Would you recommend it to others?
The Life Aquatic
Wes Anderson movies are an acquired taste. But this one in particular is very accessible, and very funny. And it has a very emotional ending.
The only thing an uninitiated viewer needs to know is that the effects are intentionally low-budget. Just take them as seriously as the characters do, you’ll warm to them.
My first time watching this movie I stopped paying attention about 30 minutes in. Some time later the final act started and I was drawn back in. I have since watched it from start to finish about 5 times. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but I’m the kind of person who doesn’t generally watch a movie more than once.
That’s my favourite Wes Anderson film! The story and design are beautiful and the writing is brilliantly clever.
the effects are intentionally low-budget
Some of them are for aesthetic reasons, but this film was actually pretty expensive to make. Famously it did a lot of damage to WA’s reputation among Hollywood execs because the studio greenlit a high budget for him and gave him a lot of creative control and the movie ended up doing really poorly at the box office. It cost 50M to make and only earned 25M in box office sales.
