: Zodiac
Director: David Fincher
This is an extremely well done film: good direction, acting, writing, etc. The topic is also stirring: a mysterious killer haunts the Bay Area in the late sixties and throughout the 1970s, sending cryptic coded messages to the SF Chronicle. Unfortunately, real life tends to interfere with a good story: the film never ends because the mystery’s never been solved. The film does a great job creating atmosphere and helping us to understand the chaos and bureaucracy that made catching the killer so difficult, but in the end I was left with a sort of “Why did I just sit through three hours of that?” Yes, that’s right — the film is nearly three hours long. It actually didn’t feel that long during it as I was fascinated, but the lackluster ending — basically everyone in the story gets old and eventually dies and the mystery’s never solved — really made it disappointing. I was waiting for a payoff I never received. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad film, just that I think it could have been better shorter and tighter. As it is it just keeps and building and building and then… nothing. That’s a bit frustrating, especially when everything else about the film is so good. It’s not really the filmmaker’s fault — it’s a real life story and that’s what happened — but the film could have been done differently to make the ending less of a letdown. For instance, the film ends with several screens of text description of what happened to the various characters. Some of that would have been better dramatized, showing a scene of what happened. That would have been more satisfying than just reading about it.
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