On February 20, Netflix released a political thriller «Zero Day» starring Robert De Niro. The actor also served as one of the show’s executive producers. In the review below, we analyze how exciting and tense the local story about «a devastating global cyberattack» turned out to be.
Pluses:
The cast is excellent; the initial apocalyptic scenes are intriguing and set up for something promising; the story looks really exciting in places;
Minuses:
the plot gets bogged down in empty dialogues and unnecessary arcs; «glitches» the main character also do not seem necessary here; the authors fail to realize the full potential of their idea;
«Zero Day»
Genre political thriller
Director Leslie Linka Glatter
Starring Robert De Niro, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Bill Camp, Dan Stevens, Angela Bassett, Matthew Modine, Clark Gregg
Premiere Netflix
Year of release 2025
Website IMDb
Former United States President George W. Mullen could easily be enjoying a carefree retirement and writing his memoirs. However, when his country is subjected to a global cyberattack that results in thousands of casualties, he cannot stand idly by. The current leader of the United States, Evelyn Mitchell, invites Mullen to head a special commission to investigate the incident, so he eagerly takes up the task to find and punish those responsible. But this task turns out to be much more complicated than it might seem at first glance.
In the context of the current political climate in America and the world at large, when news about Trump is coming out one after another at the speed of machine gun fire. It is not surprising that filmmakers are trying to respond to the current political agenda. «Zero Day» hardly carries any kind of exposé mission, but it speaks quite clearly about the fears of the average American in a tense political situation.
The fact that today there are many projects in the spy thriller genre on the screens, as well as a noticeable presence of political thrillers (remember the relatively recent «The Agency», which combined these two genres) is a characteristic echo of the current turbulent era. Just as stories about the confrontation between two superpowers, and not only spy stories (from the straightforward «Red Dawn» to some «Rocky 4»), were characteristic of their time and a direct consequence of the Cold War.
And now the first on the list of suspects in the insidious cyberattack are the Russians (and how can we not mention the powerful a hacker attack on «Kyivstar» in December 2023), especially since the Americans’ gadgets received a message quite in the spirit of the representatives of the swamps — «this will happen again», that is, something like their shredded «we can do it again». One of the dialogues even mentions the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Russians’ accusation of the Americans of organizing it. However, the Russian course of events would have been too simple and obvious, and it is unlikely that the writers would have allowed De Niro’s character to cast his fishing rod into the right pond in the very first episode.
But this approach eventually becomes a problem: while Mullen and his team are engaged in a «witch hunt», it can quickly become boring.
All this futile tossing and turning, numerous false paths, a lot of boring, empty dialogues and secondary characters that lead nowhere. Plus, the fact that the main character is slowly losing his mind (who killed that damn Bambi??) doesn’t help the story develop in a way that makes it one hundred percent exciting. Simply put, the investigation itself is not interesting.
And then it becomes doubly disappointing given how promising «Zero Day» looked at the beginning. Less than ten minutes later, events begin to develop rapidly, and George Mullen is already staring intently at a news report with truly apocalyptic footage of numerous accidents across the country. But after about half an hour, the initial fervor Emmerich-type rapidly fades away. By the end of the debut episode, you gradually begin to lose interest in what’s happening on the screen.
This does not mean that the series is a complete failure, not at all.
First, the filmmakers have managed to assemble a great cast, led by celebrated veteran Robert De Niro, who seems to embody the man who is alluded to in Biden. The same Jesse Plemons, who came over from a previous project by director Leslie Linka Glatter «Love and Death», the actor gives a solid performance. Secondly, at certain moments, the story is able to intrigue, and then the level of involvement increases again. This is especially true of the final two episodes, when the authors stop clumsily leading George Mullen around by the nose, and the viewer along with him.
That being said, after watching it, it’s hard to get rid of the idea that this material would have looked much better in a feature-length film format. Due to the limited running time, the screenwriters would have had to squeeze out all the most interesting things and simply discard the unnecessary elements. But in the form in which the story was presented to the viewer, it is difficult to argue that it is worth watching 6 episodes lasting from 40 minutes to almost an hour.
As a result, «Zero Day» cannot be called a complete failure, because at times the story is seriously engaging, but you expect much more from a show of this scale and with such a cast.
At the very least, you can try to give him a chance. If you are not embarrassed by the fact that the fight against advanced cyber terrorists has been entrusted to a dinosaur even more old-school than John McClane in the fourth «Die Hard». And these guys are used to relying on paper notebooks, not your commentators. That’s probably why they do so well.
Spelling error report
The following text will be sent to our editors: