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'Zodiac" is the "All the President's Men" of serial killer movies, with Woodward and Bernstein played by a cop and a cartoonist. It's not merely "based" on California's infamous Zodiac killings, but seems to exude the very stench and provocation of the case. The killer, who was never caught, generously supplied so many clues that Sherlock Holmes might have cracked the case in his sitting room. But only a newspaper cartoonist was stubborn enough, and tunneled away long enough, to piece together a convincing case against a man who was perhaps guilty.

The film is a police procedural crossed with a newspaper movie, but free of most of the cliches of either. Its most impressive accomplishment is to gather a bewildering labyrinth of facts and suspicions over a period of years, and make the journey through this maze frightening and suspenseful. I could imagine becoming hopelessly mired in the details of the Zodiac investigation, but director David Fincher (" Seven ") and his writer, James Vanderbilt , find their way with clarity through the murk. In a film with so many characters, the casting by Laray Mayfield is also crucial; like the only eyewitness in the case, we remember a face once we've seen it.

The film opens with a sudden, brutal, bloody killing, followed by others not too long after -- five killings the police feel sure Zodiac committed, although others have been attributed to him. But this film will not be a bloodbath. The killer does his work in the earlier scenes of the film, and then, when he starts sending encrypted letters to newspapers, the police and reporters try to do theirs.

The two lead inspectors on the case are David Toschi ( Mark Ruffalo ) and William Armstrong ( Anthony Edwards ). Toschi, famous at the time, tutored Steve McQueen for " Bullitt " and was the role model for Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry. Ruffalo plays him not as a hotshot but as a dogged officer who does things by the book because he believes in the book. Edwards' character, his partner, is more personally worn down by the sheer vicious nature of the killer and his taunts.

At the San Francisco Chronicle , although we meet several staffers, the key players are ace reporter Paul Avery ( Robert Downey Jr., bearded, chain-smoking, alcoholic) and editorial cartoonist Robert Graysmith ( Jake Gyllenhaal ). These characters are real, and indeed the film is based on Graysmith's books about the case.

I found the newspaper office intriguing in its accuracy. For one thing, it is usually fairly empty, and it was true on a morning paper in those days that the office began to heat up closer to deadline Among the few early arrivals would have been the cartoonist, who was expected to work up a few ideas for presentation at the daily news meeting, and the office alcoholics, perhaps up all night, or already starting their recovery drinking. Yes, reporters drank at their desks 40 years ago, and smoked and smoked and smoked.

Graysmith is new on the staff when the first cipher arrives. He's like the curious new kid in school fascinated by the secrets of the big boys. He doodles with a copy of the cipher, and we think he'll solve it, but he doesn't. He strays off his beat by eavesdropping on cops and reporters, making friends with the boozy Avery, and even talking his way into police evidence rooms. Long after the investigation has cooled, his obsession remains, eventually driving his wife ( Chloe Sevigny ) to move herself and their children in with her mom. Graysmith seems oblivious to the danger he may be drawing into his home, even after he appears on TV and starts hearing heavy breathing over the phone.

What makes "Zodiac" authentic is the way it avoids chases, shootouts, grandstanding and false climaxes, and just follows the methodical progress of police work. Just as Woodward and Bernstein knocked on many doors and made many phone calls and met many very odd people, so do the cops and Graysmith walk down strange pathways in their investigation. Because Graysmith is unarmed and civilian, we become genuinely worried about his naivete and risk-taking, especially during a trip to a basement that is, in its way, one of the best scenes I've ever seen along those lines.

Fincher gives us times, days and dates at the bottom of the screen, which serve only to underline how the case seems to stretch out to infinity. There is even time-lapse photography showing the Transamerica building going up. Everything leads up to a heart-stopping moment when two men look, simply look, at one another. It is a more satisfying conclusion than Dirty Harry shooting Zodiac dead, say, in a football stadium.

Fincher is not the first director you would associate with this material. In 1992, at 30, he directed "Alien 3," which was the least of the Alien movies, but even then had his eye ("Alien 3" is one of the best-looking bad movies I have ever seen). His credits include "Se7en" (1995), a superb film about another serial killer with a pattern to his crimes; " The Game " (1997), with Michael Douglas caught in an ego-smashing web; " Fight Club " (1999), beloved by most, not by me; the ingenious terror of Jodie Foster in " Panic Room " (2002), and now, five years between features, his most thoughtful, involving film.

He seems to be in reaction against the slice-and-dice style of modern crime movies; his composition and editing are more classical, and he doesn't use nine shots when one will do. (If this same material had been put through an Avid to chop the footage into five times as many shots, we would have been sending our own ciphers to the studio.) Fincher is an elegant stylist on top of everything else, and here he finds the right pace and style for a story about persistence in the face of evil. I am often fascinated by true crime books, partly because of the way they amass ominous details (the best I've read is Blood and Money , by Tommy Thompson ), and Fincher understands that true crime is not the same genre as crime action. That he makes every character a distinct individual is proof of that; consider the attention given to Graysmith's choice of mixed drink.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Zodiac (2007)

Rated R for graphic violence and drug abuse

157 minutes

Mark Ruffalo as David Toschi

Robert Downey Jr. as Paul Avery

John Carroll Lynch as Arthur Leigh Allen

Brian Cox as Melvin Belli

Philip Baker Hall as Sherwood Morrill

Chloe Sevigny as Melanie

Anthony Edwards as Armstrong

Charles Fleischer as Bob Vaughn

Zach Grenier as Mel Nicolai

Dermot Mulroney as Capt. Marty Lee

Jake Gyllenhaal as Robert Graysmith

Elias Koteas as Sgt. Jack Mulanax

Based on the book by

Robert Graysmith
James Vanderbilt

Directed by

David Fincher

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A quiet, dialogue-driven thriller that delivers with scene after scene of gut-wrenching anxiety. David Fincher also spends more time illustrating nuances of his characters and recreating the mood of the '70s than he does on gory details of murder.

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Movie Review | 'Zodiac'

Hunting a Killer as the Age of Aquarius Dies

By Manohla Dargis

March 2, 2007

David Fincher’s magnificently obsessive new film, “Zodiac,” tracks the story of the serial killer who left dead bodies up and down California in the 1960s and possibly the ’70s, and that of the men who tried to stop him. Set when the Age of Aquarius disappeared into the black hole of the Manson family murders, the film is at once sprawling and tightly constructed, opaque and meticulously detailed. It’s part police procedural, part monster movie, a funereal entertainment that is an unexpected repudiation of Mr. Fincher’s most famous movie, the serial-killer fiction “Seven,” as well as a testament to this cinematic savant’s gifts.

Informed by history and steeped in pulp fiction, “Zodiac” stars a trio of beauties — Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo — all at the top of their performance game and captured in out-of-sight high-definition digital by the cinematographer Harris Savides. Mr. Gyllenhaal is the sneaky star of the show as the real-life cartoonist turned writer Robert Graysmith, though he doesn’t emerge from the wings until fairly late, after the bodies and the investigations have cooled. A silky, seductive Mr. Downey plays Paul Avery, a showboating newspaper reporter who chased the killer in print, while Mr. Ruffalo struts his estimable stuff as Dave Toschi, the San Francisco police detective who taught Steve McQueen how to wear a gun in “Bullitt” and pursued Zodiac close to the ground.

The relative unknown James Vanderbilt wrote the jigsaw-puzzle screenplay, working from Mr. Graysmith’s exhaustive, exhausting true-crime accounts of the murders and their investigations, “Zodiac” and “Zodiac Unmasked.” Mr. Graysmith, coyly played by Mr. Gyllenhaal as something of an overgrown Hardy Boy, his great big eyes matched by his great big ambition, was a political cartoonist doodling Nixon noses at The San Francisco Chronicle when Zodiac started sending letters and ciphers to the paper, divulging intimate knowledge of the crimes. The first messages arrived in 1969, the year Zodiac shot one young couple and knifed another in separate Northern California counties before moving on to San Francisco, where he put a bullet in the head of a cabbie.

The first cipher stumped an alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies, including the C.I.A. and F.B.I., but was cracked by a California schoolteacher and his wife. The decoded cipher opened with an ominous and crudely effective flourish: “I like killing people because it is so much fun it is more fun than killing wild game in the forrest because man is the most dangeroue anamal.” The letters, the misspellings and the lax punctuation kept coming, and perhaps so did the murders, though only five were substantively linked to him. A publicity hound, Zodiac claimed responsibility for murders he might not have committed, a habit that added to a boogeyman mystery and myth that chroniclers of his crimes, including Mr. Graysmith, have exploited.

Mr. Fincher made his name with “Seven,” a thriller in which the grotesquely mutilated bodies of murder victims are nothing more than lovingly designed props. Although more than capable of adding to the exploitation annals, he is up to something profoundly different in this film, which opens with the shooting of two people parked on a lovers’ lane at night, an attack that is soon followed by a squirmingly visceral knife assault on a couple during a daytime idyll. By front-loading the violence, Mr. Fincher instantly makes it clear just what kind of murderer this was — one who liked to get his hands wet — and ensures that the murders don’t become the story’s payoff, our reward for all the time stamps, geographic shifts, narrative complication and frustrated action.

The story structure is as intricate as the storytelling is seamless, with multiple time-and-place interludes neatly slotted into two distinct sections. The first largely concerns the murders and the investigations; the second, far shorter one involves Graysmith’s transformation of the murders and the investigations into a narrative. With its nicotine browns, the first section, which opens in 1969 and continues through the mid-’70s, looks as if it had been art-directed by a roomful of chain smokers. Dark and moody, like all of Mr. Fincher’s work, this part has been drained of almost all bright colors, save for splashes of yellow, the color of safety and caution, and an alarming-looking blue elixir called an Aqua Velva that is Graysmith’s bar drink of choice.

The second, more vibrantly hued section begins with Graysmith sitting in the Chronicle newsroom, its yellow pillars now painted blue. He looks as bright and bushy-tailed as the day he read Zodiac’s first letter, though now he comes equipped with three kids and a wife (an unfortunately familiar scold whom Chloë Sevigny imbues with some welcome wit). But there are demons still loose, inside and out, which is why Graysmith takes on Zodiac alone, warming up the stone-cold case. Domestic tranquillity, it seems, can’t hold a candle to work, to the fanatical pursuit of meaning and self-discovery, to finding out what makes you and the world tick — which is why, while “Zodiac” contains multitudes (genres, jokes, nods at 1970s New Hollywood), it feels like Mr. Fincher’s most personal film to date.

