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Zodiac Movie Analysis

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his reputation in Hollywood with 1995's Se7en.Unlike that Brad Pitt thriller, however, Zodiac is relatively free of the action, quick cuts and high-tech camera work that made Fincher a favorite of crime film fans. If anything, Zodiac is nearly three hours of people talking and chasing dead ends and bad leads."It's still scary," Fincher says. "But I've done movies where my process of making the movie hindered it. I enjoyed this more than Panic Room because we don't get away from the story."Perhaps that's because Fincher, who was raised near San Francisco, remembers being 7 and riding in a police-escorted school bus after the Zodiac suggested in a letter to the press that "school children make nice targets."The experience, he says, molded …show more content…

Mageau has reservations about the film."Why would I want to see that?" he asks by telephone from New York. "I don't want to remember that time any more."Hartnell, too, says he would have preferred that the film not be made. But he knows the lurid nature of the crimes keeps the story alive in the media.And he was impressed with the lengths Fincher took to re-create the 1969 attack. "He went to the same spot on the lake, on the same day it happened," he says.The Zodiac, Hartnell says, pulled a gun on him and Cecelia Shepard, 22, as they sat by a lake in Napa County. The attacker, who wore a hood with a zodiac sign around his neck, hogtied both . Explaining a mystery is an act of reassurance. It makes us feel that chaos has been defeated, and the forces of order restored. Zodiac, David Fincher's vastly intricate and dazzling drama about the hunt for the serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area starting in 1969, offers no such soothing closure, and that's part of what's haunting about it. It spins your head in a new way, luring you into a vortex and then deeper still, fascinating us as much for what we don't know as what we do. Reenacting one of the most infamous "cold" cases in U.S. criminal history, Fincher has broken with the fanciful mode of tawdry baroque opulence he employed in Fight Club, Panic Room, and his first serial-killer outing, Seven. Zodiac is based on piles of documents culled from police records, and it's been made in a style of

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