Realizing I have somehow managed to miss reviewing nearly half of Wes Anderson’s movies, I figured it was a good time to revisit them and review the one’s I have yet to. And the first one on that list is “Life Aquatic.” I have a very strange relationship with this movie, because there’s so much of it that I love. But at the same time, there are quite a few scenes that simply don’t work for me. The first thing I’d like to mention, being something that works for me in nearly every Anderson movie, is the unique use of dialogue. Life Aquatic’s dialogue, like most of his other work, is very dry, allowing room for humour. This is mostly done well between Steve and his son, Ned. But for the most part, that’s where the humour lies, on a somewhat weak chemistry between a father and his long-lost son. It’s clear that more humour was intended to land through the use of an ensemble. In other films such as Moonrise Kingdom, the ensemble is used to its full potential. This is clearly evident in moments such as the phone operator’s unique interest of food and the use of this to build the world around these characters. However, Life Aquatic doesn’t achieve this to the same scale. Sure, each member of Zissou’s crew is uniquely distinct, but the characters never actually do anything for the sake of the story. This, consequentially, caused the general story of the movie to not move the way it was intended. Ned’s love for Jane is often just a boring plot that I honestly didn’t care about. The only truly interesting plot beat was Steve’s relation to his mentor, driving him on a revenge plot for a shark. Which brings me to the action of this movie. I’m honestly surprised Anderson doesn’t do more action movies to this scale, as though I may feel Luke-Warm on most of the shots in Life Aquatic, the action was always perfectly shot, and allowed for a wonderfully fast pace. This was also accompanied by the music which is… perfect. It fits perfectly as the homage to classic made for tv science shows, along with being scientifically proven to make me type three times faster. Overall, this isn’t the best Wes Anderson movie by any means, but it’s definitely a fun watch with enough moments to be worth watching, 7/10
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