"Down through all eternity, the crying of humanity"

Rating: 9/10 (26 March 2009)

The elements that complete a journalistic (or police) search / investigation, on a specific event, are direct and solid: When, Where, How, Who and Why. In the case of a murder, for example, the questions that one must ask are: When did the murder happen, in which location, what was the method the killer used, if possible, who was the killer and finally the motives that drew him in doing this action. In Zodiac, Fincher explores all the possible scenarios, from all the possible angles, from all the possible perspectives of everyone involved. His search is thorough, strict and to the bone. Nonetheless, the director deliberately refuses to directly encounter the motive of his invisible monster. Why did the Zodiac kill?
"This is the Zodiac speaking."
In a world where Evil is predominant in every aspect of the modern life, the director dictates to his viewers that the why doesn't matter anymore. The modern Man has come to terms with the sick, the twisted, the wrong, the unjust and the morbid in his everyday life. There is no surprise that the Zodiac murders happened, it is simply enough to eliminate any possible (bureaucratic or not) procedure to catch this murderer, no matter if along the way an entire city, an entire country, an entire society looses sight of the ultimate goal: Catharsis of the soul. No one wants to look in his own closet to find the dusty skeletons, no one is ready to look in his own mirror, no one is prepared to accept the fact that this killer is a product of the society he built for his children to grow up into. But the film, bitter to the end, offers no illusions: In a cyclone of information and evidence (lost and found everywhere in a dead end game) this society has long left the green, green grass on the one side of the white fence and now carries on in a land where the only possible breakthrough is to make it until the next morning, and the next, and the next The characters that Fincher chooses to illuminate his enduring drama of the human condition are forgotten in an endless twister of data. Lost, as is deliberately, the viewer him self, cannot find an exit and the only thing left to do is slowly but steadily to self-destroy. Carriers and marriages collapse, children are left without fathers, women are left without husbands and the entire American way of life is put aside; only one thing matters now for the grey figures that represent the final descent of modern society into total darkness: Obsession. For two and a half hours an incredibly built scenario manages to make the viewer think of all the possible details that are presented before his very eyes. In this way the cunning and tragically ironic Zodiac achieves its purpose: Forget your emotions, forget your feelings, forget your humanity; this is the real world: numbers, dates, data, TV announcements, news broadcastings, newspaper articles and all this to let you know that you are no different from the three crusaders that utterly fail to their task (to fight for a beautiful world, that is simply not there). The world of the Zodiac is our world and the fortunate ones will make it to the next morning, feeling happy for them selves. As for the unlucky ones, the only dream left is that of the remembrance of a once bright, innocent and joy full era, maybe they read about it somewhere or someone told them it existed once. After all, they will have plenty of time contemplating about these things as they gaze the endless rainy grey of a never ending dusk of a dying world.