He began uneventfully enough with the inauspicious derivativeness of a sequel to a sequel in Alien 3 in 1992. But three years later in 1995, Mr. Fincher burst into prominence with the box-office bonanza Se7en, a grim tale of two detectives hunting for a serial killer, whose victims had each committed one of the seven deadly sins. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman played the detectives. And this bull’s-eye in casting has characterized Mr. Fincher’s successful career ever since. The Game (1997) profitably recruited Michael Douglas and Sean Penn in a real-life cat-and-mouse game involving two brothers—one of whom torments the other.

In 1999, Mr. Fincher was reteamed with Mr. Pitt—along with Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter—in Fight Club, a baroque, bare-fisted extravaganza that anticipated today’s media-driven craze for total combat in the ring. Then, in 2002, he directed Panic Room, in which Jodie Foster and her children outwit and outlast a trio of predators (played by Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam and Jared Leto) with the technological devices of a maximum-security mansion.

Now, in Zodiac, Mr. Fincher’s flair for casting is the major asset of his curiously attenuated return to the serial-killer genre.