Maybe that’s why it doesn’t have the usual movie-made shrink- rapping and beard-stroking, as in Mommy was a castrating shrew and Daddy used a two-by-four as a paddle. Throughout the film Mr. Fincher and company keep focus on Zodiac’s crimes, on the nuts and bolts of his deeds, rather than on the nurture and nature behind them. There is no normalizing psychology here, and no deep-dish symbolism either, maybe because the title crazy is so peculiarly fond of symbols, which he sprinkles in his missives and, for one murder, wears superhero style on a black-hooded costume that makes him look like a portly ninja in a Z-movie quickie. It’s no wonder the victims don’t see the threat behind the masquerade until it’s too late.

Psychology isn’t Mr. Fincher’s bag; he isn’t interested in what lies and writhes beneath, but what is right there: the visible evidence. And what beautiful evidence it is. His polished technique can leave you slack-jawed, as can his scrupulous attention to detail: the peeling walls of a derelict building in “Fight Club,” the rows of ant-size letters marching across the pages of a composition notebook in “Seven,” the bruises splashed across a woman’s arm in “Zodiac.” There is mystery in this minutiae, not just virtuosity, and maybe, to judge from reports of his painstaking process, a touch of madness. Like his detectives and journalists, Mr. Fincher seems possessed by the need to recreate reality — to revisit the scene of the crime — piece by piece.

There’s a moment early in the film when Mr. Downey stands in the Chronicle newsroom, back arched and rear gently hoisted, affecting a posture that calls to mind Gene Kelly done up as a Toulouse-Lautrec jockey in “An American in Paris.” Avery has already started his long slip-slide into boozy oblivion, abetted by toots of coke, but as he strides around the newsroom, motored by talent and self-regard, he is the guy everybody else wants to be or wants to have. Like Mr. Ruffalo’s detective, who leaves everything bobbing in his rapid wake, Mr. Downey fills the screen with life that, by its very nature, is a rebuke to the death drive embodied by the Zodiac killer. Rarely has a film with so much blood on its hands seemed so insistently alive.

“Zodiac” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It contains extremely graphic gun and knife violence, as well as alcohol abuse and cocaine use.

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by David Fincher; written by James Vanderbilt, based on the books “Zodiac” and “Zodiac Unmasked” by Robert Graysmith; director of photography, Harris Savides; edited by Angus Wall; music by David Shire; production designer, Donald Graham Burt; produced by Mr. Vanderbilt, Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer, Bradley J. Fischer and Cean Chaffin; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 158 minutes.

WITH: Jake Gyllenhaal (Robert Graysmith), Mark Ruffalo (Inspector Dave Toschi), Robert Downey Jr. (Paul Avery), Anthony Edwards (Inspector Bill Armstrong), Brian Cox (Melvin Belli), Elias Koteas (Sgt. Jack Mulanax) and Chloë Sevigny (Melanie).

International edition
Australia edition
Europe edition

Mark Ruffalo, left, and Adam Goldberg in Zodiac

Zodiac review – David Fincher’s terrific, seductive account of real-life serial killings

It is impossible not to enjoy Zodiac: if enjoy is the word for a picture so often scary and stomach-turning

T he look and the feel and the bulk of David Fincher’s new movie are so seductive. He has made a massively confident and watchable thriller about the unsolved “Zodiac” murders in 1960s San Francisco: the work of a serial killer who sent teasing codes and letters to the local papers, and who is today either dead or still at large, preparing to resume his career.

This was a man who would lay low for months or years between his bloody crimes, while his pursuers - cops, reporters - grew older and more careworn as their own careers unwound. Zodiac spans a 30-year period to the early 1990s: an epic, tangled saga of leads muddled, evidence lost and areas of jurisdiction haggled over. The murder scenes are chilling, counterpointed by the stolid procedural work and the rich background settings. Fincher’s period material is outstanding; the colours of the San Francisco bay look ravishing in images that seem plucked from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and at one point there is a lovely (and presumably digital) stop-motion historical sequence, recreating the construction of the city’s Trans-america Pyramid.

Robert Downey Jr and Jake Gyllenhaal play two shirtsleeved journalists who are on Zodiac’s case: Downey is Paul Avery, the mercurial crime reporter who dresses like a wrecked aesthete - a sozzled stew of Jimmy Breslin and Oscar Wilde. Gyllenhaal is Robert Graysmith, the paper’s geeky and little-loved cartoonist whose amateur enthusiasm for the case becomes an obsession. Their work alternately helps and hinders the investigating officers, Inspectors David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards).

Our coffee-drinking odd couple do a fair bit of tense perching on each other’s desks in the open-plan 60s newsroom, at one stage looking up together in an image used in the picture’s publicity stills. Fincher is here surely recalling the most dynamic duo of the period: Woodward and Bernstein. But who is to be their Deep Throat? It can only be Zodiac himself, getting in touch with his misogynistic rants, crazy codes and creepy clues.

Zodiac is very different from Fincher’s other serial-killer film Seven. That was in the classical serial-killer genre, in which the culprit has a cogent, unified short-range career, conducted within a limited time-frame, leading to a clear unmasking, if not capture. This movie is quite different: Zodiac’s victims are not governed by, say, the 12 astrological signs. They are just random, anarchic. His story has no clear ending and so clearly belongs to that other genre of muddled, messy, unreadable real life. It is narrated from the investigator’s perspective, but in its elusive sprawl, it is comparable to killer’s-eye-view movies such as Shohei Imamura’s Vengeance Is Mine, Cédric Kahn’s Roberto Succo or Jaime Rosales’ The Hours of the Day. Those were about serial killers who are doing something other than serial-killing for large amounts of screen time: serial killers plugging away at the day job. The killer can muddle along for years without his career coming to any sort of crisis; it may not even be clear to him that he is a “serial killer” in the generally accepted sense of the term.

As his murders tail off, or are attributed to other wackos, Zodiac himself seems like a once-praised but now misunderstood artist who has mysteriously neglected or even abandoned his vocation. In failing to nail him, the wearied cops and newspapermen are like critics who have not delivered a definitive appreciation of his genius.

It is impossible not to enjoy Zodiac: if enjoy is the word for a picture so often scary and stomach-turning. And it certainly isn’t boring, despite a mammoth two-and-a-half hour running time. Fincher’s feel for detail is terrific: the chewed pencils, typewriters and clunky tele-fax machines are very real, and there are some bizarre moments so absurd that they could only have come from real life, such as the conceited lawyer Melvin Belli (Brian Cox) taking a call on live TV from a heavy-breathing weirdo claiming to be Zodiac, and arranging a “secret” rendezvous with him at a location actually revealed on the air: with the inevitable media-cop scrum as squad cars and TV vans scream through the streets to this top-secret address.

Gyllenhaal and Downey’s performances are arguably a little opaque, and Downey plays the dialogue in his trademark swallowed gabble, which is now verging on self-parody. Ruffalo, too, is in danger of getting typecast as the cop, and there is a tricky moment in which his character is taken off the case on the grounds that he forged some Zodiac letters released to the press. Nothing in Ruffalo’s plain-dealing performance casts any light on the vanity or delusion that must have been behind this baffling professional lapse.

Maybe there’s no sense to be made of this unwieldy, unlovely, downbeat story. But there’s no doubting Fincher’s ambition and sheer cinematic virility.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday June 9 2007:

In the review below we described Melvin Belli as a “conceited TV psychologist”. In fact he was an American lawyer, famous for personal-injury cases and nicknamed the King of Torts.

Robert Downey Jr
David Fincher
Mark Ruffalo
Crime films
Period and historical films

The Movie Review: 'Zodiac'

A former music-video auteur, Fincher largely made his name in 1995 with the grand guignol murder fantasy Se7en , arguably the most influential genre film of the last 15 years directed by someone not named Tarantino. But where Se7en , with its stygian gloom and theatrical executions, inflated the serial killer genre to gothic proportions, Zodiac lets the air back out. It is methodical rather than macabre, clinical rather than cruel. Consciously modeled on All the President's Men , it shares that film's knack for almost ostentatious understatement.

Early in the movie there are two gruesome, would-be double murders. (In each case, one of the intended victims remarkably survives.) But rather than up the ante in typical fashion, with an escalating series of violent assaults, Zodiac quickly sprawls outward, following the ripples created by the initial bloodshed. The killer begins writing letters to the San Francisco Chronicle , full of coded clues and threats. The paper's flamboyant, dissolute crime reporter, Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), begins covering the case, as does, more oddly, a timid editorial cartoonist named Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). When the unknown killer, who dubs himself "Zodiac," murders a cabbie in San Francisco, another pair of investigators is added to the mix in police officers Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards).

As the weeks and years pass, clues are uncovered, misplaced, debunked. Threats of further violence--including, famously, a promise to murder a schoolbus full of children--are mailed to the Chronicle . Suspects multiply, even as the men investigating them begin to dwindle. Avery slips into alcoholism and drug abuse; Armstrong transfers to another job in the department. Even supercop Toschi (the real-life model for Steve McQueen's "Bullitt") gradually moves on to other cases, other priorities. As everyone else's interest fades, though, Graysmith, the cartoonist, becomes ever more obsessed with the case, gradually reigniting the embers of the cold investigation.

Throughout, there are subtle nods to the changes taking place in American culture in the late '60s and '70s, and to the Zodiac killer's modest role in hastening them. The earliest scenes from the film, of teens cruising the innocent streets of California, could be outtakes from America Graffiti . Later, we find cop Toschi at a special screening of Dirty Harry , a film loosely based on the hunt for the Zodiac killer (in it, the psycho, "Scorpio," really does abduct the schoolkids) and a harbinger of the nation's shifting mood on crime. Irritated by the movie's implicit rebuke of his work, Toschi leaves the theater early. "No need for due process, right?" he grumbles afterward.

The cast--which also features Chloë Sevigny, Brian Cox, and John Carroll Lynch--is uniformly excellent, but the real star of Zodiac is Fincher, whose craftsmanship shows in every frame. Visually, the film is a pleasure: Shot entirely with a digital camera, it has a slight golden hue that reinforces the theme of an America just beginning to lose its innocence. The design and costumes are spot on, conjuring that most implausible of eras in a manner simultaneously precise and dreamlike.

