This is going to be an actual movie review, unlike the last one because this time I actually paid attention to the movie, even though (spoiler, sort of) it ended up being rather boring. There also ended up being a section at the end of this post, after the main review part, explaining why I decided to watch Zodiac, as well as some other things too.
Now, I think the concept/premise of this movie, a movie about the Zodiac killer could have been made into a good film, but this one just wasn't. It was worse than I expected it to be. It wasn't a particularly compelling movie; I finished it just for the sake of finishing it and not because it was actually interesting past the 2 hour mark or so. In total, it was nearly 3 hours long.
For some reason, or perhaps reasons plural, the movie came across to me as boring and I just didn't really feel like there was any element in it that would have made it a good movie. The other movie directed by David Fincher that I've seen was really pretty brilliant - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which he directed 4 years later. I think both source materials are pretty interesting in and of themselves, but with one, the movie was a lot better than the other. I had a hard time seeing some of the actors in Zodiac as their characters and not the actors; this might have been because they're pretty recognizable faces even though I haven't seen any other movies that they've been in (at least that I can remember). I wouldn't exactly say it was because their acting was bad. I would assume they just did the best with the script they were given. Maybe because I was already familiar with the events of the Zodiac case, the events of the movie seemed overly predictable. But on the other hand, I'd already read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before watching that movie and still found that one enjoyable, so perhaps predictability wasn't really the problem.
Apparently Zodiac got a pretty positive reception when it was released, which I don't really understand... I didn't really think it was particularly good. I'd say it's maybe about a 2 out of 5. Watchable, but not particularly interesting. I was expecting it to be better. Sort of like when I watched The Silence of the Lambs. That one was kind of a letdown too. I didn't really like the portrayal of Hannibal... Mads Mikkelsen did a much better job in the few episodes of NBC Hannibal that I've seen. In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal almost seemed sort of... caricature like, or something like that.
And so my not so positive review of a movie that people generally seemed to write positive reviews about is finished, with a bonus not so positive mini review of The Silence of the Lambs for good measure.
A post-script/addendum explaining my reason for watching Zodiac (and also I end up explaining some other things too, turns out): (incidentally, we are back to the one and only Vincent D'Onofrio. Maybe the next post won't involve him in some capacity. No promises, though.) I watched this movie partly because I had been wanting to watch it for awhile (I thought the subject matter was interesting) and also partly because I wanted to watch the actor Mark Ruffalo acting in a role of some sort, and it turns out that he was in this movie, playing a police officer character investigating the Zodiac killings. I wanted to watch Mark Ruffalo because I wanted to see him acting as well as possibly try to get a feeling for how his voice sounds, which I wanted to know because he sort of looks like Vincent and I was wondering if perhaps they'd end up having similar voices or not (although obviously, looking similar doesn't really have any correlation with having similar sounding voices). I think Mark has a weird sounding voice. For some reason. It just sounds kind of weird to me. Anyways, that was that. It's sort of like how I watched Full Metal Jacket because I wanted to see Vincent in a role other than Detective Goren in Law and Order. Which, incidentally, was... it was a trip. I don't think I really managed to understand the point of that movie. I feel like there probably was one (probably??), but I just can't really seem to figure it out.. suffice to say, it wasn't exactly what I was thinking of when I had the intention of "I want to see Vincent in another role". A very random addendum to the addendum, but spell check tells me that D'Onofrio and Ruffalo are misspelled words, Interesting, sort of. Italian last names. Both actors are of Italian descent.
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