The many phases of
the Zodiac killer investigation covered over 2.5 hours.
It's hard to come up with a better TV show/movie companion than Mindhunter for Zodiac. I just finished binging Mindhunter and decided that I wanted more. I'd seen Zodiac before, but remembered almost nothing about it*. I forgot how perfectly it matches up with Mindhunter. Both are about getting into the mind of a killer while resisting the urge to sensationalize it. I highly recommend the pairing if you have the time.
*I had a bad habit of putting on Netflix rentals while writing term papers back in the day. That's why, despite technically watching it twice, I'm not sure how much I can count Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels toward my overall movie tally.
Zodiac is a bold challenge for both screenwriter James Vanderbilt and director David Fincher. First of all, it's an unsolved case. Second, the murders occur over a big chunk of time and, accordingly, the investigation moves in fits and spurts. The key players change. There's no natural climax to the story. On paper, this really looks like it would work better as a season of something like Mindhunter or American Crime Story rather than a single movie. That still might be true. Fincher and Vanderbilt sure make it work as a movie though. The smartest move is to shift the focus between Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr. and being fine with leaving one or two of them out for significant chunks of time. Making it both a police procedural and newspaper investigation movie worked surprisingly well too.
I guess you do need to be prepared for what this movie is and isn't. It's isn't an action thriller. It's a mystery without any hard answers. The pace is deliberate but not always escalating. David Fincher directs the hell out of it and kept me on edge the whole time.
Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend
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