Zero Day
(2025)

ZERO DAY 🇺🇸 (2025)

#Netflix

There’s an undeniable sense of impending doom that society has been plagued with over the last decade, which has been captured on film with movies like Netflix’s Don’t Look Up (2021) and Leave the World Behind (2023), or my personal favorite of the bunch, A24 and Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024).

Each of those stories centers around an attack of some sort and highlights our inability to come together during times of crisis. That inability stems from the severe division amongst society due in most part to ideological differences that people have created a tribal nature around supporting.

ZERO DAY tackles that very same sentiment in a story about a cyber attack that caused the death of 3,400 civilians, shaking the United States to its very core. George Mullin (Robert De Niro—The Irishmen, Goodfellas, The Godfather Part II), a former president, is asked by the sitting president (Angela Bassett—Black Panther) to lead a new task force with the sole objective of ensuring that whoever is behind this is held accountable.

As everyone begins to point their fingers at Russia, George begins to find evidence that the attack may have come from inside the country, leading many to believe whoever is behind this conspiracy didn’t just do this to provoke the powers that be, but did so to deconstruct the government from the root of its foundation.

It’s disorienting to watch great actors provide such worthwhile performances to a story that is mysterious enough to spark your curiosity, yet isn’t good enough to say or do anything we haven’t already seen before. This has the same issue I felt Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning had, which was that a lot of what happens is told through info dumps that make the overall hysteria surrounding the events harder to get invested in.

The first episode had me thinking this was going to be a story about a respected, wartime president who has a photographic memory but is beginning to lose his sense of reality because he may have dementia and how he will have to handle going from a savior figure to a possible detriment to his country.

That would’ve been a way more interesting story that would’ve been worthy of De Niro's stabilizing force of a performance.

I should note this isn’t a bad watch. It’s serviceable in most parts because of how timely all of the events transpiring in this feel and how closely a lot of the main characters resemble polarizing real-life figures (Elon Musk, Alex Jones) who are actively involved in the exhausting nature of online discourse. That online discourse weighs heavily on the ongoing investigation in the series. The power of a narrative and how it sways the general public into believing something while forcing the hand of the task force into being reactionary was an example of how divisive a simple idea can be.

ZERO DAY has great intention with its social-political commentary but fails to provide depth to a crisis in which the hysteria behind the civil liberties being breached never evolves into an understandable justification for public safety. 

Enjoy!

6.4/10 🍿 🎥

Runtime: 50mins
Episodes: 6
Where: Now Streaming on Netflix

Zero Day Review (2025) The Richmond Reviewer - February 21st, 2025

#ZeroDay #RobertDeNiro #AngelaBassett #JessePlemons #LizzyCaplan #MovieReview #Movie