Cashing in on the success of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, here comes the sequel.

Check out the trailer:  28 Weeks Later

Zodiac is a meticulously crafted police movie tracking the killing spree that gripped the Bay Area from it’s beginnings in the summer of 1969 through 1971. As a movie Zodiac works on many of the same levels as All The Presidents Men. Two of the main players in Zodiac work at the San Francisco Chronicle. Much like Redford and Hoffman’s characters. Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) is the head of the Chronicle’s crime beat and Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the staff cartoonist. Robert Downey Jr. is incredible in his portrayal as a wise-cracking and boozing reporter. The Zodiac killings are, at first, exactly what he needs to breathe new life into his editorial. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Graysmith brings a dogged determinism to solving the murder that we haven’t seen in cinema since Richard Lee Dreyfus’ U.F.O. obsessed father in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Fincher’s cast of actors runs deep: Brian Cox, Chloë Sevigny, Elias Koteas, James LeGros, Donal Logue, Clea DuVall, Adam Goldberg, Dermot Mulroney, and Philip Baker Hall all turn in strong performances.

Mark Ruffalo is magnetic as detective Dave Toschi. Toschi is a famous San Francisco cop who was the basis for Michael Douglas’s character in the Streets of San Francisco, Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. The latter film is also based on the same subject matter as Zodiac. Ruffalo’s Toschi wears his gun in the signature way that Bullitt wore his. He wears seventies slacks and turtle necks, sports long sideburns and appropriately large hair for the decade. But Toschi isn’t all style he pursues the case with vigilance and goes after every lead given to him. What make this film interesting is that the case of the Zodiac outlasted the primary detectives assigned to the case. We don’t get that neat ‘cop film’ ending. The Zodiac was never caught. We see reporters, cops, and all touched by the case inexorably drawn into the hunt for the killer and slowly their lives are destroyed. This quest takes a heavy toll on their personal and professional lives. Toschi is dismissed from the case. His partner, played by Anthony Edwards, requests a transfer from the case. Paul Avery descends into drugs and alcohol. Graysmith may lose his wife.

The movie begins with the murder of a young couple parked on lover’s lane. The murder is suspenseful and brutal in it’s cinematic execution. Fincher makes us feel present and close to all the violence in the film. When watching an average serial killer movie or horror film you often have that moment where you feel violence is about to erupt on screen but then the filmmaker holds back to heighten your suspense, only to surprise you with it just when you are about to relax. Zodiac just shows us the violent act exactly when and how it would unfold and it is brutal, shocking, and surprising in its force. In a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle the Zodiac includes a taunting letter and a cipher. Graysmith takes a stab at the code but it is a husband and wife school teacher duo who love puzzles who decipher the code.

The code references a line of dialogue from the 1932 film The Most Dangerous Game, a film about an evil count who hunts his dinner guest for sport on a remote island. This killer is playing with the cops and the people of San Francisco. He hates them and is toying with them. The film is replete with other cinematic references. The police hold a special screening of Dirty Harry. One of Graysmith’s leads takes him to a projectionist who may or may not be the killer. Here we can see a link to Brad Pitt’s projectionist in Fight Club. We begin to see common tropes in Finchers oeuvre. In Seven the killer writes in a cryptic code and enjoys taunting the authorities. The Game and Panic Room are about manipulation and fear.

Zodiac turns what could be a traditional serial killer genre flick into a brilliant detective story. Fincher is almost single handedly responsible for giving birth to the modern serial killer drama. Say what you want about Psycho, Fincher’s Seven may be one of the most emulated movies of the last decade. It is almost as if Fincher, embarrassed by all the emulation, wanted to tell the real story, the real impetus, that lead him to direct the highly stylized and cathartic Seven.

Zodiac is a film that is absent of excess emotion. It is one of the most repressed examples of filmmaking in my memory. There are no great cathartic moments for its characters. None of the detectives ever raise their voices or display strong public emotions. Everything is under the skin. The turmoil of these characters runs deep. The Zodiac is like a tumor growing in them all. This tumor takes it’s toll on some and other struggle to excise it in their search for closure.

Towards the end of the film Robert Graysmith’s character takes position as the lead protagonist. He is the tenacious one so obsessed with catching the killer he even enlists his own children to help him track lunar cycles and match them to key Zodiac timelines. This obsession ultimately leads him face to face with the Arthur Leigh Allen, the best and most convincing suspect of the SFPD. All circumstantial evidence led to this suspect but the police never had any concrete evidence. They hung their hopes on handwriting analysis that ultimately failed as a link to Allen. The Zodiac was never caught.

It is amazing how the internet affects our lives today. During the narrative of Zodiac characters struggle with facts and gaining access to facts. Faxes machines aren’t even that common yet. Cell phones don’t exist yet. Police records are kept in boxes and each precinct deals sparingly in detailing its cases to other precincts. I can only surmise that if the Zodiac murders happened today they may have caught their killer.

David Fincher wanted to tell the story of the Zodiac murders that haunted his childhood while living in the Bay Area at the time. He wanted to tell this murderous story as a reporter and as a chronicler of the time and with respect for the details. In a sense he is redefining the genre and doing great justice to cinema. The movie begins with a bang of violence and ends with a whimper as Jake Gyllenhaal briefly encounters Allen. This structure is the inverse of the traditional Hollywood drama. This is a ‘true crime’ film. This is laborious detective work committed to celluloid.

I would like to add a few technical comments about Zodiac:

This film may be the closest approximation of Seventies Cinema since the 70’s. When shooting a period piece you have to recreate everything through construction, production design, props and costume, etc. If you had the good fortune to shoot a film during the Seventies you could just shoot your location. In Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon you have the street scenes and flavor of New York on film. Lumet probably just had to direct his camera to the existing people on the streets around him. Fincher had to re-create these moments. He chose seemingly trivial moments to film: people walking down the street, exiting elevators, and other day in day out repetitions. All of these moments lend an authenticity to the movie that makes you feel the weight of the period and the sense of a different era.

Harris Savides shot this film on the Viper digital cameras. I loved the look of the movie. It had that wonderful desaturated look of old Kodachrome prints. I think he did a wonderful job with the look of the era. I still see a muddy quality in the low light detailing of digital cinema. Film grain looks alive to me with detail even in low light. Digital tends to go mushy in the subtle low light detail. Overall I loved the way this film looked but I’m not yet sure the technology is there to replace film.