Maybe the greatest American film of this century so far.

Rating: 9/10 (8 October 2011)

This is honestly just a perfect movie. From a technical standpoint, it's mindblowing. The music, the way it's shot, the way that Fincher sets up every scene is breathtaking and entirely gripping and original. He sinks you into this experience and you just go along the whole way. He grabs you and makes you feel all of the sensations he wants you to feel. But one of the ways it's perfect is through all of it's imperfections. It skips years at a time, it never comes to a complete conclusion, it doesn't give it's audience a firm ending so they can go home and sleep properly at night.
It's a thriller in the broadest of terms, but it moves so slowly and patiently. You slowly become obsessed and when the film is ended you are frustrated by the lack of a solid conclusion and the fact that you'll never know the solid truth, but that's the truth of life sometimes and Fincher boldly takes you to that place. David Fincher broke ground as a filmmaker with Seven, which is in my eyes the perfect American crime thriller, in the way that it plays almost everything in a standard way (until the final act, at least) but everything is done perfectly with a lot of great commentary on society. So when you come into another Fincher crime thriller (especially about another serial killer), you expect this feature that is immediately gripping and filled with blood and action the way that Seven was, but he defies expectation at every turn here.
Zodiac is not this fast-paced action-drenched thriller, it's so patient and calculated. The way it requires the audience to just be involved in it and then leaves it hanging is so breathtakingly refreshing and completely sticks with you. The accuracy in the way it approaches the case and the time period (the art direction is miraculous) is marvelous if you stop and pay attention, but it's impossible to stop long enough when the plot pulls you in so well. This is a perfect movie, made even more so by all of the ways that it's not "perfect". As he has shown many times in films like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network, Fincher can make anything cinematic (even the most mundane moments, as he demonstrated in the latter) but here he scales back the tide.
He could have done these murder scenes in the most cinematic ways but he plays them quiet and he could play almost any scene in a very standard cinematic way that we are used to in Hollywood, but he goes the totally opposite way. He plays them patiently and sly, keeping the audience on it's toes and constantly playing with their perception. This could have easily been a horror film with gore and a bunch of jumps, but instead he (and writer James Vanderbilt) makes it this calculated mystery and study of obsession and the true nature of crime in America.
People use horror films to escape and get enjoyment out of watching people get cut apart, but Fincher doesn't let you enjoy anything here. You see these horrific sequences and they feel so real and you recognize that even though something like this will probably never happen to you, it could. Fincher has created something that will live on as one of the masterpieces of American cinema and for my money it's the best of his career to this point.