Impressive Film

Rating: 9/10 (16 May 2007)

A film by the director David Fincher will always have fans waiting.
His latest is Zodiac about the famous real-life series of murders in California in the late 1960's.
The film opens with the murder of a young couple and follows pretty quickly with a second attempt. But then the focus of the film swings to San Francisco and the office of the Chronicle, the newspaper which became a conduit for Zodiac's taunting the police and panicking the public.
ROBERT DOWNEY JR plays the Chronicle's star crime reporter John Avery, whose drug and alcohol-fueled life got a boost from his connection with Zodiac. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Robert Graysmith, the political cartoonist of the paper who, although on the sidelines, also became obsessed with finding Zodiac.
MARK RUFFALO plays Inspector Toschi, another life that would be affected by this case.
What is impressive about this film is the meticulous way in which an incredible amount of detail is made cohesive. Based on Graysmith's best-selling books about the crimes the film is fascinating in its process of detecting but it's also compelling in showing how the obsession to discover the identity of Zodiac impacted on the lives of three men.
Shot in high definition digital video by Harris Savides it is evocative of the times and seamless.
Performances are tops but what is surprising, considering Fincher was the director, it's really non-sensational.
It's a most mature work by this very talented director