The yawning of the Age of Aquarius

Rating: 6/10 (3 March 2007)

On the strength of the advance advertising, I was really looking forward to seeing "Zodiac". I expected a taut, tense thriller. Instead, I found myself mind-numbingly bored for two and a half hours.
"Zodiac" should have been an exciting tale of a cat-and-mouse game between a murderer and those out to catch him. At the very least, it should have been a fascinating psychological portrait of what makes a killer tick -- or, for that matter, what drives the police and the reporters on his trail.
"Zodiac" unfortunately fails on both scores. It plods when it should race, does not engage our emotions, and does not provide compelling motives for the Zodiac or for those pursuing him. (The victims are appallingly disposable. We are given no incentive to care about them at all.) Indeed, the "evidence" presented by the film did not convince me of the main suspect's guilt. For instance, why does the killer adopt a different modus operandi for each murder? (We are told that the Zodiac took credit for crimes he did not commit. Possible, but not very persuasive.) "Zodiac" works best as an exploration of Robert Graysmith's obsession with the case, to the point of risking his marriage to bring the killer to justice. But, even here, despite Jake Gyllenhaal's stellar performance, the film does not quite succeed.
"Zodiac" has a great soundtrack of hits from the late 1960s and 1970s, and it wonderfully captures the look of that plaid-and-polyester period. (Gracious, did we really wear such ugly clothes?) There is one slip-up on the screenwriter's part. The suspected killer is referred to as possibly being a pedophile. I'm pretty certain that term did not come into common usage until after the mid-1980s. In the late 1960s and 1970s, we would have called him a child molester. (More to the point, however, why would a pedophile target adults rather than children?) I read one review that called "Zodiac" a police procedural. For me, however, it felt more like an epidural. Despite a constellation of acting talent, the stars simply do not align.