Catch this Zodiac

Zodiac tells the true story of the pursuit of the infamous Zodiac

murderer of the 1960s and 1970s. A trio of investigators pursue the killer, including a cokehead crime reporter named Paul Avery (portrayed with startling realism by Robert Downey, Jr.); Robert Graysmith, a newbie San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist and amateur sleuth (played by Jake Gyllenhaal); and Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), a homicide inspector.

Zodiac is a very good procedural, and its power comes from its authenticity. The script for Zodiac is based upon painstaking research, not only by Robert Graysmith in two best-selling books on the Zodiac but the filmmakers as well. Director David Fincher (Se7en) wisely doesn't skip over the red herrings, false confessions, and dead ends that plagued the investigation over the course of three decades. TV and film murders are often solved fairly tidily and easily. Hollywood studios and writers assume (with some justification) that audiences don't have the patience and attention span to watch a case unfold as it actually does in real life. There is of course a price to be paid: Zodiac clocks in at just over two and a half hours, long by most people's standards. But condensing so much information from so many years needed that runtime to do the material justice.

The idea of a serial killer taunting the police through anonymous letters to police and the news media isn't new, of course: Jack the Ripper did it in 1880s London. In the years since, others have taken on the mantle, including Ted "The Unabomber" Kaczynski and the D.C. Snipers. But few have captured the publics' (and the media's) imagination as the Zodiac did. As the film points out, the Zodiac's body count is fairly paltry; the reason he became world-famous is because of the media attention.

Zodiac also highlights the fallibility of eyewitness testimony and expert testimony. The public likes to think that techniques such as polygraph and handwriting analysis are rock solid, but in fact there's a lot of room for interpretation, and many experts have been flat-out wrong. (Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who killed her five children in 2001, was recently granted a new trial because the prosecution's mental health "expert," Dr. Park Dietz, testified that Yates had been influenced by a Law and Order episode she'd seen about a similar case. In fact, as her defense attorney discovered after Yates was convicted, such an episode never aired.) At least one expert ruled out Graysmith's best suspect, leading us to wonder whether the expert was wrong or all the other evidence is wrong.

Zodiac is in fact less about the Zodiac himself than about those

doggedly pursuing him. The film's tagline is "There's more than one way to lose your life to a killer," and this is clearly shown in the personal price the various investigators paid for their involvement in the case. They are chasing not an ordinary man

but a media-made myth, and when Graysmith finally confronts the man he believes is the Zodiac, the irony is palpable. In the real-life Graysmith's case, at least, his obsession with the case cost him decades of his life (though it earned him a lot of money from his books). Zodiac, by sticking to a real chronology of revelations and developments instead of a Hollywood version of a serial killer script, turns its material into a remarkable film.