DVD review from Nick at Nite:
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. Movie making genius. Clever writing. Good storytelling. Snappy and appropriate editing. Makes you think anything Wes Anderson does must be good. Well you couldn’t be more wrong. The Life Aquatic is horrid. It is worse than Ishtar. It makes the crap I normally watch on video seem good. I could not have been more disappointed. The plot isn’t that bad. Crazy Jacque Cousteau wannabe tries to hunt down the Jaguarshark that killed his best friend. He used to be hip and cool. Everyone loved his National Geographic specials. Now Zissou is old and boring. Just like this movie. The set was unique – A cutaway of the ship. I like the funny way the Zissou crew dressed and the guy singing David Bowie songs in French was mildly amusing. But looks and a gimmick ain’t everything. The writing is so bad, I would have preferred the actors just read from the phone book. I give the movie an “F.” Go rent Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums instead.
The Movie Court 
[…] woman. It was that, but it was also much, much stranger than I was expecting. Harold (But Cort, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) is a pallid and very odd young man of about 20. He is obsessed with death and likes going to […]
[…] wife (Marcia Gay Harden, Whip It) and a Machiavellian Cheney/Rove figure played by Willem Dafoe (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). And finally, the most unlikely figure of all is Omer, a nice, show-tune-loving guy from the […]
[…] which I assume was the first movie to be directed by Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou). Written by a very young Owen Wilson (Midnight in Paris) and starring him and his brother Luke […]