Zodiac (film)
Zodiac is a 2007 American neo-noir crime thriller film directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by James Vanderbilt based on the nonfiction books by Robert Graysmith: Zodiac (1986) and Zodiac Unmasked (2002). The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr., with Anthony Edwards, Brian Cox, Elias Koteas, Donal Logue, John Carroll Lynch, Chloë Sevigny, Philip Baker Hall, and Dermot Mulroney in supporting roles.[4][5]
Zodiac
- Mike Medavoy
- Arnold W. Messer
- Bradley J. Fischer
- James Vanderbilt
- Ceán Chaffin
- Paramount Pictures
(North America)[1] - Warner Bros. Pictures
(International)[1]
- February 28, 2007 (New York City)
- March 2, 2007 (United States)
157 minutes
United States
English
$84.7 million[2]
The film tells the story of 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. The case remains one of the United States' most infamous unsolved crimes. Fincher, Vanderbilt, and producer Bradley J. Fischer spent 18 months conducting their own investigation and research into the Zodiac murders. Fincher employed the digital Thomson Viper FilmStream Camera to photograph most of the film, and used traditional high-speed film cameras for slow-motion murder sequences.
Zodiac was released by Paramount Pictures in North America and by Warner Bros. Pictures in international markets on March 2, 2007. It received largely positive reviews, with praise for its writing, directing, acting, and historical accuracy. The film was nominated for several awards, including the Saturn Award for Best Action, Adventure or Thriller Film. It grossed over $84.7 million worldwide on a production budget of $65 million. In a 2016 critics' poll conducted by the BBC, Zodiac was voted the 12th greatest film of the 21st century.
Plot[edit]
On July 4, 1969, an unknown man attacks Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau with a handgun at a lovers' lane in Vallejo, California. Only Mike survives.
One month later, the San Francisco Chronicle receives encrypted letters written by the killer calling himself "Zodiac", who threatens to kill a dozen people unless his coded message containing his identity is published. Political cartoonist Robert Graysmith, who correctly guesses that his identity is not in the message, is not taken seriously by crime reporter Paul Avery or the editors and is excluded from the initial details about the killings. When the newspaper publishes the letters, a married couple deciphers one. In September, the killer stabs law student Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard at Lake Berryessa in Napa County; Cecelia dies two days later.
At the office, Avery makes fun of Graysmith before they discuss the coded letters. Graysmith interprets the letter, which Avery finds helpful, and he begins sharing information. One of Graysmith's insights about the letters is that Zodiac's reference to man as "the most dangerous animal of them all" is a reference to the film The Most Dangerous Game, which features the villainous Count Zaroff, a man who hunts live human prey.
Two weeks later, San Francisco taxicab driver Paul Stine is shot and killed in the city's Presidio Heights district. The Zodiac killer mails pieces of Stine's bloodstained shirt to the Chronicle along with a taunting letter. San Francisco police inspectors Dave Toschi and his partner Bill Armstrong are assigned to the case by Captain Marty Lee and work closely with Vallejo's Jack Mulanax and Captain Ken Narlow in Napa. Someone claiming to be Zodiac continues to send taunting letters and speaks on the phone with lawyer Melvin Belli on the KGO-TV morning talk show hosted by Jim Dunbar.
In 1971, Detectives Toschi, Armstrong, and Mulanax question Arthur Leigh Allen, a suspect in the Vallejo case. They notice that he wears a Zodiac wristwatch, with the same logo used by the killer, and Toschi thinks he is the killer. However, a handwriting expert insists that Allen did not write the Zodiac letters, even though Allen is said to be ambidextrous. Avery receives a letter threatening his life; becoming paranoid, he turns to drugs and alcohol. He shares information with the Riverside Police Department that the killer might have been active before the initial killings, angering Toschi and Armstrong. The case's notoriety weighs on Toschi, who cannot sit through a Hollywood film, Dirty Harry, loosely based on the Zodiac case.
