Film Review

Zodiac

Back when I was approximately 12 years old, I saw a "special" on some cable TV show. Maybe it was WPIX out of NYC (remember when people played video games in a daily contest yelling "Pix!" to make someone at the station press the button?) or A&E in its early days. Anyway, the "special" was about the Zodiac Killer who terrorized California in the late 60s through mid 70s. He murdered people randomly and in different ways and sent cypher-codes (see pic to see an actual example of one of his cyphers) to the police and media to give them clues to his identity. It absolutely haunted me for years because they had the creepiest sounding guy reading the letters that the killer sent to area newspapers or the police. His voice-over stuck in my head. That, and the fact that they never caught Zodiac struck a chord on my impressionable young mind.

They say the best way to overcome your fear is to face it, so I read books about the case, magazine articles, and anything I could get my hands on. The entire time I did so, it was to reassure myself that they guy was in California and nowhere near Buffalo, NY. Eventually, I got over it.

Then, the internet came along and one day I stumbled on a site about the case...and spent weeks following links to others. Reading "new" theories about the case re-sparked my interest. At the same time, there had been rumors for well over a decade about a film being made, which never seemed to come to fruition.

Then came 2007 and David Fincher's marvelous film, Zodiac. When it was released, I wanted to go see it, but was too busy and figured I'd catch it on DVD. I bought the DVD a month or so ago, but never got around to watching it...partially because I also bought a PS3 and have been addicted to Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction for a while now...but I digress.

I watched the film and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's an amazing "history" of the case. It is meticulously filmed, edited and designed. And the interesting thing is that while ther performances are all very well done, no one is a stand-out among the others. It's a real ensemble piece.

It is long. A little more than 2 and a half hours. And you wonder where it's going at times. But it's all worth it in the end. You can't feel the frustration the investigators felt or the obsession that the reporters felt without almost literally re-living the entire investigation.

Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey, Jr., and Anthony Edwards all do finely tuned, nuanced work, as do all (and I mean all) of the supporting actors and extras. The director's cut with a ton of extras comes out in 2008, and I'll be the first to buy it. It will give me one more moment of obsession about a 40 yr old serial killer case.

Chances are the Zodiac Killer is dead or in old-age obscurity at this point, because of the amount of time that has gone by, but the case still creeps me out. It's the "what if" factor. And this remarkable film only reinforces that. Zodiac is "unease" at its best.