough to appeal rather than irritate - especially when beneath the artifice there-s always throbbed a welcome ache of pathos, borne out by lovingly sketched characters.

Anderson's latest is clearly closer to his heart than any of his previous movies, and features all his trademarks in garish Technicolor. His recognition of the comedic value of uniform - from Bottle Rocket's boiler suits to Tenenbaum's tight red tracksuits - here results in the hilarious "Team Zissou" get-up: pastel-blue shirts, bright crimson woolly hats, Glock strapped to right thigh. His slavish attention to music results in an interesting mix of laidback acoustic cover versions and deliberately dated, analogue-electro flurries. His predilection for made-up animals like those spotty Tenenbaum rodents is realised via Henry Selick's exotic stop-motion sea-fauna creations. Plus, of course, his fascination with Jacques Cousteau, so apparent in Rushmore (a quote from the celebrated French sub-aquatic explorer is what spurs Max to campaign for a school aquarium), is elevated in this movie to raison d'être.

The Life Aquatic presents a parallel reality which straddles our world and another trapped in the late '60s, when Cousteau's international popularity was at its height. The technology invented and employed by Team Zissou is supposed to be cutting-edge, yet it displays a retro chunkiness which recalls early Bonds. Zissou's own movies, segmenting his various quests into hokily-titled chapters, feel like they were made decades ago; in fact, they're very deliberately reminiscent of TV series The Undersea World Of Jacques Cousteau, which charted the real diver's adventures.

Zissou, of course, isn't a real diver, and Anderson plays up the concept that, as Zissou's critics suspect, he might be a fraud, even possibly faking his friend's death to manufacture publicity for his latest quest - in search of a creature that doesn't even exist. The lines blur between the "real" world as presented in Anderson's movie, and the "fake" world shot by Zissou's crew within Anderson's movie. In one superb sequence, we're taken on a tour of Steve's ship The Belafonte, but rather than show it as a Steadicam whirl through hatches and cabins, we follow the characters as they walk around a very obvious cross-section set. Plus, of course, there's all those stop-motion critters, which, in this age of crisp CGI, can't look anywhere near realistic. The schtick being: how can Zissou be a fake if the entire world he inhabits is equally artificial?

Unfortunately, for all its comic, aesthetic astuteness, there's something very important missing from Anderson's latest that's always been there before: heart. There's a half-arsed attempt to jimmy in some romance between Blanchett's journo and Wilson's amiable Ned, while Ned's maybe-father/maybe-son relationship with Steve fails to stir up any feeling and climaxes with something of a dramatic gaffe. The artificiality encouraged by the helmer proves overwhelming, with the story's more serious elements either looking horribly out of place (such as when the Zissou ship is boarded by violent Indonesian pirates) or becoming so sapped of emotion they sink to the level of a cheap afternoon soap.

Even the ever-reliable Murray struggles. He's no doubt happy to be indulging Anderson, but all the while is seemingly unconvinced that Zissou could ever be a bona-fide, oxygen-inhaling human being. Consequently, neither are we. Yes, the wetsuits are snazzy, but when you tear into them like Steve's mythical jaguar shark, you won't find much meat within.

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The Movie Review: 'The Life Aquatic'

Early in Bottle Rocket , writer-director Wes Anderson's 1996 debut film, a little girl asks her recently de-institutionalized 26-year-old brother when he will be coming home. "I can't come home," he explains. "I'm an adult." With that scene Anderson, himself 26 at the time, announced the theme that would dominate all his movies to date: the plight of the man-child, too old to live life like a kid but not mature enough to stop trying.

In Bottle Rocket , it was half-hearted thieves Anthony and Dignan straddling the gap between boyhood and manhood. In Rushmore (1999), Anderson went simultaneously younger and older, presenting us with Max Fischer, a boy growing up too fast due to a dead mother and flaky father, and Herman Blume, an unhappy fiftysomething tired of behaving like a grownup. He repeated this formulation in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), contrasting the Tenenbaum siblings, who'd lost their childhoods to precocity, with their capricious, irresponsible father, Royal. But the emphasis had already begun shifting from the young characters to the old. Where Blume was a supporting figure in Rushmore , Royal was the closest thing to a main character in Tenenbaums , as the title made clear.

