``Zodiac'' Fincher's most ``quiet'' work in history shows his beliefs

Fincher himself investigated the incident from scratch.

While it is unmistakably Fincher's work, there is something different about it. What I would like to emphasize here is that ``Zodiac'' is not a dramatization of the facts, but rather a work that attempts to turn the ``facts'' themselves into a film. Of course, there were some changes made to make it work as a feature film, but you can tell that the film was carefully crafted to be as faithful to the facts as possible, with respect for the people involved and the victims.

The unprecedentedly long production period can be said to be a stepping stone to this goal. The production team, including Fincher, reportedly gathered a huge amount of material and re-examined the incident from scratch. They reexamined the evidence and documents that had been archived and conducted interviews with surviving victims and those involved. It is surprising that during filming, he found new evidence regarding the incident and submitted it to the police.

Coincidentally, criminal profiling was still in its infancy at the time, as demonstrated by the Netflix original series Mindhunter (2017-), for which Fincher served as executive producer and episode director. The movie focuses not only on the abnormalities and horrors of the Zodiac, but also on the underdeveloped investigation of the Zodiac in the late 1960s and 1970s.

“Mind Hunter” preview

Reverse detection requires 15 minutes of continuous phone calls, the police station in charge of the case lacks a fax machine, and the investigation has been delayed, and DNA testing is still far from perfect. Human errors also occur, such as letting a suspect escape due to a communication error, and the more detectives and reporters pursue the criminal, the more exhausted they become.

If you watch the movie, you'll be able to see that the Zodiac became a loathsome "legend" because the times were on its side. The reason why movies give us this suggestion is probably because they prioritize conveying facts over entertainment.

“Zodiac” (c)2019 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

By the way, if we briefly look back at the history of the United States at that time, President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, and Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. The murder of actress Sharon Tate, which is also depicted in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (19), occurred in 1969, a year after the Zodiac's first crime. In the same year, Apollo 11 became the first man to land on the moon, but the 1960s could be described as a bloody decade.

``Newness'' arrived at after Soderbergh's advice