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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is interesting, quirky and fun-filled. But, says Online reader Dean Agius, while it may look like director Wes Anderson's most ambitious project to date, it feels like his most inhibited...

It's a strange thing really, the way Wes Anderson manages to make films that seem both familiar and utterly unique.

Perhaps it's the ensemble cast that have become Anderson regulars: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston.

Perhaps it's also a thematic thing: the director's filmography to date - Bottle Rocket (1995), Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) - is characterised by a kind of comedic familial dysfunctionality.

Bill Murray stars as Steve Zissou - a rather sour, introspective sea-adventurer whose hokey and staged underwater documentaries make little money for his loyal benefactor (Michael Gambon).

After his best friend is apparently killed by a mythical 'jaguar shark', Zissou and his crew - including Cate Blanchett as an English reporter and Owen Wilson as a pilot claiming to be Zissou's love-child son - set off to exact revenge by killing the marauding sea beast.

Visually speaking, Anderson and cinematographer Robert Yeoman have created something unarguably wonderful to look at, though technically they seem to have become magpies.

humorous zooms

The film's overtly 'mockumentary' feel, and Zissou's hilariously set-up documentaries seem to pulse with the same irreverence as Christopher Guest's Waiting For Guffman and This Is Spinal Tap.

In addition, much of the filming - particularly a number of inherently humorous zooms - has a distinctly 70s, Robert Altman-esque sensibility.

And Blanchett's character is reminiscent of a similarly-caricatured English reporter in Altman's Nashville. Where that film is filled with guitar-strumming Country singers, Anderson's has a guitar-playing crewman crooning the songs of David Bowie - in Portuguese.

Despite the comparisons, The Life Aquatic... still rings with a unique creativity.

A shot of Zissou's boat, the Belafonte, cut in cross-section, showing the inhabitants moving about within is breathtaking, and the fantastically colourful stop-motion sea-fauna and obviously hand-crafted exotic flora give underwater scenes a hyper-real quality.

oily charm

Murray is almost certainly the master of the mid-life crisis: Rushmore, Lost in Translation, and now The Life Aquatic... are testament to this.

Anderson regular Owen Wilson adds to the enigma as Bill Murray's long-lost son

He brings the same quality of melancholic regret to Zissou, a man whose marriage is on the rocks, and whose career is clearly overshadowed by that of his wealthy sea-adventuring rival, played with superbly oily charm by Jeff Goldblum.

But squared against other notable performances - Anjelica Houston as Zissou's practical, ambivalent wife, and Willem Dafoe as a tender German crew member - Murray seems somewhat ill-at-ease in Zissou's skin; you feel he has found himself, for the first time in years, inhabiting a character he can't properly explore.

And you can't help but think that Anderson should have popped the bubble his characters exist in, so that they - and to a certain extent the script - could breathe just a little bit more.

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