Remote sensing instruments should have been included in the array of odd and quaint instruments that line Steve Zissou's ship. They would perhaps have helped the cast and crew locate the essential emotional ties that make viewers care about what's going on onscreen. As it stands, this is a remote film: I didn't really care about any of the characters, except perhaps Cate Blanchett's reporter. I wonder what went wrong, how Wes Anderson could have turned in this barren product after the lovely and compelling The Royal Tenenbaums. I think it might lie in the absence of Owen Wilson's name on the "written by" line in the credits. That's the big change, so it must have had something to do with the problem.

And I wanted to like this film. I catalogued its oddities, which are cultivated with more detail than most writers put into character development, waiting for it to gel into something gripping, or even involving. I laughed appreciatively at the whimsical array of characteristics that made up each main character, and the ones that defined the lesser ones. I liked the funny computer-generated fish, which looked a bit like something cut from The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. But I never really got into it. I admired it more than I liked it, and there was a lot about it that I didn't even admire.

Anderson has always had an extremely stylized way of directing his actors. The flat diction and pauses in the dialog in The Royal Tenenbaums are more stylized than anything else this side of David Mamet. But the interesting characters always made it, if not believable, at least acceptable and understandable in the world that exists in the film. But here, it's lifeless. Part of the problem is the framing of the shots: the characters enter the frame and go to the center of the screen, then there's a pause, and then the dialog begins, with the actors shot either directly from the side or facing the camera in a stagey manner. It emphasizes not the oddity that Anderson's so interested in achieving but the emotionless quality of the filmmaking. The staginess is only part of the problem. The sound design is, frankly, terrible. There's an echo to the dialog that makes it sound like it was delivered in a theater with bad acoustics.

There's a story, sort of. Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is a washed-up oceanographer who is at the end of a long Cousteau-like filmmaking career. His partner has just been devoured by a "jaguar shark," and Zissou wants to raise funding for an "illegal suicide mission" to destroy the shark. I'm reminded of Roger Ebert's immortal line from his review of Jaws the Revenge, where he says "And what shark wouldn't want revenge against the survivors of the men who killed it?"—a line that made me laugh more than anything in The Life Aquatic.

His ragtag crew, by the time the ship sails, includes a banquet of oddballs, including Ned (Owen Wilson), who might be his son; Klaus (Willem Dafoe), whose jealousy of Ned's budding relationship with Steve borders on the romantic; Bill Ubell (Bud Cort), the "bond company stooge"; a Brazilian guy named Pelé (Seu Jorge), who sings David Bowie songs in Portuguese for the soundtrack (why name him Pelé if he never gets to kick a soccer ball?); and Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett), a pregnant reporter who falls for Ned. Other characters include Steve's estranged wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston, sorely underused), who is shacking up with the competition, Alistair Hennessy (Jeff Goldblum); and the guy who pays the bills, Oseary Drakoulias (Michael Gambon), who is too nice to have a name like that.

Not a heck of a lot happens. Steve integrates Ned into the crew; Klaus is jealous of Ned; Steve wants to hit on Jane; he's jealous when she takes a liking to Ned. Filipino pirates attack the ship and take the bond company stooge hostage, and Team Zissou has to rescue him from a hurricane-destroyed hotel on a tropical island.

OK. Well, some things happen, but they're not presented in an absorbing manner. The most interesting scenes in the film are (1) a running argument between Ned and Steve that ranges all over the cutaway boat set that was built so viewers can see the action everywhere at once, and (2) when we finally get to see the jaguar shark. These scenes are perfect: we start to care a little about what's going on with Ned and Steve and Jane because the characters seem to care; and the shark is simply astonishing, and the characters realize that, and they shut up about it.

This isn't a terrible film, but it's a disappointing one. I guess Anderson and Owen Wilson are no longer a writing team, and that's sad. Anderson and Noah Baumbach, who cowrote this film, are the writers announced for Anderson's next film, an animated version of Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox. This will be Anderson's first adapted screenplay, and maybe Dahl's inspired weirdness will help him get back on the path he created with Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums.