A very well done "true crime" movie that gets most of the facts straight for once.

Rating: 8/10 (10 January 2011)

Zodiac (2007) should not be confused with The Zodiac (2005), one is a good movie the other is in the IMDb bottom 100 list. Zodiac chronicles the 22 year investigation into the Zodiac killings. The story begins in 1969 with the shooting of two teenagers in Vallejo, California, one survives and becomes the only witness to ever see the killer's face. What follows is a cryptic trail of bodies, letters, phone calls, and other clues left by the killer to taunt police even as Zodiac continued to kill. The movie does an excellent job of following the investigation as players come and go, leads are uncovered and investigated then dismissed, files closed and reopened, in short the entire 22 year history of the case is condensed into a little over 2 1/2 hours.
The movie is engrossing and I was constantly waiting for the next clue, the next lead, the next anything, to lead the investigators to the killer. Players come and go, as is only natural over a 22 year period, some come back to be important, others simply fade away, their parts played in the endless drama surrounding the case. You never know if a lead is solid and the clues valid, the suspects all seem guilty, yet none seem to be taken into custody. Zodiac highlights the immense difficulty involved in police work. There is no "smoking gun", no big break in the case, no star witness, just the sporadic pursuit of justice which ends in a decidedly non-Hollywood fashion.
Zodiac is slow but relentless it just keeps coming at you, drawing you deeper and deeper into the story. All told this movie is a fascinating look into one of the most mysterious and long-running serial killers in U.S. history.