Impressive, but not much of a story.

Rating: 7/10 (9 April 2018)

This ranks in the lower half of the Fincher movies, both in my personal opinion and on IMDb's rating scale. It lacks some of the incisive commentary on society and human nature that are present in some of Fincher's other movies, and is set up as a crime thriller mystery. While it kept my attention for most of the duration, the ending left me a little bit empty because there wasn't much of a point to it that I could see. Now, since the movie is based on facts and the Zodiac killer was never caught or officially identified, I can't really complain about this. In truth, I think that Fincher and James Vanderbilt did a very good job adapting these events into a movie, but the story itself is not one that easily fits into a traditional narrative. The events take place over a number of years with large gaps in between events, which means that the movie has to kind of reset itself every twenty minutes or so, which slows things down. The nature of the case also requires the audience to remember a lot of specific details, again nobody's fault but it is a detractor. There are also a lot of minor characters and names to keep track of, which is a challenge if you watch the movie in one sitting and even more of a challenge if you watch it in more than one sitting.
I seriously admire the work that went into this, because it was interesting to watch and had a lot of engaging scenes in it. But at its core, this is not a story so much as it is a sequence of separate events. There's no real cause and effect to string them together. Our main characters are pretty good and easy enough to root for in their own ways. This is helped in no small part by the fact that they are played by three great actors.
If you're a Fincher fan like me because of his other works like Gone Girl, Fight Club, Se7en, and The Social Network, just be warned that this is less of that type of Fincher. It certainly looks and feels like a Fincher movie, though his dark lighting trademark got a little too dark sometimes here and made it difficult to see what was happening. However, it lacks the thematic depth of his other works and is not as engaging to watch. It is definitely dark in tone, but nowhere near as violent as Se7en, so its a relatively safe movie for viewers who don't like blood and gore. I was invested enough while watching it, but at the moment, I'm not that inclined to watch it again. Overall Rating: 7.2/10.