With The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou , released on video today, the shift is complete. The younger characters have been pushed to the wings to clear center stage for Zissou (Bill Murray), a once-famous underwater documentarian teetering on the brink of irrelevance. (Picture a burned-out Jacques Cousteau from Chicago.) The movie opens with Zissou's latest documentary, The Jaguar Shark (Part 1) , opening to a lukewarm reception in Italy. During the course of production, Zissou's best friend and longtime diving partner Esteban was eaten by the giant marine predator of the documentary's title, and Zissou pledges that in Part 2, he will hunt the monster down and kill it. ("I don't know how yet," he allows. "Maybe dynamite.")

Raising money for the endeavor proves difficult, however, as Zissou has not had a hit in a decade. His Greek business manager (played with cosmopolitan sleaziness by Michael Gambon) fails to get funding from a Saudi princeling; his wealthy, semi-estranged wife Eleanor (a jaded but regal Anjelica Huston) is disinclined to invest any more of her parents' fortune. Fortunately for the venture, who should appear but Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a Kentucky pilot who may or may not be Zissou's son from a 30-year-old assignation. Ned is invited to join Team Zissou, and in short order pledges the inheritance from his dead mother to the jaguar shark expedition.

In the course of the voyage, Team Zissou will steal oceanographic equipment and an espresso machine from Zissou's far more successful competitor Alistair Hennessy (a wonderfully self-regarding Jeff Goldblum); Zissou and Ned will both fall for a pregnant reporter (played by a pregnant Cate Blanchett) tagging along for a magazine story; pirates will attack the ship and kidnap a member of the team; a daring rescue will be undertaken; and the jaguar shark will be encountered once again, though not until after Zissou has run out of dynamite.

The Life Aquatic , in other words, contains a great deal more activity and adventure than Anderson's previous films. Yet, if anything, its pace is more sedate. This is partly because it is his longest movie to date, clocking in at just under two hours. But it is also because as his boyish protagonists have grown older, their metabolisms--and those of the movies themselves--have been slowing down. Where Bottle Rocket and Rushmore are propelled by the ardor and energy of youth, Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic are characterized more by an air of wistfulness and regret. The evolution is reflected in Anderson's musical choices. In Tenenbaums , the furious British Invasion chords of Rushmore gave way to a coy cover of "Hey Jude." The Life Aquatic continues this progression toward a kind of languid irony, its soundtrack consisting largely of acoustic versions of David Bowie songs, sung in Portuguese by Brazilian musician Seu Jorge.

Casting, too, contributes to The Life Aquatic 's peculiar lethargy. In Tenenbaums , Gene Hackman brought infectious enthusiasm and angry undercurrents to the role of Royal. Murray's Zissou, by contrast, is typically laid back, a wry and rather downbeat observer of his own life passing him by. While Murray's drowsy comic gifts are frequently used to delightful effect--is there any actor alive who's better at underplaying a punch line?--they're unable to provide the film with much in the way of forward momentum.

Murray played essentially the same character in Rushmore and in Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation : a highly successful man who'd lost his enthusiasm for life and was merely going through the motions--the faltering marriage, the career on autopilot and beginning its descent. In those two movies, his inner fires were rekindled by a relationship with someone half his age, still full of vitality and promise. But he has no such tinder in The Life Aquatic . In theory, Owen Wilson's Ned ought to fill that niche. But Wilson, too, is a bit listless, coasting through the role of pipe-smoking straight-arrow instead of taking comic advantage of his casting against type. (This is the first of Anderson's films that Wilson did not co-write, his place having been usurped by Noah Baumbach.) The movie comes most to life in the scenes with Goldblum, whose uptight energy is a nice counterpoint to Murray and Wilson, but his screen time is sadly limited in the film, as in his career of late.

As a result, The Life Aquatic drifts along at a lazy pace, the occasional encounter with pirates notwithstanding. This might not be such a problem if the content of the movie were more amenable to such narrative understatement. But it isn't. The Life Aquatic is Anderson's wackiest film by far, full of over-the-top gags and situations. Its oceans contain Dr. Seuss seascapes and teem with goofy digitized sea creatures--the 60-foot, fluorescent jaguar shark, a rhinestone-encrusted bluefin, glowing "electric jellyfish" that wash up on shore, etc. (A fish able to turn itself inside-out appeared in the trailer but didn't make the cut for the movie.) Even the characters are more openly absurd than in past Anderson films. Klaus (Willem Dafoe), a sycophantic crewmember with a preposterous German accent, is a caricature so cartoonish that he almost could have wandered onto the set from a Coen brothers' project. Humor this broad demands an emphatic tempo, not the idle, tongue-in-cheek pacing that The Life Aquatic provides.

