Assignmen T On Principles of Psychology Paper - I: GLS University Faculty of Law, GLS Law College

GLS University
Faculty of Law, GLS Law College
Assignmen
t
On
Principles of Psychology Paper– I
Name of the Assignment: Zodiac
Student’sName: Malhar Faldu Faculty Name: Dr. Riddhita Parikh
Semester: 1 Division: B
SubjectCode: I.L.B.A 212101104 Roll No.: 122

Introduction:
Zodiac is a 2007 American mystery thriller film directed by David Fincher from a screenplay
by James Vanderbilt, based on the 1986 non-fiction book of the same title by Robert Graysmith.
The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr. with Anthony
Edwards, Brian Cox, Elias Koteas, Donal Logue, John Carroll Lynch, Chloë Sevigny, Philip
Baker Hall and Dermot Mulroney in supporting roles.[4][5]
The film tells the story of the manhunt for the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who terrorized
the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s and early 1970s, taunting police with letters,
bloodstained clothing, and ciphers mailed to newspapers. The case remains one of the United
States' most infamous unsolved crimes. Fincher, Vanderbilt, and producer Bradley J.
Fischer spent 18 months conducting their own investigation and research into the Zodiac
murders. Fincher employed the digital Thomson Viper Film Stream Camera to photograph most
of the film, with traditional high-speed film cameras used for slow-motion murder sequences.
Zodiac was released by Paramount Pictures in North America and Warner Bros. Pictures in
international markets on March 3, 2007, and received mostly positive reviews, with praise for its
writing, directing, acting, and historical accuracy. The film was nominated for several awards,
including the Saturn Award for Best Action, Adventure or Thriller Film. It grossed over $84.7
million worldwide on a production budget of $65 million. In a 2016 critics' poll conducted by
the BBC, Zodiac was voted the 12th greatest film of the 21st century.
SUMMARY OF THE MOVIE:
David Fincher’s magnificently obsessive new film, “Zodiac,” tracks the story of the serial killer
who left dead bodies up and down California in the 1960s and possibly the ’70s, and that of the
men who tried to stop him. Set when the Age of Aquarius disappeared into the black hole of the
Manson family murders, the film is at once sprawling and tightly constructed, opaque and
meticulously detailed. It’s part police procedural, part monster movie, a funereal entertainment
that is an unexpected repudiation of Mr. Fincher’s most famous movie, the serial-killer fiction
“Seven,” as well as a testament to this cinematic savant’s gifts.
Informed by history and steeped in pulp fiction, “Zodiac” stars a trio of beauties — Jake
Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo — all at the top of their performance game and
captured in out-of-sight high-definition digital by the cinematographer Harris Savides. Mr.
Gyllenhaal is the sneaky star of the show as the real-life cartoonist turned writer Robert
Graysmith, though he doesn’t emerge from the wings until fairly late, after the bodies and the
investigations have cooled. A silky, seductive Mr. Downey plays Paul Avery, a showboating
newspaper reporter who chased the killer in print, while Mr. Ruffalo struts his estimable stuff as
Dave Toschi, the San Francisco police detective who taught Steve McQueen how to wear a gun
in “Bullitt” and pursued Zodiac close to the ground.
The relative unknown James Vanderbilt wrote the jigsaw-puzzle screenplay, working from Mr.
Graysmith’s exhaustive, exhausting true-crime accounts of the murders and their investigations,
“Zodiac” and “Zodiac Unmasked.” Mr. Graysmith, coyly played by Mr. Gyllenhaal as something
of an overgrown Hardy Boy, his great big eyes matched by his great big ambition, was a political
cartoonist doodling Nixon noses at The San Francisco Chronicle when Zodiac started sending
letters and ciphers to the paper, divulging intimate knowledge of the crimes. The first messages
arrived in 1969, the year Zodiac shot one young couple and knifed another in separate Northern
California counties before moving on to San Francisco, where he put a bullet in the head of a
cabbie.
The first cipher stumped an alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies, including the C.I.A. and
F.B.I., but was cracked by a California schoolteacher and his wife. The decoded cipher opened
with an ominous and crudely effective flourish: “I like killing people because it is so much fun it
is more fun than killing wild game in the forrest because man is the most dangeroue anamal.”
The letters, the misspellings and the lax punctuation kept coming, and perhaps so did the
murders, though only five were substantively linked to him. A publicity hound, Zodiac claimed
responsibility for murders he might not have committed, a habit that added to a boogeyman
mystery and myth that chroniclers of his crimes, including Mr. Graysmith, have exploited.
The story structure is as intricate as the storytelling is seamless, with multiple time-and-place
interludes neatly slotted into two distinct sections. The first largely concerns the murders and the
investigations; the second, far shorter one involves Graysmith’s transformation of the murders
and the investigations into a narrative. With its nicotine browns, the first section, which opens in
1969 and continues through the mid-’70s, looks as if it had been art-directed by a roomful of
chain smokers. Dark and moody, like all of Mr. Fincher’s work, this part has been drained of
almost all bright colors, save for splashes of yellow, the color of safety and caution, and an
alarming-looking blue elixir called an Aqua Velva that is Graysmith’s bar drink of choice.
There’s a moment early in the film when Mr. Downey stands in the Chronicle newsroom, back
arched and rear gently hoisted, affecting a posture that calls to mind Gene Kelly done up as a
Toulouse-Lautrec jockey in “An American in Paris.” Avery has already started his long slip-slide
into boozy oblivion, abetted by toots of coke, but as he strides around the newsroom, motored by
talent and self-regard, he is the guy everybody else wants to be or wants to have. Like Mr.
Ruffalo’s detective, who leaves everything bobbing in his rapid wake, Mr. Downey fills the
screen with life that, by its very nature, is a rebuke to the death drive embodied by the Zodiac
killer. Rarely has a film with so much blood on its hands seemed so insistently alive.
“Zodiac” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It contains

extremely graphic gun and knife violence, as well as alcohol abuse and cocaine use

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GLS University

Faculty of Law, GLS Law College

Name of the Assignment: Zodiac

Student’sName: Malhar Faldu Faculty Name: Dr. Riddhita Parikh

SubjectCode: I.L.B.A 212101104 Roll No.: 122

“Zodiac” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It contains

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