8 Obscure Background Movie Clues That Explained Everything

6. The Zodiac Killer Looks Different Each Time Because The Film Doesn't Have The Answer - Zodiac

Who is the Zodiac killer? That's the question driving David Fincher's two-and-a-half hour detective thriller Zodiac, and at the end... you'll be none the wiser. The mystery twists and turns, with multiples fakers and likely candidates repeatedly debunked. The ending does see Jake Gyllenhaal make up his mind, but the exact truth is kept at arms length; prime suspect Arthur Leigh Allen certainly fits the bill, but had already been cleared of the crimes earlier on in the film and, because in real life he died before he could be arrested, no charges were ever made against him. A pretty sudden finale to say the least.

The key phase in that, however, is real life. What happened in the movie is exactly how it went down, and in truth Zodiac was never about solving the case (that's the job of internet theorists), but presenting it (at least the bits pertaining to the murders themselves) as accurately as possible. There's lots of otherwise bizarre creative choices that play into this; most prominently, each of the Zodiac's appearances are recreated solely from victim testimony (hence why the first attributed killing, which had no survivors, wasn't shown), leading to the murderer looking different in each attack.

It's not easy to get that from the classic thriller set up (or that the investigation side of things is slightly fictitious), but the real point of the film is to explore the process, not the answer. Who was the Zodiac? Who knows, but certainly not the film.