This mismatch between joke and delivery is further complicated near the end, when the film briefly ceases to be funny at all. There is an accident and, as a result, the death of a main character--a death that, unlike Estaban's at the beginning of the film, is not played for laughs. But the moral gravity of the moment hasn't been earned by anything that's come before it, and the tragic development serves no real purpose in furthering the plot. It's just dropped in there, a weird and slightly distasteful stab at seriousness in an otherwise unserious film. No sooner has it occurred than the movie shies away from it, sliding back into its awkward comic rhythms. The jaguar shark is found, the documentary is completed, and there is another Italian premiere, once again with Team Zissou short one member. Not that anyone seems to mind much: Soon enough, the rest of the cast is strutting jauntily back to the ship to the strains of "Queen Bitch," a Bowie tune at last played in its original, red-blooded form rather than as an arch, acoustic knockoff. It comes about two hours too late.

The Home Movie List:

Go, Wes, young man Bottle Rocket (1996). The most likable of Anderson's films, it never tries too hard--perhaps one reason why for all its appeal it is oddly forgettable. Wilson brothers Owen and Luke have a pleasant enough chemistry that it's surprising they haven't appeared together more often.

Rushmore (1999). In Max Fischer, Anderson created a true original, a man-child whose precocity was due not to any particular gifts but rather to his own furious will. The counterpoint with Murray's Blume was perfect, resulting in Anderson's best film by far.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). Clever and witty, as always, but Andersen's increasingly hermetic control and twee affectations stifled much of the life from the movie. Thankfully, Hackman could not be contained, giving a dynamic performance that saved the film from portraiture.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). Even the title takes its own sweet time. Murray is a national treasure, but this monument to his hangdog charms is too big and unwieldy to do them justice.

This post originally appeared at TNR.com.

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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) Review

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) Director: Wes Anderson Screenwriters: Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach Starring: Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Gambon

Following the critical successes of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums , Wes Anderson had become more of a household name by the time his fourth feature The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was released in 2005. While now regarded affectionately, at the time of its release The Life Acquatic proved one of the more divisive of Anderson’s efforts, with critics praising the production design, visuals and adventurous spirit but lamenting the characterisation and narrative. This split in opinion is clearly evident in William Thomas’ 2004 Empire review , which reads, “Unfortunately, for all its comic, aesthetic astuteness, there’s something very important missing from Anderson’s latest that’s always been there before: heart”.

The narrative of Anderson’s fourth feature is heavily inspired by Jacques Cousteau and has nods to Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”. In The Life Aquatic , Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is an Oceanographer seeking to document a “Jaguar Shark”, a mysterious creature that is believed to have killed a crew member during a previous expedition and whose documentation is destined to ensure Zissou’s place in science history. What follows is a comedic look at the traditional sea exploration sub-genre of cinema and literature, and is the closest in Anderson’s filmography to an adventure or action film, the picture’s second act in particular having a number of memorable set pieces.

It would not be a Wes Anderson project without a large ensemble cast, and The Life Aquatic features a number of regular A-List Anderson collaborators including Jeff Goldblum, Anjelica Huston, Willem Dafoe and Owen Wilson, while respected character actors Cate Blanchett and Michael Gambon make their only appearances for the director in this release. The bulk of the cast do a fine job of fleshing out their characters, but perhaps there is some credence to the thought of the characters being underdeveloped, and it is certainly true that the performances lack some of the sparkle found in The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore in particular. Bill Murray stars at the head of the talented group in one of his rare lead roles in an Anderson project (the bulk of his other collaborations with the director being cameo appearances or supporting roles), the actor offering an ever-dependable comic performance at arguably the height of his post-80s powers following the gargantuan success of Lost in Translation the year prior (2003).

