Right out of the gate, Wes Anderson’s “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” has an impressively tall hurdle to clear. The director’s standing filmography – the relatively obscure “Bottle Rocket,” the legendary “Rushmore” and the elaborate “The Royal Tenenbaums” – more or less sums up everything currently respected by the modern cineast. Trouble is, where do you go from there? Anderson’s latest outing clearly reveals his survival strategy: expand upward, expand outward, expand downward.

More specifically, expand all the way downward; the movie revolves around the titular Zissou (Bill Murray, in his third Anderson project), an underwater filmmaker