Based on the famous San Francisco Zodiac serial killings in the late 1960s – early 1970s, in his newest offering David Fincher takes us on a ride through familiar territory, yes the serial killer film (we’ve seen it before, in fact he’s done it before in SEVEN).
REVIEW:
There’s not much new here from a filmmaking perspective, not like he’s breaking any new ground or even giving us any of the trademark stuttery David Fincher visuals.
What the film does do however is give us a pretty darned interesting and astonishingly well documented run down of the Zodiac case (which has never been officially solved incidentally, though the film does offer up a hypothesis). I gotta say there was never an instant when I was bored, though there was also never an instant where I felt like I really cared about any of the characters. When I left the theater I was exhausted, mentally, though not necessarily in a bad way. The film really does take you through the hell and then ultimate frustration that it must have been for the San Francisco and surrounding areas’ police departments not actually being able to mount a strong enough case against any of the countless suspects they had based on the random and seemingly unmotivated nature of the killings. Not to mention the embarrassment it must have caused them because the Zodiac was so public, send countless letters to newspapers featuring cryptic notes and open taunts to the police department (he even asks at one point that people where Zodiac buttons on their jackets).
Inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo in fine mumbly form) leads the investigation along with his partner Inspector William Armstrong (Anthony Daniels) over the years, and at somewhat of a price to his career and resolve. Eventually after several years on the case he calls it quits and a cartoonist for a local newspaper, Robert Graysmith (upon whose novel the film is based, played by an adequate Jake Gyllenhaal) takes over, based on his long term obsession with the case, partially due to his friendship with columnist Paul Avery who actually received death threats from the Zodiac himself (played by the always hilarious Robert Downey, I swear I could go to this film just to see him).
After years of study, obsession and correspondence with cops who used to work on the case, Graysmith eventually comes up with a pretty solid argument linking one of the investigations prime suspects Arthur Leigh Allen to the murders, though it still isn’t enough to be able to actually prove anything successfully in a court of law and so the case remains unsolved.
It’s not until 22 years later in 1991, when Mike Mageau, one of the survivors from the initial attacks in the 60s, identifies a picture of Allen as being the man who shot him that the police attempted to actually make charges against Allen. Of course soon after Allen was identified by Mageau, he died of a heart attack and so charges were never made, it never went to court and thus it was never really proven that he did it.
Overall the film is an interesting account of an astonishing set of murders and a killer whose lust for media attention gripped the public and baffled law enforcement for a great part of the 1970s.
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