The production design and aesthetics of the film were singled out for high praise in even the more middling reviews published around its release, with many noting the attention to detail given to Zissou’s ship The Belafonte and the overall feel of the world. Anderson’s use of colour and his unique productions have been parodied to high heaven in the years since The Life Aquatic , so it can be easy to overlook the influence he has had within this area and how distinctive his films are within their production design, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou being by far one of the most visually dynamic and ambitious projects of his career to that point.

As was the case with Wes Anderson’s earlier work, the soundtrack for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is key to the idiosyncratic style that Anderson presents, the odd mix of famous David Bowie tracks and Portuguese language covers of famous songs from Brazilian actor and musician Seu Jorge making for a distinctive and quirky audio accompaniment that helps to increase your likelihood of enjoying this unique albeit divisive release.

Whilst somewhat of a misfire in 2004, appreciation for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou has increased tenfold in the decade and a half that has followed (perhaps in no small part due to the success of Anderson’s later films Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel ). One of Anderson’s strongest and most eclectic casts really sells the quirkiness of The Life Aquatic’s world, and it is a fun, escapist romp harking back to many seafaring works of the past while maintaining Anderson’s unique visual and storytelling traits. It may not have the heart of some of this great filmmaker’s other offerings, but The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou more than makes up for it in other ways.

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The Life Aquatic cinematographer on staging one of Wes Anderson's most emotional scenes

It's Wes Anderson week at EW! Ahead of the Oct. 22 release of The French Dispatch , we're celebrating the auteur's singular filmography with a series of throwbacks celebrating his most beloved titles. Here, director of photography Robert Yeoman — one of Anderson's most frequent collaborators — looks back on creating the heartfelt climactic moments of The Life Aquatic.

By the standards of Wes Anderson's career at that point, 2004's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was a massive undertaking. His fourth film — following the scrappy debut Bottle Rocket , the modest breakout Rushmore , and the star-studded crossover hit The Royal Tenenbaums — was a major step up in complexity and scale, with a budget more than twice that of Tenenbaums .

"We had ships at sea, and weather, and all kinds of crazy stuff," recalls cinematographer Robert Yeoman, who has shot all of Anderson's live-action movies. "There were no easy days on that film."

But for all that, The Life Aquatic 's climax is strikingly intimate — or as much as it can be while involving a submarine and a stop-motion animated shark. The film tells the rambling tale of seafaring documentarian Steve Zissou ( Bill Murray ) and his quest to hunt down and kill the "jaguar shark" that ate his best friend. It all culminates deep in the ocean, as Zissou and his motley crew of companions come upon the creature at last, and Zissou, moved by its beauty, opts not to destroy it after all — and finally makes peace with the loss of his friend.

Much of the scene plays out in a typically Andersonian ensemble shot, featuring about a dozen characters placed just so within the small submarine. The sub was constructed on a soundstage at Rome's legendary Cinecittà studios, where much of The Life Aquatic was filmed.

"It was hard to pack everybody in there, and a bit difficult to light, because everyone was sitting so close together," Yeoman recalls. The crew experimented with the characters' placement before bringing the actors in: "Wes is very particular about blocking, so once [a set] is built we oftentimes will take the same amount of people and try to squeeze them into that space," the cinematographer adds. "We do a lot of prep work so that when the actors arrive, there's no surprises."

Indeed, as one might expect from his fastidious filmmaking style, Anderson prepares extensively for his films, storyboarding or even animating every shot before the cameras roll. "A lot of directors want the freedom to bring the actors in and make it up on the set, but that doesn't happen with Wes," says Yeoman. "By the time we get to shooting, we know pretty much exactly what the shots will be. And it helps everybody — the production designers don't have to come in and dress a whole house, because they know we're only looking in one direction. And I know that that's the only direction I have to light, so I don't have to light the entire house."

This preparation was crucial to The Life Aquatic , which was the first of Anderson's films to feature extensive effects created in post-production. The filmmaker recruited The Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick to create various fantastical sea creatures, including the jaguar shark, through stop-motion animation. Nowadays, of course, it's extremely common for key elements of a movie to be added in later through visual effects, but it was uncharted territory for Anderson and his team at the time.