But it's in the movie's pacing that Fincher's touch shows most clearly. This is a film in which, frequently, not very much is happening: Reporters and investigators try to crack a code or interview suspects or discuss elements of the crimes. There are no gunfights or car chases. Yet talky though the film is (and long, clocking in at over two and a half hours), it has an almost breathless momentum. Though the dialogue itself is not particularly memorable, the entire cast crackles in conversation; they have their patter down. One early scene, in which policeman Armstrong tries to negotiate some thorny jurisdictional conflicts with officers at two other departments, is a particular pleasure, transmuting one of the dullest subjects ever committed to celluloid into gold. Whatever advice or direction Fincher may have offered his performers on their line readings--his verbal choreography, for want of a better term--paid off handsomely.

Indeed, it's difficult to think of a more perfect pairing of director and project than Zodiac , which attaches Fincher's legendarily painstaking methods to a story about procedure and obsession. It's not merely the director's tendency to shoot and re-shoot a given scene dozens of times. ("The first day of production in San Francisco we shot 56 takes of Mark and Jake," Fincher explained to Entertainment Weekly , "and it's the 56th take that's in the movie.") Along with screenwriter James Vanderbilt, Fincher also spent months interviewing witnesses and investigators and hiring forensic experts to examine the Zodiac evidence anew. Just as Graysmith, the killer's most tireless pursuer (on whose books the screenplay was based), had done some 30 years earlier, the filmmakers essentially reinvestigated the case from the ground up. It is perhaps thanks to this doggedness that Zodiac captures so persuasively that feeling, familiar to anyone who's worked long enough in journalism (or, I imagine, law enforcement), that the truth might be just around the corner, that one more scrap of evidence, one more phone call, could make all the pieces of the puzzle fit together at last. Like Graysmith, Fincher has madness in his method; unlike him, he has found what he was looking for.

This post originally appeared at TNR.com.

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Metacritic reviews

100 Village Voice Village Voice Zodiac exhausts more than one genre. Termite art par excellence, it burrows for the sake of burrowing, as fascinated by its own nooks and crannies as "Inland Empire."
100 Newsweek David Ansen Newsweek David Ansen The movie holds you in its grip from start to finish.
100 Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman Zodiac never veers from its stoically gripping, police-blotter tone, yet it begins to take on the quality of a dream.
90 The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen Firing on all cylinders as a creepy thriller, police procedural and "All the President's Men"-style investigative newsroom drama, the smart, extremely vivid production oozes period authenticity.
90 Variety Todd McCarthy Variety Todd McCarthy Conveying an astonishing array of information across a long narrative arc while still maintaining dramatic rhythm and tension, this adaptation of Robert Graysmith's bestseller reps by far director David Fincher's most mature and accomplished work.
90 L.A. Weekly L.A. Weekly Zodiac may be the perfect meeting of filmmaker and subject -- an obsessive's portrait of obsession that is, finally, a monument to irresolution.
88 Rolling Stone Peter Travers Rolling Stone Peter Travers Unique and unmissable.
88 Premiere Glenn Kenny Premiere Glenn Kenny It makes for a daringly different kind of thriller -- cerebral, meticulous, haunting.
70 New York Magazine (Vulture) David Edelstein New York Magazine (Vulture) David Edelstein What begins like your basic police procedural becomes more and more choppy and diffuse. To a point, that’s intentional: Zodiac was never caught, and Fincher aims to creep you out with the lack of closure.
67 Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten At 2 1/2 hours, the film is too long in the telling and too short on suspense.
See all 40 reviews on Metacritic.com
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Drinking to drunkenness in bars (Paul and Robert f

Positive Messages

Serial killer is cruel and plainly deranged; cops and reporters argue amongst themselves and become obsessed with the case to the point of ruining their home lives. Paul gives his editor the finger.

Violence & Scariness

Extremely bloody crime scenes; violence includes shooting, stabbing (especially brutal), fighting; much discussion of means of murder, ammunition, and gun types; letters from killer describe plans to kill children on school buses (a boy hears this on TV and looks worried); mention of gas chamber; woman in prison appears with dark bruises on her arm; scary scene in basement when Robert thinks he's met the killer by accident (jump shot, dark shadows, tense music); discussion of a suspect's deviant history ("touching kids").

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Sex, Romance & Nudity

Suggestion of sexual desire as first victims "park" (they're shot before they even kiss); Paul reports that the killer is a "latent homosexual."

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Repeated profanity, especially "f--k," as well as "s--t," "hell," "goddamn it," and other colorful language ("Sweet mother of Christ," "Jesus on crutches," "Tell him to screw," "crap," "getting your rocks off with a girl") and name-calling ("shorty" and "retard").

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Products & Purchases

Some references by name (Folgers, the movie Bullitt ), plus background imagery (Coca-Cola and Campbell's soup in vending machines, Slinky on TV); Dirty Harry on movie screen.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Drinking to drunkenness in bars (Paul and Robert favor blue drinks called "Aqua Velvas"); more drinking at Belli's Christmas party (he offers a "toddy"); frequent cigarette smoking; Paul looks high/wasted at work -- he snorts cocaine and keeps a full bar and other drugs in his home.

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Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this three-hour movie about the investigation into a string of real-life serial murders during the early 1970s is too violent and disturbing for most teens (and probably even some adults). While some violence takes place off screen, what does appear is brutal and bloody: The Zodiac shoots a couple in their car, stabs another couple in the back (the victims' pained, horrified faces are shown both times), and shoots a cabbie. Police officers and reporters discuss the deaths in some detail. Characters drink heavily and smoke frequently (one also uses hard drugs). References are made to the killer's "latent homosexuality" and a suspect's pedophilia. Language includes repeated uses of "f--k." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 20 parent reviews

What's the Story?

An intelligent, sinuous mystery, ZODIAC is less interested in sensational violence than in the ways that the media affects such violence. Based on the notorious, still-unsolved early-1970s Zodiac murders in the San Francisco area, the movie focuses first on efforts to figure out the murderer's motives and then on the ways that the Zodiac "imagined" himself into public consciousness by writing letters to the San Francisco Chronicle and leaving clues to taunt the police. The film begins with a murder -- the first one for which the killer took public credit. After the shooting, Zodiac calls the police and sends a letter to the Chronicle , demonstrating -- in his mind, anyway -- that he's smarter than all of them. As he uses the media to "make himself up," the movie considers the effects of the case on those who pursue him, including Inspector David Toschi ( Mark Ruffalo ) and his partner, Inspector William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards); as well as earnest cartoonist Robert Graysmith ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) and brilliantly self-destructive crime reporter Paul Avery ( Robert Downey Jr. ). They run into problems at every turn, from law enforcement officials in different jurisdictions who don't want to work together to handwriting experts, fingerprinters, and even celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli ( Brian Cox ). With egos getting in the way, only rudimentary technologies to work with, and legal impediments, no one cracks the case, and everyone loses themselves to it.

Is It Any Good?

David Fincher 's excellent movie includes several violent murder scenes (a stabbing is especially grisly). But it's more interested in the consequences of the brutality: crime scenes, investigative procedures, fear in the community. In a mess of intersecting obsessions and deceptions, Zodiac finds remarkable coherence, tracing the similar needs, means, and fictions that structure truth.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the media's relationship with serial killers. How do the killers use the media to gain attention? How do the media use the killers to gain ratings? How do viewers and readers respond to such coverage? Think about how movies portray killers and their pursuers: Unlike The Silence of the Lambs , this movie focuses on the investigation, with very little information about the killer. How does that affect the film's narrative and displays of violence? Is violence more effective when it's shown, or when it's implied? Why?

Movie Details

In theaters : March 1, 2007
On DVD or streaming : July 24, 2007
Cast : Chloe Sevigny , Jake Gyllenhaal , Mark Ruffalo
Director : David Fincher
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Warner Bros.
Genre : Thriller
Run time : 165 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : some strong killings, language, drug material and brief sexual images.
Last updated : April 14, 2024

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Just the facts: two homicide detectives, a crime eporter and a political cartoonist spend decades knocking themselves out to atch a serial killer who never (officially) gets caught. Careers, arriages, even sanity fall victim to obsession. That’s Zodiac , a eticulous, mind-bending, nonstop mesmerizer of a movie that needed another ie-hard fanatic to make it pop onscreen.

And who better for the job than he brilliant, driven David Fincher, a director known to put his actors hrough more than 100 takes to get the nuances he wants. He raised the ar on kinky freaks in Se7en , plumbed the roots of trickery in The Game , tracked delusion to its core in Fight Club and used a prowling camera o dig out psychological truth in Panic Room . Zodiac , the name of the sycho who ted terrorizing the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968 and ormented the press with coded messages, is right up the director’s dark lley. Fincher was seven and living in the kill zone when his dad told im that the Zodiac had threatened to shoot kids like him as they tepped off their school bus.

It’s a wonder Fincher wasn’t traumatized by his nut job, who inspired the fictional killer Scorpio in Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry . Primal fear is hard to explain away, but the characters n Fincher’s film try to do just that by cutting a monster down to uman size. At the head of the list is cartoonist Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal with just the right blend of smarts and geek-boy ixation. Graysmith, a shy newbie at The San Francisco Chronicle , is ripped by the first letter, which begins, “This is the Zodiac speaking.” or more details, he hounds the paper’s ace crime reporter, Paul Avery the reliably amazing Robert Downey Jr.), who in turn hounds the SFPD’s otshot homicide inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and his partner, illiam Armstrong (Anthony Edwards). The contentious bond among these en will stretch into years, even when Armstrong drops out and no arrests re made. It’s Graysmith who will later write the two books, Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked , that serve as the film’s source material, bolstered by resh investigations launched by Fincher and screenwriter James anderbilt.

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That’s a lot of dogs to be gnawing on one bone. But make no istake, you will be hooked and creeped out big time. Fincher stages the irst murder with blood-chilling intensity. A hooded killer walks up to a ar parked on a lovers’ lane and opens fire on a teen couple (he urvives, she doesn’t). It could be the stuff of a typical CSI episode — iolent porn sandwiched between commercials. But Fincher transcends xploitation. We feel the swiftness of the crime, the shock of what follows nd the reeling sense of life snuffed out in seconds.

