Not horror, not drama, not suspense, not a thriller - classify as dull

Rating: 3/10 (20 April 2008)

I saw this because of the positive reviews about it. I have to say I have never heard of Zodiac before this, and didn't really care about the facts when I heard about them in this movie. However that's what this is all about. The whole script, written by someone who grew up in the area at the time and was fascinated by the Zodiac killings, painstakingly and painfully follows the investigation for him. Every ten minutes, the film cuts to a random date in the future (and tells you) when the next interesting event happens. It is like a blow-by-blow reconstruction. There really is no dramatisation at all. Even by the time of the second murder, the scene was dragged out so much, you wish Zodiac would just get on with it.
Then the inept, bureaucratic nightmare of police investigations starts (multiple officers are involved as the murders happened in different counties). Yes, it's great to see that it took the police 1 and a half years to get a warrant for one suspect and so on, but did I really care? To compound this, there are so many suspects and threads of evidence and handwriting samples that you get detached from it all and again lose interest.
Then there is Graysmith himself. He is utterly unconvincing. He comes across as a bit of a lunatic who is even more obsessed than the screenwriter about this case. Sevens year later he turns up at a police station after dark to demand to see their files there and then. He keeps harrassing one of the old detectives who had been in charge of it years earlier. He even doesn't care when his family leave him and he gets anonymous calls every week. I have to say I was hoping Zodiac would come and finish him off just so the movie could end.