"It was a learning experience for my end as well as his, [for] what we had to get in the camera and what could be put together later," Yeoman recalls. "A lot of the post-production techniques that we take for granted today were newer back then, so everyone was learning at that time." Still, he adds, "Everyone was pretty clear [on] what the shark would look like. There are certain things that you can't anticipate, but we all kind of knew what the creature was going to be. Wes certainly tries to be as clear as he can be with everyone [about] what he's looking for."

One crucial element that could be incorporated in camera, so to speak, was the music. The shark's emergence from the deep is accompanied by the song "Starálfur" by Icelandic art rock band Sigur Rós , which Anderson played on set to "get people in the mood," Yeoman says. "Back then, Wes knew the music tracks very clearly before we started shooting, and we would have a boombox on set and play all the tunes while we were setting up," he recalls. "That particular music was very sad and emotional, so by playing that on the set, everyone could just get into that mind space and emotionally be where that song might take us."

What's more, "over the years, Wes has kept the on-set crew very, very small," Yeoman adds. "A lot of movies I'm on, there'll be hundreds of people all standing around, but that's not the case on Wes' films. There might be five or six people there, and everybody else is somewhere else. He doesn't want any distractions for the actors, particularly in a scene that's emotional like that. We try to do all our work, and then when the actors get there, just try to be in the background."

It all helped cultivate an environment where everyone felt appropriately vulnerable. "I remember that Bill Murray at one point kind of tears up [in the scene], and it was very emotional watching him do that," recalls Yeoman. "We knew it was going to be emotional, but I was so surprised when Bill started tearing up, and I remember feeling the strong emotion of the whole thing myself, and just being very moved by it."

And while The Life Aquatic was not exactly well-received at the time of its release — it was a box-office bomb and Anderson's first film to receive predominately negative reviews , but has built an admiring cult following in the years since — Yeoman remains proud of the work they did on the film, and especially that climactic scene.

"It was very strong, and particularly when all the other actors leaned in and touched Bill on the shoulder, it just had a very strong feeling to it," the cinematographer reflects. "I felt like it was a perfect culmination of all that had happened up to that point."

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) Movie Review: In Search of Human Connection

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) Movie Review: Made after ‘Royal Tenenbaums” (2001) – one of the benchmark works in Wes Anderson’s filmography – “The Life Aquatic” (2004) fell under the weight of crushing expectations as many such follow-ups do. Spike Lee once said that filmmakers like Elia Kazan and Billy Wilder often do their best work when they follow up their big commercial hits like Ace in the Hole and Face in the Crowd because they’re allowed to experiment. Anderson simply used a bigger budget to deliver something stylistically different from its predecessor. It was a recipe for high expectations upon its 2004 release, but the film deserves a re-evaluation when watched later in time.

Anderson created the film as a homage to the wondrous undersea world of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. His title character Steve Zissou (played by Anderson regular Bill Murray), is a deep sea explorer who creates the kind of films that anyone who shares a Cousteau fan’s love of the sea would enjoy, particularly with Anderson’s undeniable gift for visuals. If Wes Anderson is guilty of self-indulgence, the “The Let Me Tell You About My Boat” sequence is a welcome dose of vanity.

At the same time, the film is centered around a jaded character on a downhill slide. Steve Zissou is what would happen if Jacques Cousteau caught a few bad breaks later in life. To the degree that good character development is revealed through the unpeeling of layers, Steve Zissou appears to be more and more of an empty construct as we learn more about him. It’s revealed that he’s more of a showman than a scientist. Additionally, the presence of journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett) on his expedition means that he must always be in front of her.

It’s perhaps the pressure of tighter funding or the fact that he was always ugly, to begin with, that Zissou becomes more and more defeated as he realizes he can’t control his narrative. It’s probably not accidental that the cultured Zissou can’t seem to connect the dots between his quest to hunt down the shark that killed his best friend and the doomed Captain Ahab. The brains behind his operation, estranged wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston), advises against the mission. This can’t be a good sign.

