Member review

If you were to ask any young film student where their greatest artistic influence came from, you could bet highly on the answer being from Wes Anderson. The Texas-born writer and director is the prime example of the modern auteur, known for his quirky and fantastical characters and worlds, creative and hilarious dialogue and his almost dark obsession with symmetry. Whilst his later works such as Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014 / my personal favourite) struck a high chord with both critics and his niche audience fanbase (including myself), this 2004 film failed to live up to the high quality he is more than able to produce.

Following the adventures of renowned oceanographer Steve Zissou himself (played by Bill Murray), we are taken on a high sea adventure complete with fantastical underwater wildlife, pirates and a patchwork crew filled with colourful character and an even more impressive supporting cast. Highlights include the ever-wonderful Jeff Goldblum as a rival sea captain inadvertently sucked into Zizzou's strange voyage, Willem Dafoe as his loyal first mate and Cate Blanchett as a pregnant English reporter simply looking for a scoop. Anderson frequently shines with his ability to reinvent his recurring collaborators into weird and wonderful characters in each movie and this film, whilst lacking in some of the usual whimsicality, is fortunately no different.

The film adopts the same visual style as his other films: symmetrical shot composition, extra-diegetic gaze shots, set constructed like an on-screen play etc. The ingenuity of Anderson's artistic expression shines through this as always, borrowing design elements from classic sea voyage films such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Yellow Submarine (1968) to craft his oceanic tale. He even breaks out his now-signature stop motion animation to create the underwater wildlife, seamlessly blending cinematic styles into one world. However in the pre-Grand Budapest period of his career, Anderson's artistry can only go so far and at times feels like style is being kept afloat more than the plot.

One of the film's stand outs, in my personal opinion, is the performance of Bill Murray, the film's lead. Murray is known for his wacky and brilliant characters in films such as Groundhog Day (1993) and Ghostbusters but has also shown that he can display a darker and unsympathetic side in his roles too (see Scrooged [1988]). For this role, he blends the two seamlessly, giving us alternating moments of laughter and moments of aversion, yet we always come out feeling for him in the end. As always there are downsides to even a strong leading performance and for me this came in the form of Zizzou's relationship with his estranged 'may or may not be' son (played by Owen Wilson). The often long and rather dull interactions between the two take us away from the adventure and fantasy of the main plot and the film begins to fall into naturalism, an area of film-making Anderson usually stays away from. The loss of whimsicality in the family's dysfunction is never made up for and lacks the fun and anarchic synergy of later pairings by Anderson, such as the mismatched Gustave and Zero in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

In the nutshell, the film is Anderson through and through. While it lacks the sheer creativity and imagination of some of his other films, the more down-to-earth approach is likely to satisfy the dramatists in the audience. The impressive ensemble cast and moments of colourful animation and set design makes this film a decent watch, though I strongly wish the sub-nautic inspiration had been expanded upon further.

Oh well, there's always plenty more fish in the sea.