David Fincher's 'Zodiac'
| Rating: | ★★★★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Horror |
In a night of revelry, two unsuspecting youngsters who are making out on a holiday or simply relishing the Independence Day Celebration in California drop dead and injured in their car after an unidentified man shoots them point-blank.
The opening murder scene highlighted by the swelling of Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" makes the film unforgettable. A grim reality depicted in the senseless murder slides along with this 60s rock anthem which makes you cringe a bit. And a bit more.
The killing of Darlene Ferrin and her companion in 1969 virtually starts the ball rolling—the killer goes on his butchery until the time comes when the lives of a number of San Francisco journalists and cops get entangled with the search for his identity. Through his ciphers and letters, the serial killer terrifies the San Francisco Bay Area and taunts the police. As investigators in four jurisdictions begin to search for him, the case becomes an obsession for four men—as their lives and careers are built and destroyed by the endless trail of clues.
While San Francisco Chronicle may be entitled to berate the film for whatever reason it has, aside from being the site of struggle of the story’s characters, saying it “falls flat. and giving it a C rating, what makes Fincher’s adaptation sensible is its treatment of a crime thriller woven in the threadbare characters—Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.), the San Francisco Chronicle lead reporter whose life gets preoccupied and later emaciated by the Zodiac lure; Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the cop who pursues and later becomes the pursued, and Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist who eventually cracks it further for good. Graysmith’s nonfiction work is itself the source material for the film.
After years of search and investigations, however, the Bay Area police could not properly identify the Zodiac murderer who had senselessly killed a number of promising persons in the state. They could not prove him guilty on the bases of handwriting and fingerprints, two indicators that could pin down criminals for their dastardly acts some three decades ago.
While it is not so difficult to pinpoint the criminal—what with the DNA tests and similar other forms of crime identification and detection—these days, what strikes us hard in the film is its depiction of how a potential criminal who had been at large for years and should have been imprisoned for his heinous acts can simply go on at large just because police technology was simply quite old-school or backward, as compared today.
Nevertheless, the experience presented in the film spells the realities we witness in our own country nowadays. Here and now, politicians and criminals alike loom at large, living with the rest of the saner civilization which they prey on, or on which they feed.
“Zodiac” in this sense becomes a predictable masterpiece as we easily see what it speaks to us of the stark realities that make our lives difficult. Some people are born to make us live in fear. Some are just born to make things difficult for us unless we try to do something about it.
John Caroll Lynch’s Arthur Leigh Allen, who comes hardly unscathed during the film’s timeline—he is identified by the 1969 killing witness Mike Mageau only in 1991 or towards the end of the film—visibly mirrors the criminals in our country who are still at large because we lack measures to properly track them down. This is simply engrossing as it is gross.
Screened locally some four months later than its original release worldwide, Fincher’s adaptation of Robert Graysmith’s whodunit throws open the puzzle that is not solved because in reality it was not solved for a long time.
Others say it is a kind of “procedural thriller for the information age,” trying to mirror the stark realities of the 1970s.
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