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There’s also the blaring juxtaposition that killing any animal is pretty much the antithesis of any scientific expedition. At a certain point, one wonders if the “scientific lab” that Zissou advertises in his “Let Me Tell You About My Boat” sequence has any application beyond the aesthetic. Zissou, after all, admits at one point that no one in his crew is an oceanographer.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) Movie Review

Wes Anderson has a unique style, but what’s overlooked is how well the detailed craftwork serves the story. The typography is not only memorable and period-appropriate, but it blurs that reality because it opens both the movie and the documentary-within-the-film. The soundtrack is another example of this brilliance. Portuguese covers of David Bowie songs are diegetically worked into the soundtrack through Seu Jorge playing a crew member. In more reality-shaking moments, the death of Steve’s probable long-lost son or Steve nearing on his imaginary shark quest, non-diegetic songs like “Search and Destroy” (Iggy and the Stooges), “The Way I Feel Inside” (The Zombies), or even the original David Bowie version of “Life on Mars” overtake the soundscape.

The Life Aquatic’s most significant flaw might be its bloated cast. Acting titans like Bud Cort, Jeff Goldblum, and Michael Gambon are stuck in minor, thankless roles that could have gone to character actors. With his accent and childlike sense of neediness, Willem Dafoe’s sidekick character can best be described as wacky. Distinguished actors like Gene Hackman and Danny Glover lent themselves to lighter character roles for “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Still, it feels like Dafoe crosses too far over a line of hamminess for this to be a dignified addition to his filmography.

At the same time, the cast size seems retrospectively quaint compared to the unchecked gargantuan of late-stage Anderson. If someone didn’t enjoy Life Aquatic for its bloat, it would be hard for them not to reconsider when “The French Dispatch” (or even a consensus masterpiece like “Grand Budapest Hotel”) boasted superfluous star cameos in over half the roles.

The most significant moment in “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” is a simple hug between two rivals. The scene occurs towards the movie’s end: The title character Steve Zissou (Bill Murray), expresses a defeated sigh to his opponent, Allistair Hennesy (Goldblum). “We’ve never made great husbands, have we?” Zissou says about his estranged wife, to whom Hennessy was also married. “Of course, I have a good excuse. I’m part gay,” responds Hennesy as the two exchange an embrace out of nowhere.

This is the essence of what Wes Anderson is about. His stories are about one emotion- the common human need to belong – that trumps all the others. In the same way, Wes Anderson’s glamorous visual facades withhold a more complex emotional state. Wayward emotions like jealousy, respect, self-actualization, and navigating drifting love are framing devices that drive the story. Steve Zissou, and most Wes Anderson protagonists, are really after a universal human connection. Even if it means from a rival. The story can never become too dour when the protagonist is never more than a hug away from being saved from misery. Wes Anderson’s films have an overarching theme of human connection, and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” is no exception.

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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

DVD edition reviewed by Chris Galloway
June 28 2008

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Internationally famous oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and his crew-Team Zissou-set sail on an expedition to hunt down the mysterious, elusive, possibly nonexistent Jaguar Shark that killed Zissou's partner during the documentary filming of their latest adventure. They are joined on their voyage by a young airline co-pilot, who may or may not be Zissou's son (Owen Wilson), a beautiful journalist (Cate Blanchett) assigned to write a profile of Zissou, and his estranged wife and co-producer, Eleanor (Anjelica Huston). They face overwhelming complications, including pirates, kidnapping, and bankruptcy. Oscar-nominated writer-director Wes Anderson (2001, The Royal Tenenbaums, Best Original Screenplay) has assembled an all-star cast that also includes Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Gambon, Noah Taylor, and Bud Cort for this wildly original adventure-comedy.

Picture 7/10

Extras 4/10

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The life aquatic with steve zissou, common sense media reviewers.

Another quirkfest from Wes Anderson; not for kids.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Characters behave badly in many ways, from being c

Violence and peril, including guns, characters kil

Non-sexual nudity, non-explicit sexual references

Very strong language.

Drinking, smoking, drug use.

Positive Messages

Characters behave badly in many ways, from being cruel to each other to stealing.

Violence & Scariness

Violence and peril, including guns, characters killed.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Non-sexual nudity, non-explicit sexual references and situations.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou includes very strong language, non-sexual nudity (topless sunbathing), and non-explicit sexual references and situations, including pregnancy from an adulterous affair and bisexuality. Characters drink, smoke, and smoke marijuana. Characters behave badly in many ways, from being cruel to each other to stealing. Characters are in peril and there are violent encounters with deadly animals and various weapons, including guns. Some characters are killed. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (3)
Kids say (17)

Based on 3 parent reviews

Not as good as his other films, but still great.

