The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a 2004 American comedy-drama film directed, co-written, and co-produced by Wes Anderson. It is Anderson's fourth feature-length film and was released in the United States on December 25, 2004. It was written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach and was filmed in and around Naples, Ponza, and the Italian Riviera. The film stars Bill Murray as the eponymous Steve Zissou, an eccentric oceanographer who sets out to exact revenge on the "jaguar shark" that ate his partner Esteban. Zissou is both a parody of and homage to French
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou whimsy." The film has a 62/100 weighted average score on Metacritic, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Anthony Lane, a film reviewer for "The New Yorker", agreed with the conventional criticism of Anderson's deadpan style: that the underreaction of Anderson's characters used to be "hip" but has now become "frozen into a mannerism." He said that "some stretches of action" in the film are being "lightly held within quotation marks," with an "unmistakable air of playacting" in even the most violent scenes. He also criticized the film's deliberately "weird" set ups, which leave the viewer with "the impression of having nearly drowned