01. I don’t think this movie was omg amazing or anything, but it was pretty good. It’s actually really freaking long (2hrs 40 minutes -ish) without feeling it, which is a good sign, especially in a movie where there isn’t tons of action.
02. The commercials for this movie were so freaking stupid, they make it look like a horror film when it’s practically the complete opposite. The trailer is a lot more faithful to the movie itself with it’s sort of “This is how we solve a crime puzzle in the pre-CSI 1970s.” Except for the part where they don’t solve it, exactly.
03. You know who’s a really good actor? Robert Downey Jr. Loved him in this and especially loved his interactions with Jake Gyllenhaal in the first half of the film. When Avery introduced himself to Graysmith and Graysmith was like “Er, I’ve been working here for nine months”? LMFAO. Costuming for him was really spectacular as well.
04. You know what drives me nuts? When they use a song in the trailer and then don’t put it in the film itself. They did that with “Jesus Walks” in Jarhead and something else in Four Brothers (which song was it again, Audrey?), and they did it in this one with Rod Stewart’s “I’m Losing You”. It just worked so well in the trailer in conveying both the era and the unnerving creepiness of the whole thing and then they just completely left it out! Not cool.
05. Speaking of the soundtrack, I liked how they bookended the film with Lee Norris’ character and Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man”. The sound mixing with that song in the opening sequence was fantastic as well; who knew that a Donovan guitar solo would provide an awesome soundtrack to murder? I certainly never would have guessed that.
06. Also, because clearly I cannot get enough of this soundtrack, they used Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice”, which I thought was awesome. That song is so great in and of itself and really did a lot to set the tone for the first summer of murders that the film focuses on. I don’t know if they used the studio version because that’s the one they like better or what, but my obsessive little mind was secretly glad they didn’t use the vastly superior version recorded live at Woodstock because Woodstock hadn’t happened yet in the timeline when they played the song and my obsession with anachronistic musical errors would have pitched a fit if they had. Or maybe they just like the studio version better and didn’t really care.
07. It took me roughly 2/3 of the movie before I was able to identify Anthony Edwards as being Anthony Edwards. His hair confused me.
08. Would it have killed them to age Jake Gyllenaal a bit? The movie spans about fourteen years and he looks nearly the same in 1983 as he did in 1969, albeit with darker circles under his eyes. Everyone else’s hair gets a little greyer or they change hair styles or something that indicates the aging process.
09. HATED the way they kept track of the timeline. Sometimes a date would appear on screen (“July 4, 1969″) to let you know when it was. Other times they’d put up something more vague like “2 ½ months later”, which is fine the first time if you’ve remembered the previous date but gets confusing once they do it three or four more times. Would it have killed them to do something like “September 27, 1970 — 4 months later” or whatever? Bah.
10. Loved the scene where Graysmith gets his kids to help him do research on the Zodiac. “Don’t tell mom about our special project!”
11. As soon as we found out that Jake Gyllenhaal had married Chloe Sevigny’s character, I kept thinking “Okay, what will be the breaking point that causes her to take the kids and leave him?” And then when he comes home to find the house empty and a note taped to the telephone I bet myself $5 that the note would say she had taken the kids and gone to stay with her mother. GUESS WHAT THE NOTE SAID.
12. There were a couple of really weird Fight Club-esque bits that felt really out of place in the movie. I’m thinking mostly of the scene where the newspaper clippings are appearing on screen the same way the Ikea catalogue descriptions do in Fight Club or the completely random time-lapsed photography of that building being constructed. Obviously the scene with the building was to show the passage of time (duh) but since the building itself wasn’t really related to the plot and they made no other reference to it, it just seemed put in there for the sake of adding some cool special effects to a film that really does not need them.
13. I don’t know, this didn’t feel like a David Fincher film and in the places where it did, it felt really forced and like he was trying to put one large stamp on it rather than trying to apply himself to the movie as a whole. Fight Club and Se7en get to exist in the cracks and underbelly of real life, where their worlds have enough average stuff in them to make them familiar and yet completely nondescript at the same time. Zodiac just feels way too historical and too set in such a specific locale or time frame; obviously that’s the nature of the material itself, but it felt like he was out of his element or something.
14. In the film’s defense, though, it resolved itself nicely considering the real life story itself has no resolution.
15. Gary Oldman was originally supposed to play Melvin Belli. I guess maybe he was too young for the role in the end, I don’t know, but this would have been a seriously better choice than all those other movies he keeps making that go straight to DVD instead. Ugh.
16. The problem with this movie being based on a true story is that while Graysmith is important in the second and more interesting half of the film, he spends the first half of the film making you wonder just what exactly the point of his character is. I guess that balances out with Robert Downey Jr. completely pwning the first half but pretty much disappearing for the second half.