“I wonder if it remembers me.”

After Steve Zissou’s ship, the Belafonte, is raided by pirates, the pregnant reporter Jane Winslett-Richardson calls her editor — the baby’s absent father — from a phone in the communications room below deck. She begins her voicemail by talking business, but quickly shifts topics to tell him, “I’m not coming back. It’s over. Please, don’t try to contact me, okay? You’ll hear from us sometime.”

She pauses. Almost as if she can’t contain the thought, she follows that up with, “we got attacked by pirates. I feel like life is…” Her face contorts into a hysterical, enigmatic expression of panic, relief, and despair for just a moment — but she never finishes the sentence. Jane abruptly concludes the call with, “well, you get the idea — anyway, take care of yourself,” before hanging up and walking away.

The pirates kidnapped an accountant assigned to Zissou’s voyage, and took him to a former resort island that was, in years past, ravaged by a hurricane. Zissou and his men later storm the island to rescue their man. As they make their way through the seemingly abandoned resort, with its shattered windows and python-lined rafters, Zissou reminisces about the past: “My first wife, Jacqueline, and I spent our honeymoon here. Things are pretty different now.” He and his men then run downstairs and find themselves in another shoot-out with the pirates.

Jane tagged along with Zissou’s crew to interview Steve, a famous oceanographer and documentarian. Her first question to him in their first sit-down chat is a hard-hitting one: “Don’t you think the public perception of your work has significantly altered in the last five years?” Zissou is aggravated by this question, so she moves on to her next one, which isn’t much better: “Is it true that this is going to be your last voyage?”

The two of them go back and forth with her questions and his dodged answers, with Zissou becoming increasingly annoyed to the point of threatening her with a gun and her ending up in tears.

The entire time that this journalistic drama plays out under the sea, an orca playfully swims in and out of view in the window behind Zissou. Both Jane and Steve completely ignore the magnificent creature, choosing to focus instead on their dispute.

“What happened to me?” Steve asks his estranged wife in another scene, while he stares out into vast ocean during a beautiful sunset from the balcony of her private Italian villa. Her long-haired, shirtless ‘research assistant’ hangs out on the balcony below them in the background of the shot. He vents about his active mid-life crisis to her. She’s not very empathetic.

Tragedy and grief haunts all of the characters in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, one of Wes Anderson’s darkest movies. Like all of his films, it is meticulously designed and crafted. But there’s a lot more violence — both physical and emotional — and much less redemption than we’d usually expect in it. That violence is captured with an usual (for Anderson) amount of of handheld camerawork. The Life Aquatic is meticulous, yes, but also a little bit chaotic. The style reflects that.

The characters are all going through bleak times, and the storyline itself is bleak. The film opens with Steve Zissou revealing that a rare Jaguar Shark ate his best friend Esteban alive, and that he’s making it his mission to kill the shark for the scientific purpose of “revenge.” A man visits him from Kentucky and claims to be the 30-year-old son he’s never met, and he very well might actually be just that. Steve finds himself on the brink of another divorce. He’s out of money, hasn’t screened many successful documentary films in the past few years, and some of his crew — including a bunch of unpaid interns whose names he never bothers to learn — turn against him while at sea. And then there’s the pirates.

The story of The Life Aquatic is rough around the edges. But there’s beauty in it, in spite of the nearly endless slew of bad things that happen to its characters. Some of that beauty is highlighted the way in which the characters push on in spite of it all — in how they acknowledge their pain, but then brush it aside to band together with people who understand them and embark on new adventures, even when the odds seem to be against them.

But what makes the film special — and ultimately moving — is the way in which it pauses in the middle of a possibly relationship-ending argument between Steve and his wife so that they can look at and appreciate stop-motion animated crabs fighting on the beach at night. The way that Steve lovingly admires and protects the beautiful stop-motion animated rainbow seahorse that he receives as a gift at the end of his movie premiere. The way that Steve reacts to the Jaguar Shark who ate his friend when he finally comes face to face with it again under the sea… and how all of the broken people around him comfort him while taking in the sight of the rare creature with utter reverence and awe.

Steve and his team pause at a seemingly random moment in The Life Aquatic to tell the audience that they installed antennae in their diving helmets so that they could listen to music underwater… and then they dance to it on the dock, for no reason other than the joy of it,

These colorful moments — and the beautiful, artificial sea creatures and emotionally poignant music cues that punctuate so many of them — breathe consoling perspective into this otherwise chaotic, dark tale. What these moments impart is that while life is filled with tragedy and grief that we may never escape from or get over, there is often beauty and magic around us, waiting to be appreciated if only we choose to see it.

As for life, “this is an adventure.”