By 1978, Avery has moved to the Sacramento Bee. Graysmith persistently contacts Toschi about the Zodiac murders and eventually impresses him with his knowledge of the case. While Toschi cannot directly give Graysmith access to the evidence, he provides names in other police departments where Zodiac murders occurred. Armstrong transfers from the San Francisco Police homicide division, and Toschi is demoted for supposedly forging a Zodiac letter.
Graysmith continues his own investigation, profiled in the Chronicle, and gives a television interview about the book he is writing on the case. He begins receiving phone calls from someone breathing heavily. As his obsession deepens, Graysmith loses his job, and his wife Melanie leaves him, taking their children. Graysmith learns that Allen lived close to Ferrin and probably knew her and that his birthday matches the one Zodiac gave when he spoke to one of Melvin Belli's maids. While circumstantial evidence seems to indicate his guilt, the physical evidence, such as fingerprints and handwriting samples, do not implicate him. In 1983, Graysmith tracks Allen to a Vallejo Ace Hardware store, where he is employed as a sales clerk; they stare at each other before Graysmith leaves. Eight years later, after Graysmith's book, Zodiac, has become a bestseller, Mike Mageau identifies Allen from a police mugshot.
A textual epilogue indicates that Allen died before police could question him and that the case remains open.
Production[edit]
Development[edit]
Robert Graysmith first sold the film rights to his true crime book Zodiac to Shane Salerno, with whom he had established a close relationship. Salerno managed to make a deal with Ricardo Mestres of Great Oaks Entertainment to co-produce and write the film for Touchstone Pictures.[6] According to Stuart Hazeldine, who was pitched to rewrite it, the script would have been about the Zodiac killer resurfacing in Los Angeles.[7]
James Vanderbilt had read Robert Graysmith's book Zodiac while in high school. Years later, after becoming a screenwriter, he got the opportunity to meet Graysmith, and became fascinated by the folklore surrounding the Zodiac killer. He decided to try to translate the story into a script.[8] Vanderbilt had endured bad experiences in the past in which the endings of his scripts had been changed, and wanted to have more control over the material this time.[8] He pitched his adaptation of Zodiac to Mike Medavoy and Bradley J. Fischer from Phoenix Pictures, agreeing to write a spec script if he could have more creative control over it.[8]
Graysmith met Fischer and Vanderbilt at the premiere of Paul Schrader's film Auto Focus, based on Graysmith's 1991 book about the life and death of actor Bob Crane.[9] A deal was made and they optioned the rights to Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked when they became available after languishing at another studio for nearly a decade.[10] David Fincher was their first choice to direct based on his work on Seven. Originally, he was going to direct an adaptation of James Ellroy's novel The Black Dahlia (later filmed by Brian De Palma), and envisioned a five-hour, $80 million mini-series with film stars.[11] When that failed to materialize, Fincher left that project and moved on to Zodiac.[11]
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
Opening in 2,362 theaters on March 2, 2007, the film grossed US$13.3 million in its opening weekend, placing second and posting a per-theater average of $5,671.[44] The film was outgrossed by fellow opener Wild Hogs and saw a decline of over 50% in its second weekend, losing out to the record-breaking 300.[45] It grossed $33 million in North America and $51 million in the rest of the world, bringing its current total to $84 million.[46] In an interview with Sight & Sound magazine, Fincher addressed the film's low gross at the North American box office: "Even with the box office being what it is, I still think there's an audience out there for this movie. Everyone has a different idea about marketing, but my philosophy is that if you market a movie to 16-year-old boys and don't deliver Saw or Seven, they're going to be the most vociferous ones coming out of the screening saying 'This movie sucks.' And you're saying goodbye to the audience who would get it because they're going to look at the ads and say, 'I don't want to see some slasher movie.'"[23]
Critical response[edit]
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 90% based on 265 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "A quiet, dialogue-driven thriller that delivers with scene after scene of gut-wrenching anxiety. David Fincher also spends more time illustrating nuances of his characters and recreating the mood of the 70s than he does on gory details of murder."[22] At Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 79 out of 100, based on 40 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[47] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.[48]
Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman awarded the film an "A" grade, hailing the film as a "procedural thriller for the information age" that "spins your head in a new way, luring you into a vortex and then deeper still."[49] Nathan Lee in his review for The Village Voice wrote that director Fincher's "very lack of pretense, coupled with a determination to get the facts down with maximum economy and objectivity, gives Zodiac its hard, bright integrity. As a crime saga, newspaper drama, and period piece, it works just fine. As an allegory of life in the information age, it blew my mind."[50] Todd McCarthy's review in Variety magazine praised the film's "almost unerringly accurate evocation of the workaday San Francisco of 35–40 years ago. Forget the distorted emphasis on hippies and flower-power that many such films indulge in: this is the city as it was experienced by most people who lived and worked there."[51] David Ansen, in his review for Newsweek magazine, wrote, "Zodiac is meticulously crafted – Harris Savides's state-of-the-art digital cinematography has a richness indistinguishable from film – and it runs almost two hours and 40 minutes. Still, the movie holds you in its grip from start to finish. Fincher boldly (and some may think perversely) withholds the emotional and forensic payoff we're conditioned to expect from a big studio movie."[52] Roger Ebert gave the film a maximum of 4 stars, writing: "The film is a police procedural crossed with a newspaper movie but free of most of the cliches of either. Its most impressive accomplishment is to gather a bewildering labyrinth of facts and suspicions over a period of years and make the journey through this maze frightening and suspenseful." Ebert also praised the ensemble cast and, as a longtime columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times, asserted Zodiac was "intriguing in its accuracy" in showing the operation of a major newspaper.[53]
Time Out magazine wrote, "Zodiac isn't a puzzle film in quite that way, instead its subject is the compulsion to solve puzzles and its coup is the creeping recognition, quite contrary to the flow of crime cinema, of how fruitless that compulsion can be."[54] Peter Bradshaw in his review for The Guardian commended the film for its "sheer cinematic virility", and gave it four stars out of five.[55] In his review for Empire magazine, Kim Newman gave the film 4 out of 5 stars and wrote, "You'll need patience with the film's approach, which follows its main characters by poring over details, and be prepared to put up with a couple of rote family arguments and weary cop conversations, but this gripping character study becomes more agonisingly suspenseful as it gets closer to an answer that can't be confirmed."[56] Graham Fuller in Sight & Sound magazine wrote, "the tone is pleasingly flat and mundane, evoking the demoralising grind of police work in a pre-feminist, pre-technological era. As such, Zodiac is considerably more adult than both Seven, which salivates over the macabre cat-and-mouse game it plays with the audience, and the macho brinkmanship of Fight Club."[57]
Some critics expressed disappointment with the film's long running time and lack of action scenes. "The film gets mired in the inevitable red tape of police investigations," wrote Bob Longino of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who also felt the film "stumbles to a rather unfulfilling conclusion" and "seems to last as long as the Oscars."[58] Andrew Sarris of The New York Observer felt that "Mr. Fincher's flair for casting is the major asset of his curiously attenuated return to the serial-killer genre. I keep saying 'curiously' with regard to Mr. Fincher, because I can't really figure out what he is up to in Zodiac – with its two-hour-and-37-minute running time for what struck me as a shaggy-dog narrative."[59] Christy Lemire wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that "Jake Gyllenhaal is both the central figure and the weakest link... But he's never fleshed out sufficiently to make you believe that he'd sacrifice his safety and that of his family to find the truth. We are told repeatedly that the former Eagle Scout is just a genuinely good guy but that's not enough."[60] David Thompson of The Guardian felt that in relation to the rest of Fincher's career, Zodiac was "the worst yet, a terrible disappointment in which an ingenious and deserving all-American serial killer nearly gets lost in the meandering treatment of cops and journalists obsessed with the case."[61]
In France, Le Monde newspaper praised Fincher for having "obtained a maturity that impresses by his mastery of form", while Libération described the film as "a thriller of elegance magnificently photographed by the great Harry Savides." However, Le Figaro wrote, "No audacity, no invention, nothing but a plot which intrigues without captivating, disturbs without terrifying, interests without exciting."[62]