Zodiac (2007)

Zodiac (2007)

Written by James Vanderbilt, adapted from the book by Robert Graysmith

Directed by David Fincher

           

           

           I’m marking this as one of my top 10 favorite flicks of the past 10 years.  This film has absolutely nothing wrong with it.  From the stellar performances, to the captivating set-pieces, this movie is a bonafide thriller.

            I’m a big David Fincher fan.  I’m one of the three people that actually likes Alien³, I’ve watched Panic Room more than once and I still enjoy it, despite the fact that Kristen Stewart is in it, Fight Club is my favorite movie, and Seven is another perfect movie.  You may have noticed (or not) that I left out Benjamin Button and The Game, well that’s because I think The Game is terrible, but I blame it on the screenwriters (Fincher delivered on a well shot, finely acted, tense drama, but the story lacked) and I think Benjamin Button is about an hour too long, and a bit too pretentious for its own good.  So, when Zodiac came out a few years ago, I was first in line to see it.

            Zodiac chronicles (you guessed it) the search for the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco, California.  For those of you that don’t know, there were a bunch of unsolved murders in the Bay area in 1968 and 1969.  Soon after each of the murders, somebody mailed letters to the newspapers in the area claiming to be the killer.  The letters were simply signed “The Zodiac Killer.”  The killer (or killers) was never found.  The amazing thing about this flick, is that this is not where all of the tension comes from.

The film itself starts off with the second attack, on July 4^th, 1968.  We follow Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau on their date.  When they get up to lover’s lane, another car approaches theirs and takes off after a few seconds.  Minutes later, another car pulls up and a man gets out.  He simply walks up to the window and shoots both Darlene and Mike several times.  He starts to walk away, but when Mike and Darlene start moving around because they’re still alive, he returns and fires a few more rounds into each of them.  Mike lives.  The plot then moves to the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle, and we see the discovery of the first letter from the Zodiac.  Next, we meet Robert Downey Jr.’s Paul Avery and Jake Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith.  Graysmith started out as a political cartoonist for the paper, but quickly became interested in the case.  Paul Avery on the other hand, took a little while to get into it, but he soon became the number one journalist associated with the Zodiac, eventually receiving letters and threats directly from the killer.  RDJ and Jake soon become bosom buddies, and obsessed with the Zodiac.  The movie follows them and their fixation for the rest of the flick, but we eventually see a few more murders, and a little more than an hour in we meet Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edward’s detective characters.  The movie explores a few of the potential suspects, eventually landing on Arthur Leigh Allen as the number one suspect (as I said earlier, the case was never solved and the killer never found, but the movie gently points a finger towards Allen as the culprit).

What makes this flick amazing is not the investigation part, but how it shaped and changed the lives of the individuals involved.  This case consumed Robert Graysmith’s life (he eventually wrote a bestselling book about his experience, and obviously, this flick was made).  For a movie that is basically a whole bunch of nothing, Fincher does a superb job filling it with tension, and he proves that he’s a master at conveying a lot of information through tight dialogue, and slow, deliberate set-pieces.  The cinematography is excellent (as usual for Fincher, he used the excellent cinematographer Harris Savides, who has done work on most of Gus Van Sant’s better flicks) and the atmosphere of late 60’s/early 70’s is perfectly conveyed.  One of my favorite parts was how they showed the passage of time.  In one key passage, the passage is shown through time-lapse photography, showing the erection (hehehe I said erection) of a building.  In another scene, the screen is black for about 2 minutes while we only hear about the case through radio and television audio broadcasts.

Overall, I’d definitely say that Zodiac is one of the 10 best flicks of the decade, and it definitely deserves your time.  A word of caution – it is a little long (it’s about 2 hrs and 45 minutes) and there is some BRUTAL violence, although the gore factor is surprisingly low.  Once again, it’s not so much about the murders themselves, but about the affect they had on the people of San Francisco.  See this now.