The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

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.

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.

A lovely, slightly wistful, tragicomedy.

Like the jaguar shark, The Life Aquatic is hard to get a hook into.

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.

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.



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

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.