Zodiac (2007)
Directed by David Fincher
The story follows the manhunt for the Zodiac Killer, a serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s and early 1970s, taunting police with letters, bloodstained clothing, and ciphers mailed to newspapers.
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43 films that influenced Zodiac
What critics say influenced Zodiac
It’s tempting to compare the film to Pakula’s All the President’s Men, and that film is without question a touchstone for this one in many ways.
Tonally, the movie owes more to movies like “All the President’s Men” than “Serpico,” though one can find modern-day touchstones in films like Robert De Niro’s “The Good Shepherd” or Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” without dragging or trying to shoehorn superfluous scenes into the story.
Fincher evokes the suspense and dramatic build-up of "All the President's Men" (1976) as his three protagonists uncover more and more information.
While it’s understandable that he wants to branch out and try something new, such as making a chatty thriller in the vein of All The President’s Men, it doesn’t click and fails to be gripping throughout its hefty running time.
It's inspired partly by films such as The Conversation and All the President's Men, the taut political thrillers of the 1970s.
The tone echoes that of many vérité thrillers of the era, such as The French Connection or All the President's Men.
As a matter of fact, I daresay the film covers every major aspect of a crime spree such as this one: the effect on the investigators' personal lives, the media coverage ("Dirty Harry" was directly inspired by Zodiac), the nutcases who come out of the woodworks, the copycats, the procession of false leads and near-arrests, the politics, the paperwork, the red tape, and the paranoia.
Toschi was supposedly the inspiration for the characters played by Steve McQueen in "Bullitt" and Clint Eastwood in "Dirty Harry."
As Inspector Dave Toschi, the SFPD detective who has inspired the characters behind three career-making turns (Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, which was loosely based on the Zodiac case, Steve McQueen in Bullitt and Michael Douglas in the TV series The Streets of San Francisco), Mark Ruffalo captures the vocal rasp and gruff energy of a homicide cop with an antithetical jones for kids' snack foods.
Mr. Toschi's unique way of wearing his holster provided the inspiration for Steve McQueen in "Bullitt"; The serial killer Scorpio from the first "Dirty Harry" movie was modeled on Zodiac; Brian Cox's character, Melvin Belli, appeared in the "And the Children Shall Lead" episode of the original "Star Trek" series.
To a point, that’s intentional: Zodiac was never caught, and Fincher aims to creep you out with the lack of closure, with the absence of a Dirty Harry?style climax and windup (Dirty Harry being one of the myriad serial-killer thrillers that drew its inspiration?if…
One of the film�s best scenes is a special screening of Dirty Harry held for the SFPD and just as Fincher shows us the obvious parallel between Zodiac and that film�s villain, he then trusts us with our knowledge of the film and the Zodiac's threats by using only the audio to creepily typify entertainment�s �ripped from the headlines� mentality.
Instead, the letter rips off themes from "The Most Dangerous Game," a Richard Connell short story frequently included in high school literature anthologies about an obsessed hunter who stalks shipwrecked humans on his private island.
While Graysmith solves part of the first cipher, revealing its manhunting reference to the 1932 film The Most Dangerous Game, for the first two-thirds of the film Fincher has Gyllenhaal literally looming in the background, as two more murders occur and the letters keep coming, one threatening to pick off schoolchildren as they step off the bus.
The Zodiac code seems to contain a reference to a 1932 movie, The Most Dangerous Game, in which a madman hunts human prey.
When the phrase “man is the most dangerous animal of all” ends up in one of Zodiac’s letters to the newspaper, a possible connection is drawn to the Richard Connell short story (invariably referred to as a book in the movie) “The Most Dangerous Game” and its 1932 film incarnation.
Graysmith goes one better when he connects a Salinas couple’s interpretation of the cipher to a 1932 RKO film entitled "The Most Dangerous Game," about a Russian Count who hunts people on his private island.
Toschi was supposedly the inspiration for the characters played by Steve McQueen in "Bullitt" and Clint Eastwood in "Dirty Harry."
Toschi is a legendary San Francisco detective, the inspiration for Steve McQueen's character in Bullitt, as well as "Dirty" Harry Callahan and Michael Douglas's character in The Streets of San Francisco.
