Product Description

Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Anjelica Huston. Famous oceanographer Steve Zissou sets sail with a crew that includes a journalist, a pilot, a man who may actually be his son and his ex-wife in order to seek revenge on a mythical shark for causing the death of his partner. 2004/color/118 min/R.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1033 in DVD
• Brand: Miramax Home Entertainment
• Released on: 2005-05-10
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Portuguese, Tagalog
• Subtitled in: Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 119 minutes

Features

• Internationally famous oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and his crew -- Team Zissou -- set sail on a expedition to hunt down the mysterious, elusive -- possibly nonexistent -- Jaguar Shark that killed Zissou's partner during the documentary filming of their latest adventure. They are joined on their voyage by a young airline co-pilot who may or may not be Zissou's son (Owen Wilson)

Amazon.com
In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, director Wes Anderson takes his familiar stable of actors on a field trip to a fantasy aquarium, complete with stop-motion, candy-striped crabs and rainbow seahorses. And though Anderson does expand his horizons in terms of retro-special effects and a whimsical use of color, fans will otherwise find themselves in well-charted waters. As The Life Aquatic opens, Zissou (Bill Murray), a self-involved, Jacques Cousteau-like filmmaker, has just released a documentary depicting the death of his best friend Esteban, who was eaten by some sort of sea creature--possibly a jaguar shark. Zissou’s troubles also include his waning popularity with the public, and a nemesis (Jeff Goldblum) who hogs up all the grant money. Hope arrives in the form of Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), an amiable Kentuckian who may be Zissou’s son. Despite his lack of enthusiasm for fatherhood, Zissou welcomes Ned--and Ned in turn saves Zissou’s new documentary (in which he seeks revenge on the jaguar shark) in more ways than one.

One of Wes Anderson’s greatest achievements as a director to date has been launching the autumnal melancholy phase of Bill Murray’s career, starting with Rushmore in 1998, and Murray delivers a similarly comedic yet low-key performance here. Unfortunately, Zissou is one of the few characters in this ensemble to achieve multi-dimensionality. Even co-star Wilson doesn’t get to develop Ned much beyond Noble Southerner, and he ends up seeming more like a prop for illustrating Zissou’s emotional development rather than his own man. The Life Aquatic probably won’t be remembered as a great film, but it is still one that no Anderson (or Murray) fan can afford to miss.--Leah Weathersby

From The New Yorker
The latest movie from Wes Anderson, after "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums," marks another bid to swim away from the mainstream. Bill Murray plays Steve Zissou, an old-style explorer of the seas, who could easily be a mad American cousin, twice removed, of Jacques Cousteau. Steve has a tall, peculiar wife (Anjelica Huston) and an even taller and more peculiar rival (Jeff Goldblum). The plot, such as it is, concerns the hunting down of a jaguar shark, which has chewed up one of Steve's associates; at the same time, our hero is coping with the appearance of a young man (Owen Wilson) who claims to be his son. This level of weirdness could, in other hands, appear forced and willful, but Anderson seems at ease with his conceits, allowing his cast-which includes Willem Dafoe and, with a ringing British accent, Cate Blanchett-to relax into the demands of deadpan. Hardly anybody here looks young, and we can only guess at the experiences that have aged them, tested them, and cloaked them in Anderson's brand of sadness. Set against that, we get joyous bursts of David Bowie: "Space Oddity," "Rebel Rebel," and other hits, many of them transposed, naturally enough, into Portuguese. With silly, fetching marine animation sequences by Henry Selick. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Clay Smith, ACCESS HOLLYWOOD
"Bill Murray is a master of comedy .... a modern day Charlie Chaplin!"