Read the negative reviews before you waste your time

Rating: 1/10 (9 March 2007)

Se7en and Fighclub are great movies. David Fincher's latest, Zodiac, has been getting great reviews. I couldn't wait to see the movie. About an hour or so into it, I couldn't wait for it to end. It really angered me. I kept thinking, how could so many critics love this? How come I'm hating it so much?
The film doesn't look or feel like previous David Fincher films. I guess it's commendable that he's trying to do something different. The movie, though, isn't good. I'm convinced, that if he had used a pseudonym, the exact same movie would not have gotten the reviews that it did. David Fincher's reputation gives him some kind of pass from the majority of film critics. If the exact same movie was listed as being directed by someone like Gary Fleder the same critics would probably be calling this movie out for the long winded pointless choppy unemotional anti-thriller that it is.
I've never seen a movie in which I so disagreed with the reviews that I had read. So I went back and instead of skimming the reviews for whether the reviewer liked it or not (the majority of reviewers did like the movie even if they thought it was too long), I read the details and later found a lot of negative reviews.
Go to a site like rottentomatoes.com and read some of the negative reviews; even the favorable reviewers write things like "overlong and lacking dramatic focus too short on suspense lapses in storytelling that don't seem like bold artistic choices the movie's a sprawling mess zodiac was an interminable bore there's something strangely flat and enervating about the picture exhaustion kicks in to the point where we're not sure what we're looking at an exercise in frustration I've never seen a movie so full of dead ends one of the dullest of these films to date. Zodiac runs an astonishing two hours and 40 minutes, and it feels like it." Each one of those quotes is from a different review.
These reviews sum up for me the movie that I experienced. I wish I had read them before I had wasted almost three hours on Zodiac.