Great flick. Can't wait for the special edition DVD!

Rating: 9/10 (26 August 2007)

Although I've pretty much despised every film David Fincher has made up to this point, I'd always readily admit that he was a pretty good director. If only he had decent material. Zodiac is a super-detailed account of the Zodiac murders that occurred in California in the late '60s through the mid '70s, one of the most famous unsolved cases in American history. One would expect, given the director's previous Se7en, that the film would be horrifyingly gory and unrelentingly nasty. The big surprise is that it isn't at all. We do witness several of the murders, but Fincher doesn't attempt to gross the audience out as he did in Se7en. This is all done in a matter-of-fact way, in the manner of a procedural. It's amazing the way that Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt, as well as Robert Graysmith, who wrote a book on the subject and is one of the key participants in the story (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), construct the screenplay. They feed us just tons of details, but it doesn't at all feel like a dull list. The story also skips ahead in time constantly. Every few minutes, there's a new subtitle, telling us that this is "4 months later" or whatever. It's easy to lose the mood with such a fragmented structure, but Zodiac works perfectly. What's really amazing is how the details build. They're absorbed by the audience. There's so much there that, by the end of the film, everyone looks like they could be the Zodiac. It's a great film, one of the best procedural films ever done, and one of the best, so far, of 2007.
btw, rent, don't buy, the first, bare bones edition of the DVD. The studio was desperate to release it, but Fincher has been working on a director's cut and tons of extras. The better DVD should be along sometime early in 2008.