Fincher Comes of age...

Rating: 8/10 (5 October 2008)

David Fincher only directs in the thriller genre maybe because he has the expertise required to raise the tension. In his previous films he relied on funky background colours and dark filters to manipulate his viewers into unease eg fight club and se7en but he shows a totally different colour in Zodiac. One might expect a grim Fincher serial thriller which should show shocking scenes and super pop culture concepts.
But Fincher knows better he is directing a film set in the 60's  70's and it's based on real life elements. He thus approaches it in a documentary like way, more like an 'all the presidents men' type thrillers where characters are not philosophy spewing space monkeys but normal everyday plausible killers As a matter of fact he portrays the serial killer as the most deglamourized serial killer ever seen. The zodiac killer is just a normal everyday guy who acts on his whims and fancies but tries to sound cryptic. At no point of time you feel the zodiac is a genius and catching him would be an unachievable feat. What does make him elusive are police jurisdictions and time lapses spread across geographies.
Three central characters get entangled in the search of the zodiac : A puzzle loving Cartoonist Graysmith (Gyllenhal - brilliant) on whose book the movie is based, a stylish 70s reporter of san Francisco chronicle (Robert Downey, most probably himself) and a serious no nonsense cop (Ruffalo  fairly engaging).
The film transpassses (is there is such a word) thirty years to give us a feeling of how laborious the task became and shows how lives of the three central characters got severely affected by the in vain hunt of the killer.
There are moments in the film which will make your blood pressure rise like a basement scene which is bound to go down in cinematic history as the one of the most nerve tingling ever.
Zodiac is definitely a film which would feature in the bottom half of almost all top ten lists of all time serial killer movies. It also marks a sort of coming to age of the David Fincher who is headed to be one of the classic directors of all times. Recommended.