Horror-scope

With Fight Club, The Game, and Seven all appearing on my (in need of some revision, but for now it is what it is) Top 100 Movies List, there was no question that I'd be rushing out to see David Fincher's newest movie, Zodiac. And rush I did -- I went Friday, opening night.

This is actually Fincher's least Fincher-like movie to date, and that's not really a bad thing. It shows that he's expanding his style a bit. There aren't many of his signature "impossible one-take shots" (two exceptions: a birdseye view of a cab moving through the city streets, the construction of the Transamerica Pyramid). It's generally much more brightly lit than his other movies (exceptions: scenes in which the face of the Zodiac killer is being deliberately obscured in shadow). It has nothing approaching the level of gore in his earlier movies (only real exception here is a depiction of a stabbing, but it's really much more violent than it is gory).

Be warned in advance, should you go -- this movie is 2 hours, 40 minutes long. And that is its major weakness. It feels like a long movie. Lots of people got up and walked out from the screening I attended. (Though I couldn't say whether it's because they weren't liking the movie, or because our showing started at 9:55 pm, and they simply didn't know they were going to have to be awake until 1:00, what with previews.) I can't say for sure exactly what I'd cut to make the movie more manageable, but I can tell you exactly where I felt things start to drag.

The movie has three central characters, and no one of them really comes off as the sole protagonist of the piece. There's Jake Gyllenhaal as a cartoonist for the San Francisco chronicle who becomes obsessed with the details of the case. There's Mark Ruffalo as the main detective investigating the crimes (and the "fourth" significant character, his partner played by Anthony Edwards). And there's Robert Downey Jr, playing a reporter also working at the Chronicle.

Ruffalo and Downey both have excellent characters. They're compelling, funny at times, interesting to watch. Gyllenhaal's character is flat. I don't believe this is a fault of his acting, but is more an issue of the script -- he just doesn't command your attention like the other guys. In the first two-thirds of the movie, Ruffalo and Downey's characters are really the "stars" of the film, and most of the action revolves around them. But for the last third, the reins are handed almost solely to Gyllenhaal's character, and almost instantly the pace starts to drag.

It's particularly interesting to me that this character would be the weak link, since it's the man who in real life wrote the book on the Zodiac killer on which the movie is based. It makes me a little curious as to what sort of writing style he used, and just how he and the other real life people come off in his book. Perhaps the screenwriter has done an overly-faithful adaptation, and this man really comes off as the worst "character" in his own book?

In any case, the slow final hour does bring my opinion of the movie down a lot, but not beyond redemption. I give the movie a B-.

As a short footnote to this post, I'd like to nominate someone for Worst Parent of the Year. As my friend ("Roland Deschain") and I walked into the theater, there in the first seats of the first row was a woman who had her two kids on either side of her, who appeared to be about ages 8 and 4. This woman is taking two children under 10 to a rated R movie about a serial killer at 10:00 at night. (Amazingly, they were well-behaved -- but this is so much not the point I hesitate even to mention it.) Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.