Later, in one of he most realistic and wrenching depictions of murder in broad daylight, he Zodiac stalks a couple picnicking by a lake in Napa. Their serenity s interrupted when the Zodiac is suddenly on them with a knife, tabbing them repeatedly. Fincher lingers on the aftermath, of being left, rying for help, to bleed to death. These sequences, including the xecution of a cab driver on a suburban street, are paralyzing in their rutal immediacy. They need to be. It’s the human toll taken by the Zodiac, ho sparked copycat crimes across the country, that drives the rotagonists to keep hammering at this cold case even when the killings stop nd media interest wanes.

Fincher never sensationalizes these images. For he first time in his career, he’s dealing with real people and ranting them a respect denied by tabloids and Zodiac’s attempts to hype imself into a media headline. He achieves a near-documentary realism nhanced by high-definition camerawork from the gifted Harris Savides Elephant, Gerry ) that brings a gritty urgency to everything from the offices f cops and reporters to the streets where the crimes were actually ommitted. The film calls to mind two 1970s classics, Francis Coppola’s The Conversation and Alan Pakula’s All the President’s Men , in its vocation of time and place, with added resonance from the striking music by avid Shire, who scored both of those films. Fincher’s shrewd use of ongs to bridge time finds a nerve-jangling menace in Donovan’s “Hurdy urdy Man” with its intimations of “unenlightened shadows cast.”

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Still, t’s the people in those shadows who draw you in. Gyllenhaal pulls us nexorably into a mind-set that ultimately wrecks Graysmith’s marriage to elanie (Chloe Sevigny). And Ruffalo is outstanding at showing us a attered Toschi — once enough of a supercop to be the model for Steve McQueen in Bullitt and Michael Douglas on TV’s The Streets of San rancisco — demoted out of homicide but still willing to assist Graysmith on is quest. The most dramatic decline is experienced by Avery, whose ddiction to the case is trumped by his self-destructive jones for booze nd cocaine. Downey gives a blazing performance that runs the gamut from umor to heartbreak. All the actors excel. Brian Cox is sharply funny s celeb lawyer Melvin Belli, and John Carroll Lynch will haunt your ightmares as Arthur Leigh Allen, the suspect the cops dismiss and raysmith comes to focus on.

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Put your whodunit expectations away when you isit Zodiac . It’s the process that pins you to your seat. A film this ainstaking and tenacious won’t appeal to those in it strictly for the lood lust. Fincher is a powerhouse filmmaker, but he doesn’t pander. He hakes you up in ways you don’t see coming. Thanks to him, the still-new ovie year, littered with barf-inducing Hollywood formula (hello, Norbit ), has busted out with something unique and unmissable.

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Zodiac Movie Review: David Fincher’s Decade-Defining Masterpiece from the 2000s Remains a Classic

Zodiac is directed by david fincher and stars jake gyllenhaal, robert downey jr. and mark ruffalo.

David Fincher’s Zodiac remains an undeniable classic since its 2007 release, standing as a pivotal moment in the director’s historic career. In this crime drama, Fincher navigates the web of the Zodiac killer’s decade-spanning reign of terror, creating an atmospheric and compelling story that has only grown in cultural significance and critical acclaim over the years.

Zodiac stood out not only as David Fincher’s best film at the time of its release but also as a precursor to the high-quality content and thematic depth he would explore in subsequent releases. The film showcases Fincher’s notoriously meticulous attention to detail, combining true-to-life sets with digital effects to recreate the San Francisco Bay Area with unparalleled precision. This commitment to authenticity serves as a foundation for the narrative to unfold naturally and realistically.

The ensemble cast, led by Jake Gyllenhaal , Robert Downey Jr. , and Mark Ruffalo , delivers outstanding performances that help elevate Zodiac to another level. Gyllenhaal, in particular, takes center stage as Robert Graysmith, the cartoonist consumed by an obsessive quest to unmask the Zodiac killer. The film weaves in and out of the lives of its protagonists, spanning the years from the rise of the Zodiac killer to Graysmith’s meticulous and thorough documentation of the case.

But what sets Zodiac apart from other serial killer movies is its clinical approach to various other genres. It seamlessly transitions between being a taut, thrilling thriller, an obsessive procedural, a poignant portrayal of time passing, and, even in fleeting moments, a haunting horror movie. The film’s runtime of 2 hours and 40 minutes may seem daunting on paper, but David Fincher’s slick and stylish design , coupled with the cast’s delivery of an incredible script, creates a movie that captivates and mesmerizes, making time seemingly fly by.

Fincher’s ability to merge practical and computer-generated effects is on full display, creating a visually stunning and immersive experience. The film’s design is not just a backdrop; it earns the cliché that it’s a character in itself, playing a crucial role in moving the plot along. This detailed, sparse world mirrors the complexity of the case and its enduring impact on those involved.

As the film explores the lives of its characters, each actor shines in different ways. Jake Gyllenhaal’s portrayal of Graysmith’s obsessive pursuit is remarkably captivating and on brand, while Robert Downey Jr.’s character undergoes a transformation, descending into paranoia and addiction. Mark Ruffalo, playing the tormented cop unable to break the case, provides a nuanced performance that adds depth to the film’s exploration of the toll a case like this takes on those involved.

Reviews for Movies like Zodiac (2007)

Zodiac not only serves as a masterclass in procedural crime thrillers but also holds its ground among other classics in the genre. It seamlessly fits into the realm of films like Memories of Murder , Silence of the Lambs , and even Fincher’s own later works like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . The film’s enduring relevance is a testament to its status as a certified classic and a landmark of 21st-century cinema.

Despite its critical acclaim, Zodiac did not receive the widespread recognition it deserved during awards season, overshadowed by other bleak films like There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men . However, its impact has only grown over the years, becoming a favorite for many and solidifying its place as my favorite movie of 2007, a year often regarded as one of the best this century.

Zodiac is a timeless masterpiece that transcends the crime drama genre. David Fincher’s direction, coupled with outstanding performances from the cast, creates an immersive experience that lingers in the minds of viewers. Its intricate narrative, incredible attention to detail, and thematic depth make it not just a film of its time but a work of art that continues to find new audiences time and time again, solidifying its place as one of the greatest movies of the 21st century.

Genre: Crime , Drama , Mystery , Thriller

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Zodiac Film Cast and Credits

Jake Gyllenaal as Robert Graysmith

Mark Ruffalo as David Toschi

Robert Downey Jr. as Paul Avery

Anthony Edwards as William Armstrong

Brian Cox as Melvin Belli

Charles Fleischer as Bob Vaughn

Zach Grenier as Mel Nicolai

Philip Baker Hall as Sherwood Morrill

Elias Koteas as Jack Mulanax

John Carroll Lynch as Arthur Leigh Allen

Dermot Mulroney as Martin Lee

Chloë Sevigny as Melanie

Director: David Fincher

Writer: James Vanderbilt

Cinematography: Harris Savides

Editor: Angus Wall

Composer: David Shire

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'Zodiac' Revisited: The Films of David Fincher

The David Fincher masterpiece is an obsessively-made feature about obsession.

[This is a re-post of an article from my retrospective series on the work of director David Fincher . These articles contain spoilers. ]

Listening to the commentary tracks for Se7en , The Game , Fight Club , and Panic Room , you can hear in Fincher's voice a slight bit of annoyance and frustration. It's not quite bitterness, but there's an acerbic quality from a man who's exhausted and can't help but lay out wry observations. The Panic Room track in particular conveys the sense that no one should ever make a movie because it's a hellish experience meant only for masochists. But his commentaries pick up afterwards, and I believe that's partly because Fincher found his true love: digital.

Digital completely changed the way Fincher made movies, and it allowed him to provide the precision to performances that he'd applied to all other aspects of his pictures. From here on, he sounds much happier, and when talking about Zodiac , it's like a trip down memory lane as he recalls childhood memories of a serial killer who terrorized and tormented a city, and would never be caught. Zodiac is by no means a happy movie, but it's one that feels like part of a revitalized director who found a picture that fits perfectly with his admiration for process, attention to detail, and the cynicism of how a search for "truth" can rip lives apart.

Zodiac is not a serial killer film. Unlike Se7en the Zodiac murders aren't lurid or unnervingly artful. They are absolutely, painfully brutal. He is a force that disrupts both the idyllic and the mundane even though the lead up to the murders are always foreboding. When Darlene Ferrin ( Ciara Hughes ) picks up young Mike Mageau ( Lee Norris ), it's with a long tracking shot that feels predatory. It's from her perspective, but the initial implication is that it's the killer prowling for victims. When the Zodiac guns down Darlene and Mike, the slow-motion photography is absolutely chilling when played with Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" (a song Fincher chose because he personally associated it with the time period). This killing is not made to look "cool", and it's given an extra chill when the scene ends with the way the Zodiac says "Good-bye," to the 911 dispatcher.

The second murder at Lake Berryessa is also a disruption. Despite the beautiful setting, the colors are washed out but also clean. It's like looking at an old photo, and not in the way of the 70s-style Paramount logo that opens the movie. The scene is off-center just enough so that when the Zodiac comes in, it's certainly an odd juxtaposition, but not so far off as to be comical, which is saying something when you consider it's a stocky man dressed in black wearing an executioner's hood in broad daylight. And once again, the murder is absolutely brutal with Cecelia Shepard ( Pell James ) screaming as she's stabbed to death.

The final murder, the killing of San Francisco taxicab driver Paul Stine, is perhaps the most "showy" as Fincher takes us on a long, overhead view of the cab making its way to Washington and Cherry before Stine is shot in the neck in the same slow-motion fashion as Darlene and Mike. Like the Zodiac, Fincher chose to change his pattern.

And those are the only murders in the movie.

As Fincher points out in his commentary track, Zodiac is "a newspaper story that becomes an obsession with justice."

I love that the story of Zodiac , the story about a killer who is never brought to justice (and justice itself may be impossible) is arguably Fincher's most personal movie to date. Aside from all of the personal connections, both in terms of where he grew up and his father working in the news business, there's an awareness of trying to branch out and redefine himself as a filmmaker by scaling back down to the bare essentials. "I saw this movie as flying in the face of everything I had done before," says Fincher, "and I saw it as very, very simple in terms of its travel and cause-and-effect."

