"Plodding Pace and Shadowy Cinematography Mar Good Twists"
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What You Need To Know:
The first two episodes of ZERO DAY have several good twists. However, the director takes a top-notch cast and intriguing storyline and mires them in a plodding pace and shadowy look. This makes the first two episodes less thrilling. Commendably, De Niro’s character is not the outspoken liberal one might expect him to play. That said, both of the first two episodes of ZERO DAY have several strong obscenities and profanities that require extreme caution.
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Robert De Niro is an overrated actor, but his TV series debut has been hyped as a major entertainment event. However, his new thriller, ZERO DAY, a miniseries on Netflix, has several good twists, but it takes a top-notch cast and an intriguing premise and mires them in a plodding pace and shadowy look that makes it less thrilling than it should be.
De Niro stars as George Mullen, a popular and bipartisan former US President who is working on his memoir with a ghostwriter while enjoying his retirement mostly outside the spotlight. In the first episode, as Anna heads home, her car is plowed into by a train and explodes after a cryptic warning appears on her cellphone saying, “This Will Happen Again.”
It turns out the entire nation is thrown into chaos due to a complete shutdown of all electricity and other essential systems for exactly one minute. With the power grid out, all traffic signals went down and caused mass vehicular mayhem and accidents everywhere. The current President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett) calls on George to chair a powerful special committee created to investigate the disaster and prevent it from ever happening again.
Meanwhile, a mysterious Russian operative named Alexie is tracking Felix, the leader of the hackers who crashed the systems, and trying to kill him. George also has to contend with his daughter, Alex (Lizzy Caplan), a liberal congresswoman who plans to vote against the creation of the committee and be a watchdog over it because she feels it’s weaponizing the crisis. He’s also joined everywhere by his longtime right-hand man ,Roger (Jesse Plemons), who’s slowly revealed to have highly questionable ethics and motivations hidden from George.
George appears to be calm and filled with steely resolve, but he’s battling auditory and visual hallucinations. The visions cause him to obsess over his huge collection of journals secretly filled with bizarre and obsessive phrases.
Can George help save the nation, or are these thoughts and journals destined to make him a dementia-ridden hopeless failure?
[SPOILERS FOLLOW] Episode Two starts with Alexei chasing and shooting at Felix after having killed all of Felix’s team of hackers. It’s soon revealed that Felix is a former National Security Agency employee.
Meanwhile, Roger secretly meets with a creepy and super-rich businessman named Bob Lyndon, who shorted the stock market just in time to earn millions as it went haywire from the terror attack. Bob mentions Roger has been criminally charged with foreign corruption in the past and says he would never trust him, yet he tells Roger that the Russians weren’t responsible for the attack.
President Mitchell wants to launch a retaliatory cyberattack on Russia, but Mullen desperately tries to convince her not to do it. As Alexei meets a shocking end, George comes to believe the attack could have been created domestically.
Can George prevent the start of a misguided war between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers? Can he keep his head together long enough to solve this menacing mystery?
ZERO DAY has several good twists and a cast of veteran actors, but its director portrays everything with a low-key tone and shadowy look that dilutes the excitement rather than amping up the tension. Also, Mullen’s mental delusions are depicted repetitively to the point of annoyance without a payoff in the first two episodes. What should be an epic show is thus reduced to being bland half the time, with the second episode less compelling than the first.
Commendably, De Niro’s George Mullen is a non-woke, bipartisan character and not the outspoken liberal one might expect him to play. His selfless willingness to head the commission and discover the truth behind the attack help give ZERO DAY a strong moral, patriotic worldview.
The first two episodes of ZERO DAY are relatively restrained in their content. The foul language is strong but not as pervasive as one might expect from De Niro’s typical foul-mouthed movies. They also have sporadic but non-graphic violence and only an implied offscreen sexual encounter in Episode 1.2.
So, MOVIEGUDIE® advises only extreme caution for now.
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