The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou: Critic Reviews

Once again, he creates a hermetic, glassed-in movie world of postmodern anachronisms that charms and distances in equal measure.

I should have been completely exasperated with The Life Aquatic, with its wispy story and wonder-cabinet production design, but to my surprise I found it mostly delightful.

Its sporadic droll moments tempt one to view it with a charitable eye until patience is exhausted by the end.

Hovers frustratingly somewhere between charming and only mildly amusing.

The film's meta-fey title alone is an example of why some people adore Anderson and why he drives others absolutely crazy.

It's a collage of half-measures.

If there's anything more tiresome in film today than hip irony, it is forced irony, and here comes a boatload.

Stocked with colorful characters, episodic wit and well-placed pop tunes, Aquatic stays funny even as it flails about at sea.

At times arrogant, furious, ridiculous and mopey, in the end, Steve Zissou carries The Life Aquatic with an understated grace.

It is heartening to reflect that the best of Bill Murray may be yet to come.

I can't recommend it, but I would not for one second discourage you from seeing it.

Despite its cast and director, it's an amazingly unfunny movie, drowned in its own conceits, half-strangled by the tongue so obtrusively in its cheek.

The Life Aquatic is full of moments of strange tranquility and screwball juxtaposition.

With his perpetually slumped shoulders and downcast eyes, Murray nails his character's weariness; you feel tired just looking at him. But lethargy is not necessarily something you want in an audience, and eventually the movie starts to seem fatigued.

A ruse of a film that doesn't have a tenth of the wit it thinks it has.

It's too fragmented, lacks pace and is filled with so many eccentricities that it's hard to discern the point, if Anderson is even trying to make one. But watching Anderson fail is still more rewarding that watching other filmmakers succeed.

A little too laid-back for its own good.

The effect is often soporific.

Intermittently brilliant, intermittently hilarious -- and occasionally tedious.

The whimsy feels forced, and Murray is the only player allowed to hunt for laughs. More Goldblum would have helped. Wilson acts overshadowed, Dafoe has too little screen time and Blanchett is only a middling straight man.

It's one of the great mysteries of contemporary Hollywood that a talent as sideways as Wes Anderson gets bankrolled by a major, and not famously risky, studio like Disney.

The Life Aquatic is a movie deeply immersed in movie lore, and the more seasoned the swimmer the richer the experience.

The story (written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach) meanders in such a meaningless way that the visual details, as carefully wrought as they are, come off as mere props.