Entertaining film from wes anderson, what's the story.

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU is the story of Jacques Cousteau-like explorer Steve Zissou ( Bill Murray ), who finances his expeditions by filming them. He has not had a successful movie in nine years. His wife ( Anjelica Huston ) strides around chain-smoking and making bitter comments. She maintains a flirty relationship with her bisexual ex-husband, Alistair Hennessey ( Jeff Goldblum ), who happens to be Zissou's rival. Zissou's new mission is not about science; it is about revenge. He wants to kill the "jaguar shark" that killed his friend. His motley crew includes the high strung Klaus Daimler ( Willem Dafoe ) and some newcomers: Ned Plimpton ( Owen Wilson ), a naval officer who could be Zissou's son, Bill Ubell (Bud Cort), assigned to watch over them by the bond company, and Jane Winslett-Richardson ( Cate Blanchett ), an intrepid English journalist who is pregnant. Steve and Ned go off in their run-down ship and end up engaging with pirates, stealing equipment from Hennessey, and developing a romantic rivalry for Jane.

Is It Any Good?

Another quirkfest from Wes Anderson , this is filled with imaginatively charming images and Anderson's trademark oddball characters from a mix of cultures. They all speaking in his signature corkscrew speech and react as though no two of them speak the same language. Anderson is great with situations, visuals, and deadpan delivery of weird, almost absurd, dialogue. But increasingly, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou all seems to be tricks without any meaning or insight behind them, cleverness for the sake of cleverness, without any heart or soul. Or art. College students can deconstruct to their hearts' delight, but it's their own meaning they will bring to the movie, not Anderson's.

Anderson benefits tremendously from the always-engaging production design by Mark Friedberg, a delightful score by former Devo-ian Mark Mothersbaugh, and the always-engaging performances by top-notch actors clearly enjoying themselves, especially Goldblum, Dafoe, and Blanchett. The script, by Anderson and Noah Baumbach takes some bad turns in the last half hour that feel sour and unsatisfying. Anderson is getting close to Emperor's New Clothes-time here, and eventually someone is going to point out that when it comes to the substance, he has nothing on.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why Steve seemed more attached to his friend who was killed than to anyone else in his family or crew in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou . What mattered to him? What mattered to Ned and Jane? What did it add to her character to have her pregnant?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 10, 2004
On DVD or streaming : May 10, 2005
Cast : Bill Murray , Cate Blanchett , Owen Wilson
Director : Wes Anderson
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Buena Vista
Genre : Comedy
Run time : 119 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language, some drug use, violence and partial nudity
Last updated : September 29, 2023

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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