If you break down Zodiac , it's deeply methodical. We have dates to guide us. The events are largely done without embellishment other than the murders, which are gruesome and spur the imagination to the point where Fincher—who was a stickler for detail on this movie when it came to recreating the time period right down to making sure the San Francisco Chronicle set had pencils in the desks—is willing to bend the truth a bit.

For example, Fincher admits that Darlene and Mike probably knew their attacker, and Zodiac aficionados debate whether or not the killer used a silencer. Fincher's interpretation provides the dramatic flourishes the Zodiac would probably admire, and it's also worth noting that every murder ends with a fade-out as if every killing is a little vignette where we have to step into the Zodiac's world, a world which is embellished, theatrical, and operatic, much like the killer.

Once again (and I'm going to point this out every time), I think Fincher has a disturbing respect for people who are brilliant even if they're also terrible. I do think Fincher's comment about John Doe in Se7en —"more enthusiasm than technique"—applies more to Zodiac, but there's an appreciation of an artist. The letters are artistic expression, and as Fincher says in the commentary, he's fascinated by the "ongoing conversation with someone who is ‘in-process’", and the letters are the hub of that development. One of the things I like about Fincher is that he's kind of fucked up in his interests, but he's not a personality who is constantly reminding you of how "fucked up" he is. He plays it calm, cool, and collected, which is part of what makes his movies so powerful. The most dangerous guy isn't the raving maniac; it's the master planner sitting quietly in the corner of the room.

When we return to hard procedural, everything is cold and detached. It's slightly ironic that Fincher's first digital movie would be for a film set in the 1970s, but it works perfectly in so many ways. It's extremely subtle right down the magnificent visual effects work. Unlike The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , the effects in Zodiac are literally background at certain points. When Toschi ( Mark Ruffalo ) and Armstrong ( Anthony Edwards ) go to investigate the murder at Washington and Cherry, the entire background is green screen, and it's seamless. That may not seem like a huge deal now, but it's damn impressive that the effect perfectly holds up seven years later.

The visual effects and cinematography help provide a ghostly air to the whole proceedings. The methodology of the investigation still has a quick pace and even a dark sense of humor, especially when Paul Avery ( Robert Downey Jr. ) is on screen, and even though it's just Downey doing Downey (aka Tony Stark), it's still amusing (he also has my favorite line in the movie: "Me thinks our friend is a tad bit fuckered in the head."). Zodiac is by no means soulless or mechanical, but it is merciless in the sense of an indifferent universe.

Fincher is still soaking his movie in gorgeous contrasts and deep blacks, but there's a pervading sense of normalcy that makes the movie both melancholy and exciting. We know Toschi, Armstrong, and Robert Graysmith ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) are all smart people, and they can drive the investigation forward. The tragedy is that it doesn't matter . The investigation is paradoxically what eats away at these men. "The Rick Marshalls of this world will suck you dry," Toschi tells Graysmith.

Fincher isn't advocating that people give up trying to catch killers or that procedural movies are dumb. The form of this movie is a true procedural as opposed to Se7en which is lurid thriller, albeit one that's incredibly well-made. Zodiac is a procedural down to the point where Fincher is willing to remove central characters for long stretches of time. We briefly get to know Graysmith and Avery, and then once Toschi and Armstrong enter the picture, they own it for a large chunk of the movie.

Fincher could have ended Zodiac at the screening of Dirty Harry . It would be a nice little button on a story about guys who tried to get Zodiac , they didn't succeed, and movies provide the comfort of justice reality refuses to provide. That's an abbreviated version of the film, but it's telling and not showing. We know that sometimes cops don't catch the bad guys. It's unusual that they missed one as prominent as the Zodiac, but that's sometime how it goes. What remains unanswered is the cost of justice, and how an unsolved puzzle can undo someone as pure and good-hearted as Graysmith.

When Graysmith renters the picture, Zodiac is now an idea. We've met Arthur Lee Allen ( John Carroll Lynch ) and lost him. The practical case has fallen apart, and Graysmith—a lover of puzzles and a freaking boy scout—can't accept that. There has to be some semblance of justice in the world. It can't be at the mercy of someone who sends letters that were, as Fincher puts it in the commentary track, "Designed to be a real ‘fuck you’ to the people who were hunting him."

Fincher notes that the movie took more than its fair share of dramatic license with the story, which is fine because Zodiac is not a docudrama, and it's not about "catching" Zodiac, which is why the movie is enduring and captivating. It's about the impossibility of justice and how the search for truth may not be worth the answers. "I need to know who he is," Graysmith tells his wife ( Chloë Sevigny ) as she's leaving him.

Except catching Zodiac doesn't make the world a better place, and that's why the movie is so indifferent to his passion. It's still beautifully shot, and it matches Graysmith's dread, but it never indulges his passion. David Fincher isn't on Graysmith's side, nor does he particularly pity his protagonist. Granted, Graysmith doesn't even take a breath to feel pain over losing his family before he hops right back into the investigation. There's the sense that if he can just get one answer, then the world will be right. Fincher doesn't even particularly care if Allen was the killer. It's just a narrative through line.

Graysmith does eventually get to look Allen in the eye—a look that took 14 years after the first murder—and that's all the "justice" you can get. Justice isn't about righting a wrong, or punishing the wicked. At most, justice provides solace, and for Graysmith, it was at particularly high cost. Yes, he got a book out of it (one that's horribly written; I powered through Zodiac Unmasked and it doesn't know if it wants to follow the case chronologically or jump right to pointing the finger at Allen), but that's a minor victory compared to everything that came before.

With such a heavy reliance on character-driven procedural aspects, there's not much else to focus on. Aside from the killings, there's hardly any embellishment, which is why there's so much emphasis on the performances. Zodiac has a propulsive plotline, but that plotline eats away at its characters. Fincher already did plenty of takes on his other movies, but digital allowed him to be as exacting with his actors as he was on any other part of the production. Some actors enjoy this process and embrace it as a rehearsal period. Others: not so much (you can see Gyllenhaal borderline whining on the set in the making-of documentary, and Downey infamously left mason jars of urine lying around in protest). The key difference is that digital brings everything in line. There's a crispness to the performances that's slightly sharper than in previous movies. This may seem like a minor detail, but keep in mind that at one point during the production of Zodiac , Fincher told his costume designer to remove one line of thread in the eye-slit of the Zodiac's executioner's hood. The technology was now as precise as the director.

The movie closes with the adult Mike Mageau ( Jimmi Simpson ) identifying Allen as his attacker while "Hurdy Gurdy Man" plays once again. That night on July 4, 1969 never really ended.

Death would follow Fincher to his next picture, but it would be soaked in a lush romance that struggled with life, love, time, and cross-purposes.

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Zodiac (United States, 2007)

Zodiac is a police procedural - a sort of souped-up, ultra-long episode of Law & Order . Based on the 1986 "true crime" book by Robert Graysmith, the movie looks back on one of the nation's most sinister unsolved crimes: the Northern California serial killings by the so-called "Zodiac killer." Although no arrest was ever made and the case now resides on the SFPD's inactive list, many journalists, cops, and investigators had their own "favorite" candidates for the identity of Zodiac. The movie follows the hunt by cartoonist-turned-writer Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) as he seeks to unmask the villain.

To its credit, Zodiac is faithful to its source material. However, from a stylish director like David Fincher, the straightforward, no-frills approach is a little bit of a letdown. The digital photography is sharp, but there's nothing remarkable about it. There's no sense of the cinematic flair that has marked Fincher's previous efforts (even Alien 3 , for all of its faults, was visually dynamic). One can count on one hand the number of flourishes apparent during the nearly three-hour running time.

During its first hour, Zodiac unfolds along three parallel trajectories. The killer systematically eliminates victims (the crimes are re-enacted based on the survivor testimony contained in Graysmith's book). The police, led by detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) investigate and collect clues. And newspaper people like Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and Graysmith fill the papers with speculation and fact. Then, a little more than a third of the way through the book, the Zodiac killer's spree stops and the movie chronicles Graysmith's obsessive hunt to uncover his identity. He conducts interviews, pours over old files, and eventually comes up with the perfect suspect: Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch), who is damned by circumstantial evidence.

Zodiac does not promise an impartial perspective of the search for the killer. Since it's based on Graysmith's book, it represents the author's viewpoint and the facts are slanted in favor of his preferred suspect. Whether Allen was the Zodiac killer or not is something we'll never know (he died more than a decade ago), but the film stacks the deck in his favor to avoid being completely open ended. Certainly, few who see this film will leave the theater frustrated by the real-world fact that the case remains unsolved.

That Zodiac draws conclusions isn't its problem (to the degree that it has a problem) - the structure is. While the killer is active and the police investigation is in full throttle, there's tension and momentum. It's a cat-and-mouse game. But when the focus shifts to Graysmith, the film shifts into neutral. While there's a certain amount of fascination associated with following an investigator tracking down disintegrating leads and digging through mounds of old records, it's not cinematic, and this at times makes the second half of Zodiac sluggish. Fincher's attempts to create tension (anonymous phone calls with heavy breathing, a creepy film buff who might be dangerous) inject suspense, but the intensity level is low. As thrillers go, most of Zodiac is more of a slow burn than an explosion - not necessarily a bad thing, but it requires patience. The running length is problematic. Fincher is so determined to meticulously recreate Graysmith's investigation that he risks losing his audience. There are numerous dramatically effective sequences during the second half, but the uneven pace results in stagnant periods.

So where is Fincher in all of this? Zodiac has a generic look and feel that is at variance with what we have come to expect from the director. Even Fincher's early music videos had more style than this. That's not to say that the film's direction is inept. Technically, it's fine and there are some nice helicopter shots (and a nifty time lapse sequence of a building being constructed), but there's nothing special about it. It's as if Fincher is saying, "Look! I can do regular stuff too!" There was more menace and atmosphere in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam , another film about a real-life serial killer.

The performances, like Fincher's direction, are competent. Jake Gyllenhaal is understated as usual, but that's appropriate for his low-key character. As Graysmith's obsession grows, Gyllenhaal comes alive. Mark Ruffalo is very good at being petulant but has trouble with sincerity. Robert Downey Jr. once again plays the flamboyant rogue with alcohol/substance abuse problems. Art imitating life, I suppose, but he can do this kind of role in his sleep. Arguably, the best performance belongs to John Carroll Lynch who captures Allen's creepiness without doing anything overt. Brian Cox steals a few scenes as Melvin Belli (he even gets to make a Star Trek reference).

