David Fincher’s Zodiac (from a script by James Vanderbilt adapted from Robert Graysmith’s intimate true life account) begins on the fourth of July in 1969 at the height of the hippie era. As fireworks explode over the bay, a young woman namded Darlene Ferrin (Ciara Hughes ) cruises along a packed suburban street, pulling up at a nondescript house. She invites a youth named Michael Mageau (Lee Norris) into her car and the pair drive off to eat. But the drive in being full up, she quickly changes her mind, and they end up at the Blue Rock Springs Golf Course, where there is a lover’s lane.

The youth is callow and awkward, and doesn’t seem to be aware that Darlene is seeking sex, or at least a make out session. Their banter is interrupted by the ominous growl of a car, one that hovers nearby and then pulls away. Darlene seems to know the driver. But she won’t admit as much to Mageau. Then the car comes back quickly. The driver gets out, comes over to the passenger’s side, and opens fire on the occupants.

Though on the surface rather routine sounding, this is a very interesting scene and it is an interesting way to open a film about the notorious and uncaught serial killer, America’s Jack the Ripper. For one thing, this wasn’t the Zodiac killer’s first attack. Fincher could just as easily have started off his film with the Lake Herman Road double murder the previous December, as does Alexander Bulkley in his 2005 knock off film The Zodiac, with Justin Chambers and Robin Tunney, which also shows the impact of the Zodiac’s crimes on those who hunted him.

In fact, there are numerous coincidences between the two films. Both star Philip Baker Hall, as a police chief in The Zodiac and as a handwriting expert in Zodiac. Both films shoot mostly in the case’s actual locations. Both are about how obsession destroys the good, and both feature similar dialogue in the Zodiac’s third attack, in broad daylight at Lake Berryessa in September 1969, where the Zodiac wore a scary black hood.

One significant difference is that Fincher and his collaborators extend a great deal of attention on the personalities of the victims, communicating quite a bit about them in a short screen time. Which brings us back to the opening scene. As an aggressive, sexual creature, Darlene is an unusual figure in Fincher’s movies — but not his videos (has anyone else noticed her similarity to Madonna?). She is also a person whose past, her recent past, catches up with her quickly, as we learn near the end of the movie when the Zodiac’s connection with Darlene is revealed (here is a long footnote: it’s been a long time since I’ve read Graysmith’s book and its sequel, but is it possible that there was no actual Zodiac, that the reason the cases are so different from each other is that they were in fact acts of passion committed by different people? The only thing I remember really tying Zodiac to one of the crimes was the fact that he clipped off parts of a cabbie’s blood stained shirt. Is it possible that Zodiac was s a cop, writing the letters and posing as the killer in order to make some kind of point or toy with his co-workers? Also, as Robert Downey, Jr.’s character says in the movie, the Zodiac was a liar, taking credit for things he couldn’t have done; but again, I haven’t kept up with the book, and the suspect that Graysmith came up with is probably really the guy).

Fincher probably remembers aspects of the real case from his childhood, but he doesn’t seem necessarily interested in the case as a nostalgic tour. Instead, it is another exercise in failed mentorship, a theme that appears in most of his films. Cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) is as young and callow as the film’s first victim, but he is already divorced and is a single father. He goes through one mentor who fails him, Downey’s Paul Avery, the Chronicle reporter who covered the case, and then another, Mark Ruffalo’s Inspector David Toschi (the real life cop who inspired Bullitt). Graysmith, who in the film has the enthusiasm of a boy scout and is thus referred to by others (though he says he was an Eagle Scout, and he acts with the pushy enthusiasm of Robert Cummings’s character in Dial M for Murder), cracks the case, but, as with the others, at great cost, in his case at the expense of his marriage.

Harry Savides’s camerawork throughout the film is remarkable (but I assume that Fincher is the type of director who collaborates with a DP closely). It doesn’t just honor films from the ’70s — it is one. And several of the shots will go down in film history, such as the overhead shot of a cab going through San Francisco, with the camera moving above in sync as if the car were the planchette on a Ouija Board.

In fact, this is a movie “about” cars. They figure in almost every scene. They are the setting of almost every murder. Many of the film’s character building moments occur in cars, at least with Toschi.

Some film buffs have raised the question of whether the film, in its final moments, backs off from the “knowability” of the Zodiac’s final identity, even though in the real world Graysmith is convinced of it. There is a small measure of ambiguity in the film’s final images. But Zodiac isn’t like a Friedkin movie, such as French Connection or Cruising, in which the director strives for a larger epistemological strata. Zodiac does create ambiguity by having different people “play” the Zodiac. A different person from the prime suspect voices the Zodiac at the Lake Berryessa killing. Another puzzling image connected with this sequence is this: who is the guy sitting in his pick up truck obviously in mental anguish? He doesn’t look like the guy who later turns out to be the prime suspect.

No, the real mystery in the film is Graysmith’s motivation. “Bob, you look disappointed,” Avery says at Graysmith’s reaction to another dead end clue. What is the source of Graysmith’s immediate and almost visceral attraction to the case? The film is officially mute on the subject, although there is the odd, stray dialogue on the subject, such as when Graysmith is talking to his wife (played by the great Chloe Sevigny, who, with her long hair and bookish glasses embodies just the type of girl everyone got a crush on back in the ’70s).

In this film, Fincher is a master of transitions, be it the sound of traffic that leaps years, or the subtle placement of movie posters (one of them for Edward G. Robinson’s Warner film Illegal) in Graysmith’s apartment just before he encounters one Bob Vaughn, a silent movie theater employee who might be able to give him a lead. Movies permeate the film. Zodiac himself is a movie buff and there were numerous movie references in his letters. Fincher even honors Val Lewton with a “bus,” the sudden appearance of Vaughn sliding into view in a mirror. And it turns out, which is something I didn’t know and couldn’t even guess at, that the Zodiac symbol might have come from the countdown leader on a film strip. In its weird, perverse way, Zodiac is testimony to he embedded influence of movies and moviemakers on our lives.

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