David Fincher yet again proves his brilliance as a filmmaker.

Rating: 8/10 (3 March 2007)

It doesn't matter whether you've seen all of David Fincher's films or none of them. He is a director who manages to take traditional storytelling and twist it so much that it becomes fascinating just to watch the plot itself progress, even if every single other thing about the movie is weak or poorly done. However, with his latest very eerie work, "Zodiac," that is simply not the case. He is also a director who will never do the same thing twice. That doesn't mean that he just doesn't make sequels. If you were to watch two of his films, it would be nearly impossible to make any connections between the two in terms of style. He loves to shake things up and, despite having a large cult following, is willing to risk it all to do things the way he wants to.
After a great wink-wink to the way that film studio logos have changed (he uses the old logos for the studios that were used back in the '60s instead of the more elegant ones used today), the film starts out with a very intensely filmed scene in which we are introduced to the way the Zodiac killer kills as he shoots a young couple that sits in their car. After this scene, the viewer will probably make the presumption that they know exactly what they're in for: a violent thriller that has a cops-versus-killer style and involves a lot of gunfire and killing. Think again.
After hitting you hard with the opening scene, Fincher then takes an almost relaxed route in introducing us to two of our main characters, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhal), a cartoonist, and Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), a journalist, both of whom work for the San Francisco Chronicle, the news station gets a letter from a man who claims to be the man who killed two couples; one on July 4 (the one I described), and one on the previous Christmas. From this moment on, the rest of the film follows the lives of three men, Graysmith, Avery, and Inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) in their hunt to catch this Zodiac killer, and how it ultimately drives them all to madness.
In the acting department, a terrific ensemble each adds to the film in his or her own way. However, the three main performances are in this case the three strongest. Jake Gyllenhal adds another strong performance to his résumé, which includes lead performances in "Jarhead," "Brokeback Mountain," "Donnie Darko," and "October Sky." Mark Ruffalo is an actor who I have not been a big fan of in the past. Here, he brings both a sharp personality and occasionally quite funny wit to the screen as an inspector who is thrown into this whole mess near the middle of the story. But the greatest acting accomplishment of the film comes from Robert Downey Jr., who is nothing short of Oscar-worthy in his performance as a drunk and drugged journalist who owns every scene he's in (think Jack Nicholson in "The Departed," but not as sadistic). His performance is not the largest in the film, but it definitely was my favorite.
You'd think that a movie that was two hours and forty minutes long and doesn't feature any action or slapstick humor would have quite a hard time holding a viewer's attention. I don't know exactly how he managed it, but Fincher has such a natural ability to hold a viewer's attention regardless of what it is that's happening on screen that you are as entertained and interested by this as you would be by a "Lord of the Rings" film, minus all the fancy effects and silly hobitses.
I wasn't alive when the Zodiac killings happened. It happened quite a long time ago (during the late '60s and early '70s). For me, it was a fascinating experience to see what was going on with California and how they were responding to this threat both in terms of its people as whole and its small fragments that tried to piece this whole thing together. For my dad, who was around at the time and aware of the situation, he loved watching a film that followed the three perspectives of three different people largely involved in a situation that he could only watch from afar.
I have seen most of David Fincher's work (However, I have yet to see "Se7en," which greatly upsets me). Although I think it is pointless to compare films that are so different in every possible way, I would rank this as the second best work that he has done, after the masterpiece "Fight Club." The reason that I found "Fight Club" to be a better film was that it simply had the opportunity to take more risks and do more things than "Zodiac" could, because this was based on events that actually happened, whereas "Fight Club" was a complete work of fiction.
There are going to be a lot of great films that come out in 2007. However, if you truly consider yourself a moviegoer who plans on seeing the best of the best, David Fincher's exciting masterpiece "Zodiac" is a film that you definitely should not miss.