From Se7en to Fight Club, director David Fincher seems to have altered the construct of the typical male ego. In the bygone days of Vertigo and Psycho, the violent male was fed by the need to control female adversaries. The “new masculinity” featured in Fincher’s films is a compulsive attention-seeker who thrives on media-centric society’s stage.

Kevin Spacey’s serial killer in Se7en crafted a grizzly work of art for the private audience of two cops played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. In Fight Club, men-domesticated by their IKEA-furnished pads, non-fat Starbucks lattes, and the hypnotic flicker of TV sets-reinvigorate their masculinity by pounding each other to a bloody pulp in front of an audience. Those brutes come full circle with their Project Mayhem, returning to their TV sets to watch their own devilishness on the evening news.

With his latest offering, Fincher applies his skewed, “notice-me” masculinity to the true story of the media-savvy Zodiac serial killer immortalized in Dirty Harry, who was arguably better at being a celebrity than a murderer (O.J. should take notes). Fincher’s film focuses on the lives of two journalists with whom the Zodiac killer carried out a cryptic and one-way correspondence, and who were consumed by his open-ended legacy.

Sending communiqués of his crimes to local newspapers for publication, complete with ciphers and cryptograms to puzzle over, the Zodiac killer fed his ego by basking in the media spotlight. It’s even possible that the cryptic showman took credit for murders he didn’t commit.

Fincher draws a sharp contrast between the Zodiac killer’s well-orchestrated media events and the clumsy, grizzly killings themselves. His point: that the Zodiac killer cared less for the murders than the attention they brought him.

The murder scenes linger just a little too long, and lack the swiftness of most slasher flicks (the Zodiac killer often fails to kill people on the first attempt). But the murders, in all their gory detail, only take up a small portion of the richly-textured film’s 158 minutes.

Refusing to showboat with speculative flourishes, the director sticks to documented facts as the focus of his entertainment, discreetly anchoring his visions from Se7en and Fight Club in undeniable reality.

Review: Zodiac
Directed by David Fincher
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey, Jr., Mark Ruffalo
Rating: VVVVV / VVVVV