Obviously he has nothing on the GOAT serial killer!
I remember seeing the poster for this at the movie theater and being like, "Whoa! What is this? This looks cool," but then I saw the trailer and was like, "Ah, nevermind."
I KNEW IT! You sick fucks can't help but laying out clues for us normies to follow! I'm sending the high sheriffs to your Nintendo dungeon right now mister!
I'm ready for 'em.
I agree. I though the movie had a very pedagogic presentation of all its details. There is a really neat narrative to their presentation and escelation, with the constant jostling between time-periods and protagonists serving to keep it fresh.
Indeed. This movie does do a great job at informing somebody who might know nothing about the Zodiac Killer story. It might be a little difficult to keep up with all of the names and locations thrown around, but I think the movies serves as a good jumping off point to then go and read up about the case. Compare this movie with say Spike Lee's Summer of Sam movie about David Berkowitz, and David Fincher's Zodiac blows it out of the water. I remember watching Summer of Sam when it came out, and I hated it. It deals little with the story of Berkowitz and instead follows around the troubled sex-lives of a couple, and something to do with thinking one of their friends is the killer. I honestly don't remember much about it, and maybe I should revisit it to give it a second shot, but I thought the movie sucked.
Man I always loathed Social Network just due to the look and feel of that movie. I can't even get through it. Fincher has greated some absolute masterpieces like Gone Girl and Seven but some of his stuff just rub me the right off.
Yeah, I didn't really care for Social Network either. I actually laughed at the thought of there being a movie about Facebook. I guess I should reiterate that I was more praising David Fincher's techniques of pacing. Just imagine if that movie played out in a linear fashion. People would quickly realize how boring that story really is.
About them codes, when I was watching this movie (didn't know anything about the Zodiac killer previously), and the code element was brought out, I thought...
Okay, this guy is clearly after fame and attention. He wanted to be seen as a mastermind, some grand chess-master that outwits his opponents.
So... why not just make the codes unsolvable? That would have guaranteed his reputation. The codes would have remained uncracked until the sun goes out and he would be perceived as the mastermind. After all, serial killers arn't all about sportsmanship and fair-play, they're after that sense of being something grandiose.
I think he wanted them to be solved, and I don't think any of them would have exposed who he was. It was just a way to taunt police and the media while being a nuisance at the same time by making them sit around and try to solve his dumb riddles. I think his unsolved codes would have been just more of, "I like to kill/me so scary/derp derp derp."
Also... that it starts as such an intimate moment. When the scene begins, the girl is comfortably resting her chin on his chest to show that they're really close and affectionate, having a gay old time at the beautiful and scenic lakeside. Then, THAT happens.
I like how she notices there is somebody approaching before the audience even sees him. In most scary movies, the audience is clued in that there is a evil presence lurking around before the victim characters know of it, but here, we see her face react to seeing him and saying, "There's somebody else here." The boyfriend cracks wise, and they continue their little getaway. Then the audience sees the Zodiac approaching in a hood, and she freaks out and says, "He has a gun!" Like I said earlier, there's no music cues, no annoying ramped up jump-scare effects, the scene just lets the terror of the situation carry the load. Even when Zodiac abruptly starts stabbing them, there's still no music cues. It's just the stabbing sounds, and the screams of the victims. This scene is so good that it's scary.
But it's also dreadful to think about how this happened to two random people who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. There's times when my wife and I go camping and then this scene will pop into my head, and I get the chills.
That seems like a fairly galling thing for a psychology student to say. Was he trying to win affection from the killer (in hopes that he wouldn't kill them) by trying to share a moment between them, or something?
If I can find it, I'll share it on here. The police report the surviving guy gives is very detailed, and he acts very calm throughout the entire ordeal. Later, the Zodiac sends a taunting letter to the police about how he stabbed this couple at a lake, and that the guy was crying and begging for his life. I tend to believe the survivor's tale of his own demeanor because I think Zodiac was just trying to come off as macho.
Also... considering how suspicious those circumstances were. With her wheel falling out after he "fixed" it and everything, it seems supremely odd that she would agree to hitchhike. Especially with her baby in there.
The part with the guy stopping her, "fixing" her wheel, and then luring her into his car are all true. Her car was later found torched, so whoever this guy was, he was up to something nefarious. People speculate that he lost his nerve to attack her when he realized she had a baby with her, and that's why he just drove around for over an hour. The part of this story that comes into contention is whether it was really the Zodiac Killer or not. I tend to believe it wasn't just because of the way she ramped up her story in later renditions after she saw the picture of the Zodiac sketch hanging on the police wall.
It's also odd since the movie throws shade at every piece of evidence -- making us question if they're even valid. Yet that scene almost goes un-commented on. It could be cut from the film and change virtually nothing. Here the filmmakers had a chance to muddy the waters even more, yet didn't? Why do that? Maybe because that scene was so emotionally-charged and nightmarish that they wanted to keep it more as an emotional high-point than as a puzzle-piece in the game.
Yeah, I would have been fine if they would have shown the detectives being more skeptical of her story, or just added in the information that she constantly changed her story. The movie does show us how the Zodiac most likely took credit for it by comparing his letter to a newspaper article, but then they just drop it right there. That still doesn't change the fact that the movie just showed us a scene where a guy says to a woman he just picked up after sabotaging her car, "After I kill you, I'm going to throw your baby out of the window." Now the audience is going to believe that this really happened, and it was definitely the Zodiac.
The movie omits a murder scene that happened seven months before the scene we see in the beginning where he shoots the teenagers in the car. They referred to this omitted scene in the movie as the "Christmas" couple. These people were also a couple of young teenage lovers who also get shot in their car in much the same fashion as the Fourth of July couple. However, both of the Christmas couple died, so there wasn't a survivor to give any details. This is why Fincher omits this scene because he wanted the movie to be as factual as possible. Yet, then we get the hitchhiker/baby-window scene which is most likely fabricated and has nothing to do with Zodiac. Like you said, I would have rather they omitted this scene altogether. Or redo it in a way that reflected her first telling of the story, and then later showed how she changed her story. It just bugs me because the reason the scene was put in was completely for the shock/movie-entertainment factor. So much for sticking to the facts, eh?
Manhunter is such a damn good movie.
I thought that code-breaking discussion was really interesting in just how much common-sense it entailed. Like searching for double consonants, and knowing that the double-l is the most common double-consonant. It's sort of like the better Sherlock Holmes stories where there is a lot of common-sense involved.
I'm so bad at puzzles that this guy could be stabbing me in the chest while I was trying to solve his codes, and I'd still fail.
Man, what was it with the late 60's and 70's? It looks like a boom period for wacko serial killers.
Do you watch Mindhunter at all on Netflix? That pretty much gives you your answer. There wasn't a thorough national crime database, an understanding of how serial killers think, or even the term "serial killer" until a couple of FBI agents made it all possible in the late 70s. Once the FBI were able to track serial killers better, it became harder for these types to exist. Plus with the developments of DNA testing, it's harder and harder to get away with crimes. Nowadays, it's all mass murders with guns. Well, at least in America. It's crazy to think that some asshole student in Florida killed the same amount of people as the Zodiac, Son of Sam, and the Manson Family combined in probably the span of 10-15 minutes.
