Critical Recommendation: Zodiac

Get out of your house for a change, and go ask some people what they think are the greatest historical movies ever made. You'll probably hear a lot of recurring names. Some will bestow Saving Private Ryan with that title. Others will go deep and say Schindler's List. Maybe some people feeling classic (or smug and superior, not unlike us film critics) will give you a name like Lawrence of Arabia or The Bridge on the River Kwai. I think that titles like these get brought up a lot in these kinds of conversations, and what really disappoints me is that no one ever seems to talk about David Fincher's 2007 masterpiece "Zodiac," in regards to this discussion or otherwise. So you could get out and ask people what they think the best historical movie ever made is, or you could stay inside, turn on Netflix, and watch this movie instead. To balance the scales of public focus today, if just by a hair, I decided to talk about Zodiac because it isn't just my personal favorite historical film: I am convinced that it is one of the strongest all-around historical films I have ever seen and as someone who loves history, I've seen a lot of historical films. It's also one of the best serial killer movies ever made, second only to Silence of the Lambs (in my opinion), and far less well-known. In some ways, it's even better than Jonathan Demme's infamous, horrifying, and immediately recognizable classic. Based on journalist Robert Graysmith's 1986 true crime novel of the same name, Zodiac follows the infamous killing spree perpetrated by the Zodiac Killer, the most infamous serial killer to ever mar the pages of American history textbooks, and Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist who worked for the San Fransisco Chronicle and who started a private investigation into the serial murders. The film is a unique, very true-to-it's-source-material, and wildly immersive adaptation of Graysmith's account, and it's also my personal favorite movie ever made by David Fincher. It's a film that just simply doesn't get enough love for its innovative and radical take on a tantalizingly tempting and dark chapter of American history. So this article is going to be dedicated to expressing that long-overdue love.

The technical aspects of Zodiac are incredibly hard to notice for even a trained eye, and I think that this makes them some of the best I have ever seen. It's my personal belief that the very best computer-generated visual effects in a movie are the ones you don't see, and the visual effects in Zodiac are all but invisible. The practically invisible visual effects rendered in this movie recreate 20th-century San Fransisco from practically the ground up, and you barely notice. If the team had rendered San Fransisco with modern architecture, I wouldn't have even gone on the rabbit trail that made me appreciate the visual department that was behind this film, because I wouldn't have known that what I was seeing was computer-generated. Supplementing these incredible visual effects are many practical sets that look splendid. The highlight for me has to be the KGO broadcasting station room where television host Jim Dunbar receives a call from someone claiming to be the Zodiac Killer. This actually happened in real life, and the production design crew of the film recreated the KGO set to a T. Now, this scene was creepy as heck, and while it took a number of creative liberties for the sake of atmosphere, watching both the real interview and the scene from the movie side-by-side was nothing short of unnerving and almost wrong. It was so realistically portrayed that one might even consider it dangerous. Either way, the point is that this film's visual style is uniquely special, and supplemented by masterful cinematography courtesy of Harris Savides. Some have complained about Savides shooting on digital as opposed to film stock, which would have given the movie a harsher and more primitive look, but personally, I noticed that the clean look of the digital cinematography really complemented the overwhelmingly domestic and dangerous feel of this film that Fincher strives so hard to capture. This isn't Se7en. This is something that could have and, for some, did happen right in our backyards here in clean, pristine America.

I want to give this movie some appreciation for its obvious commitment to history, to its source material, and to as much of the truth as this case has chosen to reveal to us. Now, it's not 100% of the way to the absolute truth, but no film is, and I can confidently say that Zodiac is the most historically accurate "based on a true story" film I have ever seen. Now, the source material for the film is certainly full of embellishments, but the film is a faithful telling of Robert Graysmith's account, and when you're telling a story as old and as shrouded in mystery as this one, that's just about as good as you can do. This film doesn't really take many creative liberties and presents a very matter-of-fact telling of a wildly interesting and fiendish chapter of history, and everything you see in this film either happened pretty much exactly like it did in real life or is essentially a 1-to-1 comparison to Graysmith's book. It's a remarkable achievement and adds a genuinely eerie and weighty vibe to the entire film. As far as the actual story this film tells goes, it's sprawling in scale as well as in the amount of time that this film explores (the film's timeline spans from 1969 all the way to 1991). So it's fascinating, and that's kind of a given. However, Fincher also grounds the story by keeping it focused firmly on Robert Graysmith, his obsession with the Zodiac Killer, and his quest to know the truth about this mysterious man. And I think that the icing on the cake, as well as the ice that runs in the veins of this movie, is the fact that Zodiac can be genuinely scary when it wants to be. You might not sleep for days after you see the infamous basement scene in the film, and that's a hallmark of effective filmmaking if I ever did see one. Zodiac isn't really a horror movie, but at moments, it can truly be more horrifying than anything in a purely fictional horror outing without ever feeling hammy or unrealistic, and that's partially because most of the things portrayed in the film actually happened, and partially because Zodiac is just a very well-made and intelligently-plotted film, even and maybe especially on an on-the-ground, scene-to-scene basis.

Now, it's not a perfect movie, and I think that the same ambition that makes Zodiac special also causes it to meander in the middle act of the film. So it's not without flaws, but I've rarely seen a historical film like this before, and if Hollywood keeps going the way it is, I probably never will again. This movie is really good, and I would recommend it to just about anyone who is fine with following a slower pace and takes joy in the art of the method, but I do need to point out that this movie can be very dark and disturbing at points, and contains some infrequent but graphic violence, a smattering of strong language, and a touch of nudity on some magazine covers. It's not as oppressively dark as other serial killer films like Se7en or the newer Longlegs and exercises a touch of restraint that actually enhances the overall viewing of the film rather than lessening it, but it is about some very dark and very true subject matter, and I realize that this may push the buttons of some readers the wrong way. I get how this looks: Christian movie reviewer recommending a serial killer film to you. I'm not going to try and soften the blow for you and defend this film content-wise on a beat-for-beat basis, but take this review how you will. I would encourage you to give this film a watch. It's very good, and I wouldn't recommend it if I didn't feel like it deserved that accolade. It's truly a one-of-a-kind experience, even if it willingly takes a walk on the dark side of history.

Zodiac - 9/10

Matthew 5:21-22