Although the entirety of the movie spans 22 years, from 1969 until 1991, the majority of the scenes transpire in 1969 and the early '70s, and the film is at its most effective during those years. Zodiac becomes fragmented when it starts lurching ahead to highlight the "big moments" in Graysmith's investigation. It's difficult to be too harsh on Zodiac because the subject is interesting (such is often the case with serial killers) and it is fascinating to observe as the investigatory pieces fall into place. Ultimately, however, the length and uneven pacing are stumbling blocks with which an audience must contend. Patient viewers will be rewarded; others may wish for something with less subtlety and more verve.

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Zodiac Review

18 May 2007

158 minutes

Jack The Ripper is remembered 120 years after he put down the knife for two reasons: a) someone (almost certainly not him) wrote taunting letters in red ink to the media and the police signed with the catchy ‘trade-name’; and b) he was never caught and cannot definitively be identified. The Metropolitan Police may not be working the case, but the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 are still open, and therefore the Ripper might as well still be at large and dangerous. Because the mystery remains unsolved, he is still frightening. How much more frightening, then, is San Francisco’s Zodiac Killer — who took great pains (including swatches of a victim’s bloody shirt) to prove that he wrote his own letters to the press, has also eluded the police for decades since his first crimes, and might conceivably still be alive?

Part of the modern-day ritual necessary for taking on board any horror, from the average killing spree to the 9/11 attacks, is to get the facts of any case straight in a succession of chronicles — paperback true-crime bestsellers, couple of TV movies, and (eventually) a more considered cinema film. With Zodiac, this pattern is frustrated — we have the books and the movies, but there are crucial gaps in the intricate and exhaustive tapestry of hard evidence. Robert Graysmith, the doodler and puzzle addict who picked up the case when more official investigators had walked away, is convinced he knows who the killer was, and David Fincher’s film adaptation of Graysmith’s two books on the case eventually comes near to the same conclusion. However, there’s really no way (short of the silly detours into fantasy that afflict most Jack The Ripper movies) of providing the ‘closure’ demanded of Hollywood films by audiences, development executives and screenwriting guru Robert McKee. Therefore, Zodiac was fated from its inception to be an uncomfortable experience, a whodunnit with the last few pages torn out, a film biography of a faceless man.

Even something as incendiary as Spike Lee’s Summer Of Sam or as disreputable as the endless schlock biopics of Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy are able to deliver approximately happy endings — they caught the bastards! In the two-and-a-half-hour haul of Zodiac, we see all the certainties of the serial killer genre shredded. David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the bow-tie-wearing cop on the case, is a model of West Coast cool whose manner of wearing a gun-holster was copied by Steve McQueen in Bullitt. If this were a conventional movie, he would catch the killer — but Fincher shows the confident supercop become a crotchety, tired, greying figure, quietly bereft when his longtime partner (Anthony Edwards) transfers to something nine-to-five like fraud. In a crucial sequence, Toschi attends a special premiere of Dirty Harry — which fantasised a shoot-out finale to kill off a villain modelled on Zodiac, who actually tries to carry out the schoolbus attack the real murderer merely threatened — and walks out in disgust, muttering, “Whatever happened to ‘due process’?” Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) comes on like that epitome of 1970s radical chic cool, the underground journalist with a mainstream outlet, making brilliant leaps around the befuddled authorities and going after the Zodiac like Woodward and Bernstein went after Nixon. He ends up drinking himself out of a job and hiding out on a boathouse, still paranoid that the killer will come after him.

Though Ruffalo, Edwards and Downey Jr. are outstanding in their various crash-and-burn approaches to the case, the film is built around Jake Gyllenhaal’s Graysmith, a boyish outsider who makes a few connections no-one else does and later devotes his whole life to a private crusade, to the extent of roping in his preteen kids as research assistants. Gyllenhaal is excellent, but suffers through a few too many scenes with poor Chloë Sevigny — who gets stuck with the traditionally annoying Teri Garr-in-Close Encounters role as a wife who nags her husband about spending too much time on the business we’re interested in. As always, it’s impossible not to sympathise with the character — but audiences also wish she’d shut up and let Graysmith get on with tracking down that last stray witness and joining the dots no-one else has bothered with.

It’s a truism that serial killers are media creations, but Zodiac — who may have taken his name and symbol from a watch advert, was perhaps inspired by the 1932 movie The Most Dangerous Game, and wanted a lawyer who had guest-starred in a Star Trek episode to represent him — remains a phantom of the tube and newsprint. Murderers who are caught get shown up as pathetic human beings rather than Lecter-like masterminds, but Zodiac was either clever or lucky, and remains a phantom. Fincher offers us his creepy, misspelled letters in voice-over and brings a hooded form on for one of the killings, but the film’s most unsettling moments come when the possible Zodiacs are around: convicted paedophile Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch) or repertory cinema programmer Bob Vaughn (Charles Fleischer). As in Seven and Fight Club, Fincher boasts an unparalleled ability to present ostensibly friendly, deeply twisted people credibly — one of Zodiac’s few melodramatic moments, as Vaughn spooks Graysmith so much he flees the suspect’s house, works entirely because of the unnerving performances.

While this isn’t as straightforward as Panic Room, Fincher’s previous film, it lacks the highly wrought style of Seven and Fight Club — and the few holdovers from his earlier method (like the frequent California downpours which strike whenever the characters aren’t depressed enough) don’t quite match the less-showy All The President’s Men-like docudrama manner used here. Whole stretches are merely conventional, with hits of the ’70s on the soundtrack to counterpoint the killings and cop-shop or newsroom scenes that could have come from a TV show of the time, like The Streets Of San Francisco or Lou Grant. Wonderfully acted as it is, there’s still a sense that Fincher — who is evidently as hung up on Zodiac as James Cameron was on Titanic — is working a notch or two below what he is capable of. Screenwriter James Vanderbilt’s CV includes Darkness Falls, Basic and Welcome To The Jungle, and his draft really could have done with a brush-up from some less pragmatic talent to make this as deep and affecting as it is long and brilliantly detailed.

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DVD & Streaming
Drama , Mystery/Suspense

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In Theaters

Jake Gyllenhaal as Robert Graysmith; Mark Ruffalo as Dave Toschi; Robert Downey Jr. as Paul Avery; Anthony Edwards as Bill Armstrong; Brian Cox as Melvin Belli; Elias Koteas as Jack Mulanax; Chloë Sevigny as Melanie; Richmond Arquette, Bob Stephenson and John Lacy as The Zodiac Killer Suspects

Home Release Date

David Fincher

Distributor

Paramount Pictures

Movie Review

Counting two books and a battery of interviews among its source materials, Zodiac digs under the skin of the story of a real-life serial killer who terrified the public and perplexed law enforcement in the San Francisco Bay Area beginning in 1969. On Aug. 1 of that year, three local newspapers received letters claiming responsibility for several fatal shootings and another attempted murder. The letters contained details that would have been known only to the killer, along with a cipher—of which each paper was given only part—that the writer claimed would reveal his identity. More killings were promised if it was not published.

The “Zodiac,” as the killer would dub himself, seemed, in spirit, like London’s Jack the Ripper for his brazen, police-taunting mannerisms. A couple from Salinas, Calif., would crack the basic cipher, but the Zodiac’s identity remained elusive as the body count continued to rise: 13 of them, by the Zodiac’s claim. And letters continued to pile up, directing threats at even school children and providing fuel for the fire of the killer’s self-celebration.

Director David Fincher (Panic Room, Fight Club, Se7en) says that the crimes of the Zodiac, which still remain unsolved, have enthralled him for years, even as a young boy growing up in the Bay Area. That personal tie, perhaps, prompted him to create what he calls “the most informationally packed [movie] I’ve ever seen.”

This is not a Hannibal Lecter-style horror/thriller flick, then, that seeks to put you behind the eyes of a psycho killer and make you squirm as he does his dirty deeds—though it is brutally violent at times. What Fincher attempts here is not really an examination of the Zodiac, but rather four people absorbed in his case. Inspectors Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong sift through endless suspects and dead-end leads in an investigation that reduces their personal lives to a faint memory. San Francisco Chronicle crime reporter Paul Avery fares no better for his high-risk, gun-wielding brand of “story research.” And at that same paper, editorial cartoonist Robert Graysmith channels his Eagle Scout-derived code-cracker enthusiasm into a full-fledged campaign for justice, risking his life and his relationship with his family along the way.

Positive Elements

Skilled detectives Toschi and Armstrong are dedicated to their pursuit of the Zodiac Killer. And the film’s lack of 24 – and CSI -style sensationalism elevates and illuminates their commitment to justice, due process and bringin’ down the bad guy. Twice Toschi throws out stray comments that denigrate the way movies ( Dirty Harry is referenced) don’t get it right in this regard. When Armstrong eventually quits the case (after years have gone by and the trail is ice cold), his decision is made in the interest of spending more time with his family.

Before totally giving himself over to his personal investigation, Graysmith shows signs of being a loving and involved parent. He accompanies a child to the bus stop and engages with his kids at meal time. At first he also attempts to shield his children from reports of the Zodiac. While driving his son, Graysmith changes the radio dial to tune out details about the killer. And when he and his son begin to watch a TV call-in program supposedly featuring the Zodiac, Graysmith turns it off when the talk becomes too grisly. At work, colleagues notice Graysmith’s generally upstanding character. It’s explained that he doesn’t smoke, drink or cuss.

Spiritual Elements

On the radio, callers discuss whether the Zodiac is a Satanist. One estimates that he certainly couldn’t have a Christian background. The killer’s nickname and use of ancient symbols suggest his fascination with astrology and/or the occult.

Sexual Content

One suspect is said to have sodomized children, and, in his home, police uncover several hardcore porn magazines, the covers of which are shown briefly. There’s a reference to a naked fondue party, and a short scene features a cross-dresser. It’s said that in his articles Avery dubs the killer a “latent homosexual.” The Zodiac makes a crude sexual reference in one of his letters. When a young couple go parking on a date, the man asks the girl about her husband. The f-word is hurled as a sexual insult. Toschi is seen in his underwear.

