Zodiac is a crime thriller released in 2007.\u00a0 It was directed by David Fincher and based on the book of the same name by Robert Graysmith.\u00a0 It is a fairly accurate portrayal of the actual Zodiac murders in the late 1960s to early 1970s in Northern California.\u00a0 At least five people were attacked by the Zodiac killer in three separate events and several other crimes were also attributed to him.\u00a0 And the taunting letters that the murderer sent to the newspapers had the residents of the city and suburbs of San Francisco in a panic about the safety of their school age children on account of his threats to target a school bus.<\/p>\n
The bulk of the movie is the story of reporters and detectives working on the case following up on the evidence and sifting through the suspects.\u00a0 The cast is headed up by such notables as Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.\u00a0 But even the minor parts are ably performed with special notice for John Carroll Lynch as Arthur Leigh Allen who was the primary suspect and probably has the highlight scene during his police interrogation.<\/p>\n
The murder scenes are brutal and creepy in the extreme and the whole film has a dismal sense of foreboding about it that reinforces the sense of dread that the populace felt during the Zodiac\u2019s reign of terror.\u00a0 The investigation into the killings never succeeded in an indictment even though the circumstantial evidence was pretty convincing.\u00a0 And the protracted length of the search is portrayed as having destroyed the careers of the two reporters working on the story and also negatively impacted the SFPD team that was involved.\u00a0 And eventually that is the focus of the movie.<\/p>\n
And now my recommendation.\u00a0 I thought this movie was highly entertaining.\u00a0 The director succeeds in maintaining a claustrophobic atmosphere around the investigators while believably showing us where the blunders and problems hampered the search for the killer.\u00a0 We can see how law enforcement back in the 1970s is hampered by a lack of coordination between jurisdictions and what we would consider primitive forensic methods.<\/p>\n
Eventually one of newspaper investigators devoted years of his life (and the destruction of his marriage) to ferreting out the neglected details that all link back to the same suspect.\u00a0 But all of it was in vain when that suspect died of natural causes before he could be indicted.\u00a0 But it is a fascinating and creepy real life murder mystery that I can highly recommend to folks who like this fare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Zodiac is a crime thriller released in 2007.\u00a0 It was directed by David Fincher and based on the book of the same name by Robert<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237],"tags":[43,38,1355,3405,5247],"class_list":["post-37404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-robert-downey-jr","tag-zodiac"],"yoast_head":"\n