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COMMENTS

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou movie review (2004)
The colors are like the pastels produced by colored pencils, and kind of beautiful, like the shark. The action goes through the motions of slapstick at the velocity of dirge. Steve Zissou seems melancholy, as if simultaneously depressed that life is passing him by, and that it is taking so long to do it. Anjelica Huston seems privately amused ...
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a 2004 American adventure comedy-drama film directed by Anderson 🤿 Meh, it passed the time. Sort of. 😕 I enjoyed the beginning of this movie, but it ...
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
The family's kit, craft and uniform are quaintly marooned in the 1960s of Cousteau, while Zissou's hated enemy and rival explorer Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum) luxuriates in state-of-the-art ...
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a 2004 American adventure comedy-drama film written by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach and directed by Anderson. It is Anderson's fourth feature-length film and was released in the United States on December 25, 2004. . The film stars Bill Murray as Steve Zissou, an eccentric oceanographer who sets out to exact revenge on the "jaguar shark" that ate his ...
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 9, 2023. While most Anderson detractors point to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as why they don't like the filmmaker, even arguably his weakest film ...
In Defense of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou , 10 Years Later
At one point early in the film, Zissou and Ned share a glass of wine in an upscale restaurant, as a pair of onlookers whispers insults about the explorer. "People say when someone says something ...
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou: Directed by Wes Anderson. With Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Anjelica Huston. With a plan to exact revenge on a legendary shark that killed his partner, oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) rallies a crew that includes his estranged wife, a journalist, and a man who may or may not be his son.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
NickTheCritick. Apr 23, 2022. Film almost entirely set in an "aquatic" environment: Steve Zissou is a researcher-director of marine documentaries who, from the day his best friend is devoured by a jaguar shark, undertakes an expedition to hunt the animal. Murray's traveling companions are his wife, child, a pregnant reporter and crew.
Review: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Count on Wes Anderson's visual and verbal witticisms and presence of Murray to guide us through the rougher waters of the film. by Jeremiah Kipp. December 9, 2004. Wes Anderson's movies don't look and feel like other people's movies, and in fact are hardly reminiscent of what we have come to think of ...
'Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou' Review: 2004 Movie
On Dec. 10, 2004, Wes Anderson unveiled his latest ensemble comedy, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, in theaters in New York and Los Angeles. The Hollywood Reporter's original review is below ...
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is Wes Anderson's Best Film
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was released 15 years ago today, the fourth film from the now-iconic director of melancholic whimsy Wes Anderson. His previous three movies - Bottle Rocket ...
Movie Review
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, from eccentric writer/director Wes Anderson, never completely sinks, but for the first time in his career, Anderson seems to have put his creative steamship on ...
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Review
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Review. Having recently lost his closest friend to the jaws of a strange sea predator, oceanic adventurer-cum-filmmaker Steve Zissou (Murray) sets out to find ...
The Movie Review: 'The Life Aquatic'
The Movie Review: 'The Life Aquatic'. Early in Bottle Rocket, writer-director Wes Anderson's 1996 debut film, a little girl asks her recently de-institutionalized 26-year-old brother when he will ...
Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) Review
The production design and aesthetics of the film were singled out for high praise in even the more middling reviews published around its release, with many noting the attention to detail given to Zissou's ship The Belafonte and the overall feel of the world. Anderson's use of colour and his unique productions have been parodied to high ...
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Movie Review. Steve Zissou is an aging oceanographer whose best days are behind him. He hasn't made a decent documentary in more than five years. ... The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou is an offbeat, niche comedy about how people between mid-life and old age must make peace with who they've become. Steve is a washed-up, narcissistic media ...
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Review :: Criterion Forum
Picture 9/10. Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou finally gets a Blu-ray upgrade from Criterion (the last of the Anderson titles they previously released on DVD to be upgraded) who present the film in a new high-definition digital transfer (taken from a 4K master) on a dual-layer disc in its original aspect ratio of about 2.35:1.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
"The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" is a weird, non-sense, silly, not funny and boring overrated movie. The story and screenplay is pretentious and dull, wasting a magnificent cast. The Brazilian singer Seu Jorge sings David Bowie's songs translated to Portuguese in another non-sense of this film.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Blu-ray Review
Criterion's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Blu-ray hits UK shores complete with a new 4K digital restoration scanned from the film's original 35mm camera negative. Cleaned up and pristinely resolved by their labs, the new scan looks tremendous on this 1080p/AVC-encoded High Definition video presentation, framed in the movie's original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.39:1 widescreen.
The Life Aquatic cinematographer on the climactic jaguar shark scene
And while The Life Aquatic was not exactly well-received at the time of its release — it was a box-office bomb and Anderson's first film to receive predominately negative reviews, but has built ...
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) Movie Review
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) Movie Review: Made after 'Royal Tenenbaums" (2001) - one of the benchmark works in Wes Anderson's filmography - "The Life Aquatic" (2004) fell under the weight of crushing expectations as many such follow-ups do. Spike Lee once said that filmmakers like Elia Kazan and Billy Wilder often do their best work when they follow up their big ...
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Review :: Criterion Forum
Picture 7/10. Disney and Criterion present The Life Aquatic in its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1 on this dual-layered disc. The image has been enhanced for widescreen televisions. Oddly, though, they have released two different DVDs, a single-disc release (which I am reviewing here) and a 2-disc release, though this is more than likely Disney ...
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Movie Review
Parents need to know that The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou includes very strong language, non-sexual nudity (topless sunbathing), and non-explicit sexual references and situations, including pregnancy from an adulterous affair and bisexuality. Characters drink, smoke, and smoke marijuana. Characters behave badly in many ways, from being cruel to each other to stealing.

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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Picture 7/10

Extras 4/10

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