At the Chronicle, hardbitten alcoholic reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) covers the Zodiac, but an unlikely fellow staff member, cartoonist Jake Gyllenhaal (Robert Graysmith) takes an even greater interest in the case. His obsession with identifying Zodiac gradually overwhelms his life. His second wife Melanie (Chloë Sevigny) leaves him and takes the kids.
The San Francisco police are unable to identify Zodiac, though inspectors Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) pursue myriad leads. Their strongest suspect is Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch), a child sex offender, but they can't corral enough evidence to nail him. Gyllenhaal also concludes that Allen is guilty, but can do nothing more than stare him down in a hardware store.
Brian Cox has a small role as celebrity attorney Melvin Belli, briefly contacted by Zodiac.
How others will see it. Director David Fincher, whose career began making music videos, now ranks among the most commercially successful directors ever. His nine films each have more than 147K votes at imdb.com. Fight Club has a spectacular 820K votes, followed by 630K votes for Seven. Zodiac is a distant sixth place with "just" 192K votes.
In terms of imdb.com user ratings, Zodiac ranks seventh, ahead of only Panic Room and the dubious Alien 3. Yet the user rating of 7.7 is certainly high. The ratings are fairly consistent, though highest among males under 18 (8.2) and lowest among women under 45 (7.3).
The film was a box office dud, relative to its cost, and was ignored by the Oscars, BAFTA, and Golden Globes. It did garner a Palme d'Or nomination at Cannes, along with various lesser nods at minor festivals. Undoubtedly, the film has since become profitable through video sales and rentals.
Message board interest focuses on the identify of the Zodiac. Some viewers were disappointed that the ending (and identity) is left open. Officially, the case is unsolved. Some viewers prefer a fictional Dirty Harry version where the hero cop blows the lunatic killer away. But it doesn't usually work that way in real life.
Many viewers compare Zodiac with Seven, Fincher's most popular crime drama. The primary difference, of course, is that one is fictional and the other is not. Thus, the story for Seven can be exaggerated (often beyond credibility) for dramatic purposes, while the unsolved Zodiac is mostly an exercise in frustration for its cast, and to a lesser extent, its viewers.
How I felt about it. Despite Fincher's remarkable career success, I have yet to give any of his films a grade higher than 56. Except for Zodiac, which benefits from ideal casting and a quality script. Writer James Vanderbilt likely lives in obscurity, but his career is red hot at the moment, with five screenplays under current production. It appears that his work in Zodiac has been recognized.
Watching the movie, the marvel is that Zodiac basically gets away with it. He commits these murders and writes letters that increase his chances of getting caught. If Allen is the killer, though, he doesn't thrive. He loses his job, is sent away to prison as a sex offender, suffers from diabetes and kidney disease, and dies before the age of 60.
On the other hand, if Allen is not the killer, then he was virtually hounded to death simply because the police were unable to identify the true murderer. Under this scenario, Allen is the scapegoat for ineffectual police.
Back to the movie. The characters, though based on real people, are exaggerated to make them more interesting. Toschi has a compulsion for animal crackers, Paul Avery is defiant toward authority, and Graysmith's fascination for identifying Zodiac fails to wane with the passage of time. For him, it is still 1969, even 14 years later.
Most curious of all is Melanie. From her first date with Graysmith, he knows he is hopelessly obsessed with the unsolvable case, yet marries him anyway. What did she expect life would be like with him?