Not only Fincher's best, but the best movie of 2007.

Rating: 10/10 (20 August 2007)

This is a movie unlike any other in recent memory, an extraordinary and rare exercise in the costs of professional obsession. Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., and Mark Ruffalo all turn in impressive performances (though Downey's is the one that should be best remembered at Oscar season) as three men - two reporters, one detective - who never leave the case of the Zodiac Killer, a man who haunted Northern California for years. But this movie is not really about who Zodiac was, but on the power of obsession, on how men will devote their lives to chasing dragons at the cost of everything else. Fincher adheres to a strict timeline - shooting what new information appeared and little else. Nonetheless, the costs of pursuing the Zodiac are never far. Gyllenhaal, playing controversial reporter Robert Graysmith, Downey, playing reporter Paul Avery, and Ruffalo, playing Inspector Toschi, are all damaged by their pursuit of Zodiac, but are unable to stop. They are driven as much by their own intellectual vanity as by a desire to see justice done. As time progresses, and others forget about the case, they linger. They are career men forever haunted by the unknown. Their lives, and our lives when we watch, are driven by discovery, and hampered by the lack. They grow older, and we recognize our own inabilities to leave our intellectual obsessions behind, to put away our toys. And when the ending does come, we are left with a feeling of closure, but also with a sense that we can never leave that night when Michael Mageau and Darlene Ferrin were shot. We are forever stranded on July 4, 1969, when Hurdy Gurdy Man played.