I LOVED Zodiac. I really love investigative movies where we follow clues with the detectives/journalists and come to conclusion, Zodiac was one of them. The only difference is we can’t find who Zodiac is in this movie. It is about a man (maybe a group of men or maybe woman ?) named Zodiac who terrorized California in late 60s and early 70s. He killed and raped a lot of women and men at that time, and the movie tells us about SFPD (San Francisco Police Department) and San Francisco’s local newspaper’s struggles to find who this Zodiac is. In SFPD, we see Detectives Armstrong and Toschi trying to solve the murder for years to come. Armstrong at the end gets so sick of trying that he transfers to another station. In newspaper, we see Paul Avery (a crime reporter) and Robert Graysmith (a cartoonist) trying to solve the murder. Avery also gives up but Graysmith at the end writes a book about Zodiac and who he thinks the Zodiac is. By the way, the movie is kind of a biopic. The characters and suspects are all real, the book was really written and the people who we see murdered were really murdered. A review I read on the Internet also said that the places where the movie was filmed were also nearly identical to the real place so that’s good too.
Acting was superb and the thrill of trying to find a murderer was depicted really well. I especially want to talk about a scene: where Graysmith went to a man’s place and asked about the handwriting on the poster. He believed the man was Leigh’s (who he thought was Zodiac) employer at the time and was trying to make sure that it was Leigh who wrote it because the writing expert said it was the closest handwriting to the letters sent to the newspaper by Zodiac. The man said I wrote those posters 🙂 It was so chilling and I got so afraid that I couldn’t even watch the scene. I fast forwarded it to the minute where Graysmith got out of that man’s house. It was the best scene in the whole movie.
Now coming to my guesses about who the Zodiac is: My guess is on Leigh because one the only person who saw his face and survived the attack identified him as the Zodiac in the 90s nearly 30 years after the attack. However, other evidence such as fingerprints in one of the crime scenes doesn’t match with Leigh so I’m not very sure. Maybe there is more than one people in it. Because there are some problems with the handwriting matches with Leigh’s handwriting. Maybe Leigh had a partner and they did the crimes together and there was someone else who wrote the letters to the newspapers. Who knows?
An interesting aspect of Zodiac is its place. If you have done a research like me, you will likely see that serial killers and rapists are usually on the West Coast of US. Take Golden State Killer for example (he is also serial killer and rapist who got caught by DNA technology 2 years ago) who operated in California as well. I’m gonna write on Ted Bundy’s (another serial killer and rapist) movie in a few days and he started his murders in Washington. It’s very interesting. Why is West Coast so saturated with serial offenders?
Anways if you watched another movie about solved/unsolved mysteries please comment down below!