As Inspector Dave Toschi, the SFPD detective who has inspired the characters behind three career-making turns (Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, which was loosely based on the Zodiac case, Steve McQueen in Bullitt and Michael Douglas in the TV series The Streets of San Francisco), Mark Ruffalo captures the vocal rasp and gruff energy of a homicide cop with an antithetical jones for kids' snack foods.
Mr. Toschi's unique way of wearing his holster provided the inspiration for Steve McQueen in "Bullitt"; The serial killer Scorpio from the first "Dirty Harry" movie was modeled on Zodiac; Brian Cox's character, Melvin Belli, appeared in the "And the Children Shall Lead" episode of the original "Star Trek" series.
As Graysmith delves ever more deeply into the seeping bog of the case –which became both a media event and a kind of mass panic in the Bay area between '69 and '72 – he is drawn into the wary orbit of the cops assigned to the case: Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the rumpled local semi-celebrity who inspired both Steve McQueen's Bullitt and Clint Eastwood's (Dirty) Harry Callaghan – and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards), a devoted flatfoot whose steely professionalism will ultimately melt under the heat generated by the case.
In other words, it's believable that Ruffalo's cop could have shown Steve McQueen how to be a detective in "Bullitt," as Toschi did in real life.
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David Shire's ("The Conversation") score harks back to detective stories of its time yet is modern in its simplicity and Fincher's use of "Hurdy Gurdy Man" as the killer's theme is eerily effective.
It's inspired partly by films such as The Conversation and All the President's Men, the taut political thrillers of the 1970s.
He recreates the period with such precision that Zodiac looks like it might have been made at the same time as All the President’s Men and The Conversation, films that clearly influenced Fincher’s work.
Fincher & Vanderbilt may have been trying to pull off the same trick that Spike Lee did with Summer of Sam; focusing on those affected by the serial murderer, but there�s absolutely zero sense of fear from the big, bad city down to the smallest of neighborhoods.
There was more menace and atmosphere in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam , another film about a real-life serial killer.
And unlike, say, Spike Lee’s very good “Summer of Sam,” there is darned little fun to be had in Fincher’s film.
Since "Zodiac" is a movie about the famed serial killer of the title, other comparisons follow, such as Spike Lee's excellent "Summer of Sam," the 1999 film that followed the murders left in the wake of David Berkowitz, better known as Son of Sam, who took New York City by storm in 1977.
The more the culprit eludes the protagonists, the more obsessive they become in uncloaking him -- Spike Lee in Summer of Sam was content to tag his own zeitgeist-defining killer a "sick fuck," but the Zodiac becomes Moby Dick to the polyester-clad Ahabs, and in Fincher's grand joke the Great Beast is revealed (or is it?)
Zodiac is more Summer of Sam than Silence of the Lambs and, for this die-hard movie fan, that proves more distressing than a phantom killer on the loose.
The fact of police departments not sharing information, in order to claim credit for solving the case, creates a dysfunctional societal atmosphere akin to Billy Wilder’s "Ace In The Hole."
Unlike, say, Oliver Stone’s JFK, that hoped to unravel the contradictory conclusion of the Warren Commission to suggest another theory on the assassination of the President, Fincher is fine with Zodiac remaining an enigma.
In that, Fincher's film is a cousin to Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (1949) and High and Low (1963), Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men (1976) and Oliver Stone's JFK (1991).
As a procedural, we hear the words but not the music, lacking the emotional informational overload that Oliver Stone was able to play so well during JFK.
Zodiac‘s screenplay is as labyrinthine as Oliver Stone’s JFK, but Fincher never lets things become a preachy or ponderous commentary.
Dizzyingly dense, intricate in the extreme, Zodiac is the most information-packed procedural since JFK, though far more restrained when it comes to theorizing.
Sublimating all of the visual trickery that distinguished his previous films from the b- and c-grade genres from whence they came, Fincher creates a righteous epic about San Francisco's Zodiac killer and in so doing offers a cathartic close to the exact kind of serial tomes that made his name as an a-list moviemaker.While presented as a largely linear retelling of the crimes and their subsequent investigation by authorities, Zodiac is essentially the JFK of true-crime thrillers: a swirling mass of misinformation and conspiracy theory where the truth is always just out of reach.
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Don't think of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell cavorting comically in "His Girl Friday," though.
He has a movie poster of Illegal with Edward G. Robinson on Graysmith’s wall.