August 30, 2008: Zodiac
I’m a big David Fincher fan. I loved Se7en. Fight Club was one of the crown jewels of 1999, which was a real peak movie year for me, with 4 or 5 movies that rocked my world, and that was one of them. I hadn’t paid much attention to Alien 3 until I saw the Director’s Cut and realized that it’s a pretty neat movie as well, and reading the IMDB “Alternate Versions” info for that made me wonder how anyone thought the theatrical version could possibly be a coherent story at all. Anyway, suffice to say that Fincher does it for me.
I even liked The Game, which nobody else ever seems to have seen or cared about.
So it was nice to see Zodiac getting great reviews when it was out, and I saw it in the theatre and was duly impressed, even though it wasn’t “Fincher-esque” in the usual way. Also, like most movies based on true stories about which I know nothing, it made me want to learn more about the real details of the story. Until I got home, anyway. Writing this review some weeks later, I find that I still haven’t delved into learning all I can about the Zodiac killer.
This hadn’t struck me as being a movie that I needed to revisit many times like the others mentioned above. A good movie, yes, but not in that way. But in recent months, I had been feeling more and more like I wanted to see it again, so I finally sat down and did so. It plays really well, and it’s nice to see characters who act realistically and don’t go flying off the handle or generate some conflict just so that there’s conflict. I would highly recommend this as a detailed period study of a situation which drove a lot of people close to (and sometimes past) their breaking point.
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