Zodiac | Teen Ink

Zodiac

January 25, 2018
By Jared McAdam SILVER, Cannon Falls, Minnesota
Jared McAdam SILVER, Cannon Falls, Minnesota
7 articles 0 photos 0 comments

WARNING SPOILERS ABOUT THE ZODIAC CASE ARE PRESENT.
Wondering what it takes to commit the perfect murder? Weird and unusual people
like me probably have probably have. From all of the movies people watch and crime shows people wouldn't think it was possible. What if there was someone who might have gotten away with not just 1 murder but possibly 37? Zodiac in my opinion is David Fincher’s most underrated film and it just might actually be my favorite of his. See where Se7en might just be the best fictional serial killer film ever made, I think Zodiac is the best factual serial killer movie ever made. This movie’s about the real-life Zodiac killings that are still unsolved to this day that took place and baffled police detectives and newspaper journalists all over the world. It’s about the detectives that are trying to solve the case and one newspaper journalist who is absolutely obsessed with it.

I watched the making-of documentary of this movie on the Blu Ray, it’s astounding the level of detail that David Fincher and the people working on this film went to recreate the crime scenes: the look of the scenes, the ways the body were situated, the time, the date, the clothing that the victims wore was even recreated and that’s one of the things about Zodiac that makes it so much more interesting to me, because it is a real-life event that took place in the 60’s. The level of detail that they went to to recreate these events really makes it even more frightening.
See Se7en is a scary movie, watching that movie is disturbing but it’s fiction. When watching Zodiac and then do research on the topic it becomes way more frightening than Se7en. It’s because understanding that these events took place makes it so much more unsettling and it also kind of gets inside my head. I can tell that everytime I watch Zodiac I actually become a little bit obsessed with the case. Everytime I watch the movie I go and look up if there’s any new findings or any new thoughts on the case, it does that to my brain.

Jake Gyllenhaal gives one of his best performance as Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist who becomes obsessed with the case. He reminds me of me but far more dangerous after I watch this movie. Mark Ruffalo plays a detective who’s trying to solve this case and he is also becoming obsessed as well as Robert Downey Jr. who is a news reporter that’s also trying to solve this case. One of the things that Zodiac does as a film so well is portray the intense obsession and the desire to try to find out more information and to solve this case as well as what it did to affect so many different people from Mark Ruffalo’s detective, Jake Gyllenhaal’s cartoonist and Robert Downey Jr.’s news reporter. All three of these guys are absolutely knees-deep in this case and once they start to drown in it people really start to see how this case had such an effect on so many different people.

This is a very long movie, it’s almost three hours long and yet it is perfectly crafted and constructed to the point where this movie never drags for me. Not once is there a scene in this movie or a section of this film that I think slow and a lot of that is due to the magnificent editing. This is one of the best films particularly look for a scene where Robert Downey Jr. is reading one of the zodiac letters while lighting a cigarette while it’s intercut with other events taking place it’s mesmerizing, also David Fincher purposefully had the actors read a lot of their dialogue faster than they normally would have, so that the runtime didn’t get stretched too long.
This guy is smart, this guy is a filmmaking genius and this is one of his best films in my opinion. Zodiac is a perfectly constructed movie. I think it’s one of the best directed movies ever made. I think it’s David Fincher's most underrated by far. It is one of my all time favorite movies. Check out this disturbing retelling of real-life accounts watch Zodiac. It is one of my favorite movies and I think it’s one of David Fincher's best, if not his best.


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