IMDB says “A serial killer in the San Francisco Bay Area taunts police with his letters and cryptic messages. We follow the investigators and reporters in this lightly fictionalized account of the true 1970’s case as they search for the murderer, becoming obsessed with the case. Based on Robert Graysmith’s book, the movie’s focus is the lives and careers of the detectives and newspaper people.”
Jake Gyllenhaal is leading up an anotherwise unremarkable cast, which makes me think if this thing hits at the right time, it’ll be a big success for Fincher. His last one, Panic Room, failed to live up to his potential, and seemed to me to suffer from a kind of creative anxiety, possibly because Fight Club was looming over his shoulder. It was a tough act to follow, but so was Se7en, after which we got The Game, which suffers from similar problems as Panic Room.
And then came Fight Club, which is superior to Se7en in every way, but feels like a maturation of the director’s artistry along similar lines, as if the conclusion of the thoughts he started in Se7en about masculinity and morality, image and identity, sex and power. Panic Room, again, feels like a grown-up The Game in some ways, with similar claustrophobic tension more literally expressed, and stripped of the hackish plottyplotness he has always let drag him down.
Anyway, if his pattern holds, and he’s finished the next step of artistic growth, Zodiac could be both really, really good, and possibly even a runaway at the box office, because Jake is popular and both a good journalism and a good serial killer movie are overdue.