17 years later, David Fincher's crime masterpiece has just received a massive upgrade

It was the ultimate cold case. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a serial killer stalked the San Francisco Bay Area, taunting the public with ciphers and letters sent to regional newspapers. He threatened rampages and bombings if the letters were not printed. He was never caught and his identity remains unknown.

David Fincher's Zodiac doesn't bring us any closer to the solution. It's a chronicle of the years-long efforts of a crime reporter (Robert Downey Jr.), a detective (Mark Ruffalo), and a political cartoonist (Jake Gyllenhaal) to solve the case, and a study in the all-consuming nature of obsession because it is an oppressive one Flood of details – of codes and ciphers, false clues and partial theories, dead ends and dead ends. All of his forensic evidence piles up and overwhelms the world without revealing the truth.

In this regard Zodiac Even 17 years after its initial theatrical release, it still serves as a refreshing corrective to our cultural obsession with “true crime,” a genre that implicitly distorts the truth about crime by imposing sensationalized narrative frameworks on murder investigations that are more unsatisfying, darker, and darker are more banal than would be suitable for popular entertainment. Instead, Fincher's film, with its hypnotically methodical focus on three men who failed to catch the killer and the incredibly inconclusive trove of information they received, takes a deep dive to conjure up what is at the heart of the case still remains unrecognizable.

Zodiacrecently upgraded to a 4K release by Paramount, therefore floats in all manner of darkness – literal, psychological, intellectual, metaphysical – as it looks into the dimly lit corridors of the past to exhume this cold case. Across all of his films, Fincher has become known for an effective visual style in which low lighting, pinpoint detail, and complementary desaturated color schemes reflect the psychological intensity of his storytelling and establish a visceral naturalism.

Although a film like Zodiac is visually dark and haunting, but also anything but impenetrable. Instead, Fincher films an endless night with startling clarity, forcing the audience to peer into the darkness where characters and their actions are barely noticeable, but the truth hovers tantalizingly beyond our field of vision.

In this way he illuminates the distance between seeing and understanding. If Zodiac When truth is determined by a greater truth, it concerns our inability (as global citizens, historians, and storytellers trying to understand both) to transform that distance into a final truth. This idea is supported with wonderful formal discipline by the director, who, together with editor Angus Wall, compresses time and space as the investigation runs through the years of his characters' lives, and their single-minded pursuit of the zodiac gives the film a brutal linearity of narrative progression.

Zodiac was shot primarily in 1080p HD (4:4:4) using the Thomson Viper FilmStream camera; It was the first time Fincher shot digitally on such a scale – Zodiac is notable for being the first digital feature film from a major studio to be shot and produced without the use of videotape or compression in recording or editing. (The stylized slow motion murder scenes that open Zodiacbut were shot on 35mm photochemical film.)

Working almost entirely digitally, Fincher had considerable control in post-production. From recreating San Francisco using CGI to digitally adding hair to Gyllenhaal's knuckles, he took full advantage. The fact that the film was Fincher's first historical piece seems particularly relevant to the assessment of the film Structure and clarity of Harris Savides' digital video photography, whose low-light readability stands in ironic contrast to the enduring mystery of the case. Even though digital technology allows us to look deeper and more intensely into the darkness than film cameras ever allowed, we never see enough to draw firm conclusions.

The new three-disc release also includes Fincher's Director's Cut on Blu-Ray and an additional disc of special features (all carried over from the film's previous Blu-Ray release), but is most notable for its 4K transfer . This includes improvements to the sharpness and definition of the image, as well as adjustments to color saturation and contrast, pushing the film's palette towards an even more naturalistic and detailed image, without betraying Fincher's intended visual tone in all its gritty textural atmosphere.

The re-release of the theatrical version of the film with Dolby Vision HDR and DTS-HD 5.1 audio is based on a new 4K master and is particularly impressive due to its improved color quality. This version benefits from BD-100 encoding (as opposed to BD-50 on the Blu-Ray); Given that the recorded resolution in 1080p is already around a quarter of the native 4K resolution, the improvements in image detail are subtle but noticeable, with slightly more pronounced shadow gradations and darker black levels improving the depth and dimension of the image. The adjustments are very welcome, as they showcase Savides' night photography, which has never looked so textured and otherworldly, yet so tangible and inescapable, as it does here.

Paramount's previous Blu-Ray release of ZodiacIt should be said that this is a stunning 1080p transfer of the film, delivering impressive detail, depth and image clarity straight from the source. There are hardly any arguments for a 4K upgrade Zodiacwhich was shot digitally, ultimately delivers less transformative results than we might expect from ’s announced 4K transfers Se7en, Panic roomAnd Fight cluball shot on film, which Fincher reportedly supervised.

And yet Zodiac remains a high point in Fincher's filmography and is beautifully presented in this release, ensuring that his fierce attention to detail and precise visual style are on full display, reflecting the darkness through which his characters progress in the fruitless search for answers. Cold, steady and brilliant, he explores the obsessive impulses that connect serial killers, journalists and criminal investigators, Zodiac still plays a big role as a film about the existential totality of unsolved mysteries. Against this background, it has lost none of its power to seduce, confuse and compel.

Zodiac is now available on 4K UHD Blu-Ray from Paramount.