Violent Content

Actress Chloë Sevigny sheds some light on the kind of violence found in Zodiac by sharing with teenhollywood.com how she felt about reading one of Robert Graysmith’s books. “Before I started the picture,” she said, “I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll read it and try to get into where my husband in the movie’s mind was, what he was obsessed with and what he was dealing with, day in and day out,’ and I couldn’t. I got almost through half of it and I had to put it down. I was like, ‘I just don’t want to read about this anymore.'” Indeed, the Zodiac killings depicted here, while taking up a very small portion of screen time, are unspeakably merciless.

When the Zodiac guns down a young couple parked at a lookout, the girl’s face and the car’s windows are shown splattered with blood. The Zodiac hogties another couple, threatens them with a handgun and feigns walking away. He returns to stab them repeatedly with a knife. The woman struggles and screams while the blade is shown piercing her back, stomach and chest.

A cab driver is shot point-blank as he sits in his car. Later we see cops examining the gunshot wound as his body hangs from an open car door. A frightening near miss involves a young mother and her infant. After sabotaging the woman’s car, the Zodiac Killer offers her a ride to the nearest service station. He announces coldly that he will throw the woman’s baby out the window before killing her. Passersby find her standing in the road, panicky, bloody and disheveled, having barely escaped.

Additionally, detectives and journalists spend quite a bit of time discussing the murders. And the Zodiac’s letters supply disturbing images, taunts and warnings. These include blood-stained shirt swatches from the murdered cabbie, descriptions of bombs and a threat to “pick off kiddies” getting off a school bus.

Crude or Profane Language

The f-word is used about 15 times, the s-word half that many times. Jesus’ name is abused nearly a dozen times; God’s is combined with “d–n” once.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Avery is a hard drinker, smoker and drug abuser. And his behavior is shown to be ruining his health, career and personal life. At one point, he and Graysmith (who is said elsewhere to be a non-drinker) down hard liquor late into the night in a smoky bar. Several other characters smoke, including Toschi and a mother of an infant.

Other Negative Elements

To varying degrees, the journalists and police officers pursuing the Zodiac fail to guard themselves against becoming crippled by the weight of the unsolved murders. Graysmith, despite having the most altruistic motives of anyone involved, allows his investigation of the killings to become a full-blown obsession. He quits (loses) his job, pushes his wife and kids away, risks their safety, etc. And as his “interest” grows, his discernment wanes. Once protective of his kids’ emotional wellbeing, he ends up enlisting them as assistants as he desperately accumulates information about the Zodiac.

Much has been made of the exhaustive story research that went into creating Zodiac . In developing the project, David Fincher and others pored over thousands of pages of documents, interviewed surviving victims and retraced the killer’s steps alongside officers who worked the case. Says the director, “We backed everything up with documentation, our own interviews and evidence.”

Co-producer Bradley J. Fischer praises Fincher for also getting “to the psychology of what motivated the people who inhabited that world.” Fischer goes on to say, “It is a most human thing to want to know what can’t be known. It is a compulsion that exists in all of us.”

Zodiac clearly excels at comforting that compulsion. It was also crafted in an effort to document a historical era, and it can be easily said that this is a film that carries the potential of deepening our understanding of who we were and are as a society.

Time ‘s Richard Corliss, however, is compelling when he suggests the filmmakers had less admirable motives. “There’s no nice way to say it: movies love murderers,” he writes. “Producers may claim the killer’s story is a cautionary tale, but they revel—along with the villain and the audience—in the sick grandeur of a hit man, a supervillain, a serial killer. The psycho creeps toward his victim; we can’t watch, and we can’t turn away.”

When the Zodiac first demanded that his ciphers be printed, newspaper editors gave in. But as time passed, wiser heads prevailed and they decided to stop obliging him. The Zodiac also wanted a movie made about him, writing in one of his last known missives, “I am waiting for a good movie about me. Who will play me?” The answer to that question, unlike the question of the Zodiac’s own identity, is now a matter of record: Richmond Arquette, Bob Stephenson and John Lacy.

But it’s not the Zodiac’s demands and questions that should interest us; it’s how we respond to them—and whether we should continue to oblige them after all these years. As Entertainment Weekly put it, “It’s possible that he could be sitting next to you in the theater.”

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Movie Review: Zodiac (2007)

Nashtradomus
Movie Reviews
No responses
--> March 6, 2007

I was fortunate enough to get couple of tickets to go watch Zodiac on a Saturday night. I saw the trailer of this movie a few months ago and was very excited to see this one because of the director and the cast. Well it seemed that all that build up was for nothing, I was disappointed and it got to a point where I started to wonder when would the frakkin'(paraphrase from “Battlestar Galactica”) movie end. I would imagine David Fincher, who created “Seven,” “Fight Club” and “Panic Room” did not leave out any details from the book in this extremely long snorefest.

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!!

Zodiac is based on Northern Cal cold-case murders committed by the infamous man who declared himself to be the Zodiac killer. Although the story begins with and develops around the gruesome violence of such a murderer, it transforms into a tale of misfortune in the lives of those who chased him. The cast was very impressive, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a modest and a shy newspaper cartoonist who is fascinated and then turns into his obsession with the Zodiac killer’s codes and letters. David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), a savvy and dedicated SF detective who gets to be assigned to the Zodiac case and finally Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), a reporter who works along with Jake G., driven over the Zodiac killer and a substance abuse addict.

The way this movie begins, with the brutal slayings of few couples are intense and very grabbing. Similarly, there is a scene with a woman and her baby in the car would surely get your nerves up. However, that is pretty much it. The rest of the movie is not about the killer, but about the police investigation surrounding the killings and the misfortunes associated along with the people chasing the killer. With 160 minutes, that’s a lot of dragging on. The only reason I was seated and did not walk out was my curiosity to know who the killer was.

Although, it was roughly 160 minutes long, the characters were never fully developed. Even Gyllenhaal’s character is a muddled mystery at the end of the movie. The movie keeps hopping in different planes — it gets interesting at certain points and then hops into completely something else. The characters never seem to age even over a 25 year period. Gyllenhaal was driving the same car all throughout the movie and it only got better as the movie went on. This here is not to say everything about the film is bad, but at the end of it, it gives you this empty feeling about the whole proceedings. The acting on the whole is very good, Mark Ruffalo as this intense cop with his quips, Jake does a great job of straddling his lines between a lovable annoyance and a OCD maniac. Finally, Robert Downey Jr. as this misguided reporter who works with Gyllenhaal with a serious abuse problem, this might not be too hard to play and relate to his real life scenario, but he does a great job in doing so.

Overall, however, Zodiac is not a bad movie if you have time to spend and the evening to yourself with nothing else to do.

Tagged: investigation , murder , novel adaptation , true story

Writing movie reviews is beneath me. I do it now and again to remember what it is like to feel like a commoner.

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Zodiac (2007): Film Review

Jack Walters
March 22, 2023

Zodiac is David Fincher’s take on the investigative thriller, an astute character study that’s driven forward by the dark truth of the killer’s crimes.

Unlike many procedural thrillers of its time, David Fincher’s Zodiac unlocks the secret of the genre by never relying too heavily on the facts to make this true story work. It’s a dramatic retelling of the truth – and that certainly doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate, because it sticks closely to the confirmed facts of the case, but the movie soars by making its characters and relationships just as interesting as the objective story. It’s not just a chronicle of the Zodiac Killer’s crimes, but rather an intense investigation into the obsession and drive that characterize humanity’s innate need to solve puzzles. It does this by focusing closely on the detectives, journalists, and even regular citizens who fought against the Zodiac and dedicated their time to bringing him down.

David Fincher developed a strong name for himself over the years as a master of the thriller genre, filling his movies with complex narratives and gripping sequences that keep the audience invested from start to finish. Zodiac is no different, as Fincher uses his directorial talent to reconstruct the killer’s crimes with immense detail and flair, forcing the audience to come face-to-face with the specific horrors of this infamous case. Despite spending plenty of time away from the crimes and focusing on the investigation, Zodiac manages to uphold this dark intensity throughout its lengthy runtime.

There are admittedly some moments (specifically in the second act) when Zodiac ’s pacing and momentum begin to fumble, but Fincher always knows how to rectify these cracks in the script by forging even more exciting set pieces and offering the audience small clues to regain their attention and intrigue. But even when Zodiac falters in these moments, the film’s talented ensemble is always captivating enough to keep things moving. Jake Gyllenhaal is undeniably the standout as cartoonist Robert Graysmith, whose obsession with puzzles and riddles keeps drawing him back to the Zodiac Killer’s elusive clues. He perfectly captures Graysmith’s inner conflict, as his growing interest in the case forces him to question just how much he’s willing to lose in pursuit of the truth.

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Both Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo give impressive performances as journalist Paul Avery and detective Dave Toschi respectively. Fincher has always been a director who knows how to draw powerful performances from his actors, and Zodiac ’s ensemble is among the director’s most consistent to date. More than just a story of crime and punishment, Zodiac is a cautionary tale of what happens when people get too involved and obsessed with the seductively dark corners of the world. Each character experiences and suffers from this compulsion in various different ways, and that gives each individual a very distinct and important purpose within the story.

It’s impossible to discuss a David Fincher project without commenting on the visual and technical prowess – but these are areas where Zodiac doesn’t get nearly enough credit. Not only are the cinematography and lighting just as alluring and noteworthy as you’d expect from a Fincher movie, but the camera movements and precise framing are also excellent. He really makes the most of every single scene, ensuring to place the camera in the most interesting and engaging positions for each moment. It’s this level of craft that elevates Zodiac high above its competition, proving that even the most objective and fact-based narratives can be made thrilling by a little creativity.

Though it’s hardly ignored by most audiences, Zodiac remains the most underappreciated project of David Fincher’s career. While the director is most notable for works such as Se7en or Fight Club , there’s a level of consistency and authenticity to Zodiac that most fans often forget to appreciate. It’s admittedly easy to overlook the project—parts of the script feel pretty uneven, and the fact-based narrative definitely isn’t as original as Fincher’s other works—but it’s a technical feat that’s filled with outstanding performances and beautiful shots from start to finish. Zodiac is the dark horse of David Fincher’s filmography, a near-masterpiece hiding in the shadows of several flashier, more stylish stories.

Zodiac is now available to watch on digital and on demand. Watch Zodiac !

