I forget what people thought of it, but I saw Zodiac today. My thoughts...

Zodiac
David Fincher 2007 USA
A serial killer terrorises California in the 60s and 70s, teasing both the police department and the Media.
Nothing short of impressive, in concept and in execution. Fincher seems to have a wide vocabulary of filmmaking tools, and, perhaps more importantly, the confidence to employ them, for various means. This is a deep, intelligent and convincing delve into subjective verisimilitude, with not only shifting character identities, but a self-conscious nod to how the film has come to be made: the author of the book from which it is adapted remarks at one point, "I'm thinking of writing a book", and, years later, we see it as a bestseller on shelves at an airport. The viewer, like everyone else inside the film, has, at the end of it all, no real concrete idea of who the Zodiac killer is. The one difference, however, is that we're viewing events not as victims, but as viewers to a manipulated narration of events. Fincher knows this; the opening is incredibly tense, frightening and finally shocking, as we see it through the eyes of the boy, the killer's first victim (in the film if not real life); later, when we revisit this first murder, we "watch" it again (mentally, because we're not shown it) through the girl's eyes, since it is revealed or supposed that she knew who the killer was. To go through the film scene-by-scene identifying all the different gazes through which we identify with the film's meaning would take far too long (though it would surely be beneficial to the appreciation of how immensely intelligent it is), but a few points to note: the point at which Gyllenhall's obsessed cartoonist has come to the foray of investigations is the point at which the actual killings are far in the past (both in story time, which is years, and narrative time, which is hours) and the identity of the killer is at its most obscure and elusive (because of all the endless details and clues cluttering up the narrative, and the emphasis on basic demarcations such as handwriting and fingerprints). There's one scene, in which he is persuaded down into the basement of an elderly man's home, who began the scene as a possible witness and before descending rapidly into prime suspect - he hasn't really, of course, but it's constructed, like the rest of the film, so that we view the film through a certain character's psychological state, and so when he turns off the basement light, all sorts of things are suggested. Soon after, alone at home, Gyllenhall hears his back door open, and the moving shadow on the wall takes on an almost expressionistic effect in creating meaning, in this case the absurd paranoia of his character - but for a title at the end, we might even doubt whether he received anonymous, heavy-breathing phone calls at all. There's one moment, too, early on, which shows somebody who we assume to be the killer, shown with the non-diegetic phone call of him informing the police of another killing - it seems out-of-place in a film about an unsolved murder spree, but it's decidedly clever, in further mystifying the entire case in (fictional) retrospect. Fincher employs his usually smooth pans, tracks and shot-to-shot transitions as well as proving how far ahead of most others he is at CGI - some of the period reconstructions are flawless and beautiful, including a birdseye-view tracking shot of a taxicab on its way to murder, and a gorgeous establishing shot of the Golden Gate Bridge - again, even if this time the city is specific and not anonymous (like in Seven), he is very, very effective in evoking location. At 160 minutes, its duration belies the discipline with which it has been made: every direction it takes, be it a cut, shift in gaze or narrative thread, a pan or a track, seems motivated.