Fincher’s serial-killer thriller rescues the genre from its cliches. For all the diabolical cunning of the real-life Zodiac killer, the movie posits that he may just be a bland nobody. And for all the brilliance of the obsessive detective work (by journalists Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr. and cop Mark Ruffalo), the sleuths never do close the case. Rather than pretend to offer us a true glimpse into the heart of evil, Fincher makes us look instead at our own frailties, at our inability to divine truth even when we’re drowning in a sea of data.
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