TAGS: David Fincher
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Produced by, released by, zodiac (2007), directed by david fincher / james vanderbilt / mike medavoy / cean chaffin / arnold messer / bradley j. fischer.

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Review by Perry Seibert

The opening sequence of Zodiac -- a man stalking and shooting a couple parked in a lover's lane, all set to the strains of Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" -- offers everything people have come to expect from director David Fincher: stylish cinematography, a blast of brutal violence, and editing just unconventional enough to keep the viewer simultaneously disturbed and riveted. The style is very familiar to those who appreciated Seven for its nightmarish neo-noir sensibilities, or Panic Room for its grab-you-by-the-throat-and-never-let-go aesthetic. Unlike those films, however, Zodiac is much more than an exercise in terrorizing the audience; with this opening, Fincher plunges the audience into the emotional state that all of San Francisco experienced during the years the Zodiac Killer menaced the Bay Area. Over the course of the next two and a half hours, he lays out the personal and professional reasons cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), police detective David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), and newspaper reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) each become involved in the hunt for the killer, all with the efficiency of a Dragnet episode. What elevates Zodiac from a routine police procedural into art is Fincher's ability to make the audience feel what these three men feel in their response to this threat, using their terror as a mere jumping-off point for their psychologically and emotionally complex stories. The straightforward narrative, sculpted by James Vanderbilt from a pair of nonfiction books written by the real Robert Graysmith, follows the textbook of a police procedural film, especially in the way we are largely excluded from the personal lives of both Toschi and his partner Armstrong, played by a pitch-perfect Anthony Edwards. These characters are defined almost exclusively by their ability to solve crimes, and Ruffalo is deft in communicating the gradual erosion of Toschi's self-regard as the case drags on for years and years without a resolution. Never one to play any emotion broadly, Ruffalo might be a perfect actor for Fincher, whose powerful visual style ups the emotional stakes for an audience. During the middle section of the film, when Toschi and Armstrong follow their most promising lead, Fincher tempers the terror with excitement and frustration as the two devoted detectives desperately try every possible avenue to link the suspect to the crimes. On a first viewing, this portion of the movie may feel slack, as if Fincher has lost his command over the narrative. Not until Zodiac is over does the viewer realize how effectively Fincher has manipulated audience expectations, and made them feel as infuriated and exasperated as the protagonists. This is where terror gives way to frustration and dissatisfaction, emotions most directors never consider eliciting from an audience in a conventional serial-killer movie.

Gyllenhaal's innately appealing demeanor holds the center of the film. One would be hard-pressed to find a young actor more plausible as a former Eagle Scout, and one can admire the sweeping emotional arc of Fincher's entire film in Graysmith's evolution from a straight-arrow nerd to an obsessed amateur detective. The scope of Fincher's ambitions are enhanced by Gyllenhaal's savvy mix of boyishness and competence, and Graysmith's eager-to-please intelligence finds a natural complement in Downey's Paul Avery, an extroverted reporter threatened directly by the Zodiac. Fincher deftly parallels the desire for recognition that Avery and the killer share, allowing the viewer to feel that the monster they are looking for might be closer than they care to recognize.

David Fincher has always possessed a strong sense of film history. The genius of Seven, his other masterpiece, comes in large part from his encyclopedic knowledge of noir tropes. He understands the power that images have, and his films tell us that he likes to show off his knowledge. But Zodiac is the work of a cinematic enfant terrible who has learned there is more to life than movies. There are direct references to Bullitt and Dirty Harry, easily the two most famous films about San Francisco detectives, but these are references made by the characters within the film, not shots stolen by Fincher in order to impress. In these moments, he pointedly expresses that movies are not real life. The film is further grounded in reality by the unobtrusive but flawless art direction and costume design. This is one of the few modern films set in the '70s where the fashion of the times is not made to look ridiculous, but presented as simply the reality of the day. Because the film is grounded in fact, and because he inspires real empathy, Fincher makes his characters more three-dimensional than we expect. It's because of these human connections that Zodiac transcends genre and offers ample proof that David Fincher is well on his way to constructing a body of work worthy of his formidable reputation.

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COMMENTS

Zodiac movie review & film summary (2007)
'Zodiac" is the "All the President's Men" of serial killer movies, with Woodward and Bernstein played by a cop and a cartoonist. It's not merely "based" on California's infamous Zodiac killings, but seems to exude the very stench and provocation of the case. The killer, who was never caught, generously supplied so many clues that Sherlock Holmes might have cracked the case in his sitting room.
Zodiac
Moira I Good thriller, fine cast Rated 5/5 Stars • Rated 5 out of 5 stars 09/18/22 Full Review Kingston M One of my all-time favourite movies. Loved the suspense and thrill this movie gave me.
Zodiac
Directed by David Fincher. Crime, Drama, History, Mystery, Thriller. R. 2h 37m. By Manohla Dargis. March 2, 2007. David Fincher's magnificently obsessive new film, "Zodiac," tracks the story ...
Zodiac review
T he look and the feel and the bulk of David Fincher's new movie are so seductive. He has made a massively confident and watchable thriller about the unsolved "Zodiac" murders in 1960s San ...
Zodiac (2007)
Terrific movie. Based on the wonderful novel, this film brilliantly tells the story of the unknown Zodiac killer, who operated in the late 60's and early 70's. You will easily lose a full night or afternoon with this movie, it's incredibly, it's engaging, dramatic, and captivating.
Zodiac (2007)
Zodiac: Directed by David Fincher. With Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, Robert Downey Jr.. Between 1968 and 1983, a San Francisco cartoonist becomes an amateur detective obsessed with tracking down the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified individual who terrorizes Northern California with a killing spree.
Zodiac
Based on the actual case files of one of the most intriguing unsolved crimes in the nation's history, Zodiac is a thriller from David Fincher, director of "Seven" and "Fight Club." As a serial killer terrifies the San Francisco Bay Area and taunts police with his ciphers and letters, investigators in four jurisdictions search for the murderer. The case will become an obsession for four men as ...
The Movie Review: 'Zodiac'
The Movie Review: 'Zodiac'. By Christopher Orr. July 30, 2007. The story begins with the murder of a young man and woman in Benicia, California in December 1968. Or possibly it starts with the ...
Zodiac (2007)
40 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com. 100. Village Voice. Zodiac exhausts more than one genre. Termite art par excellence, it burrows for the sake of burrowing, as fascinated by its own nooks and crannies as "Inland Empire." 100. Newsweek David Ansen. The movie holds you in its grip from start to finish. 100.
Zodiac Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 20 ): Kids say ( 29 ): David Fincher 's excellent movie includes several violent murder scenes (a stabbing is especially grisly). But it's more interested in the consequences of the brutality: crime scenes, investigative procedures, fear in the community. In a mess of intersecting obsessions and deceptions, Zodiac ...
Zodiac
Zodiac. Just the facts: two homicide detectives, a crime eporter and a political cartoonist spend decades knocking themselves out to atch a serial killer who never (officially) gets caught ...
Zodiac Movie Review and Star Rating
Zodiac not only serves as a masterclass in procedural crime thrillers but also holds its ground among other classics in the genre. It seamlessly fits into the realm of films like Memories of Murder, Silence of the Lambs, and even Fincher's own later works like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.The film's enduring relevance is a testament to its status as a certified classic and a landmark of ...
Zodiac Review: The Films of David Fincher
Zodiac is not a serial killer film. Unlike Se7en the Zodiac murders aren't lurid or unnervingly artful. They are absolutely, painfully brutal. He is a force that disrupts both the idyllic and the ...
Zodiac
A movie review by James Berardinelli. Zodiac is a police procedural - a sort of souped-up, ultra-long episode of Law & Order. Based on the 1986 "true crime" book by Robert Graysmith, the movie looks back on one of the nation's most sinister unsolved crimes: the Northern California serial killings by the so-called "Zodiac killer."
Zodiac Review
Release Date: 17 May 2007. Running Time: 158 minutes. Certificate: 15. Original Title: Zodiac. Jack The Ripper is remembered 120 years after he put down the knife for two reasons: a) someone ...
Zodiac
Movie Review. Counting two books and a battery of interviews among its source materials, Zodiac digs under the skin of the story of a real-life serial killer who terrified the public and perplexed law enforcement in the San Francisco Bay Area beginning in 1969. On Aug. 1 of that year, three local newspapers received letters claiming responsibility for several fatal shootings and another ...
Movie Review: Zodiac (2007)
Overall, however, Zodiac is not a bad movie if you have time to spend and the evening to yourself with nothing else to do. Critical Movie Critic Rating: 3. Movie Review: Breach (2007) Movie Review: Wild Hogs (2007) Tagged: investigation, murder, novel adaptation, true story.
Zodiac (2007): Film Review
Zodiac (2007): Film Review. Zodiac is David Fincher's take on the investigative thriller, an astute character study that's driven forward by the dark truth of the killer's crimes. Unlike many procedural thrillers of its time, David Fincher's Zodiac unlocks the secret of the genre by never relying too heavily on the facts to make this ...
Zodiac (film)
Zodiac is a 2007 American neo-noir crime thriller film directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by James Vanderbilt based on the nonfiction books by Robert Graysmith: Zodiac (1986) and Zodiac Unmasked (2002). The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr., with Anthony Edwards, Brian Cox, Elias Koteas, Donal Logue, John Carroll Lynch, Chloë Sevigny, Philip Baker Hall ...
Zodiac Movie Review and Analysis
The rhythmic editing is the style that won Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall Oscars for editing on The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and it keeps Zodiac moving at lightning speed despite the huge length.Initial reviews remarked it was Fincher's most restrained film, showing a radical departure from the hyper-stylization of Fight Club and Panic Room, and indeed this was ...
Zodiac (2007)
The opening sequence of Zodiac -- a man stalking and shooting a couple parked in a lover's lane, all set to the strains of Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" -- offers everything people have come to expect from director David Fincher: stylish cinematography, a blast of brutal violence, and editing just unconventional enough to keep the viewer simultaneously disturbed and riveted.
Zodiac (2007): A discussion. : r/movies
MagicClutch. ADMIN MOD. Zodiac (2007): A discussion. When people ask me what my favourite movie is I usually default to Zodiac. I don't think it's "the best" but it is my favourite. The acting, the music, the look and feel. I think it's criminally under appreciated.

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