Anything but dull, Gibney’s clarion call whipsaws along like a combo Jason Bourne/007 thriller minus all that running. Unnerving and likely to give viewers some bitter food for thought, Zero Days is Gibney’s most important work yet.
Easily the most important film anyone has released this year, it is a documentary that deserves to be seen by every sentient citizen of this country – and indeed the world.
Gibney’s film cuts across subjects and genres with its own fluid, quicksilver intelligence.
It’s a detective story. It’s a spy thriller. It’s a cautionary tale. And it’s true.
You’ll want to see Zero Days — just not when you’re counting on a good night’s sleep a few hours later. Alex Gibney’s documentary about cyberwarfare is many things, none of them lulling: a thriller, a detective procedural, a startling chronicle of science fiction transformed into fact, and an urgent plea for public discussion of a new way of waging war that could wreak havoc on a scale akin to that of nuclear weapons.
Zero Days has a similarly balanced outlook along with a critical political viewpoint that avoids hysteria and demagogy. Its strongest protest is against what Mr. Gibney sees as the dangers of excessive American secrecy.
Zero Days is an intriguing, disturbing watch.
His new film Zero Days may ostensibly be an investigation of the 2010 malware worm known as Stuxnet, but over its swift-moving 116-minute runtime, Gibney does a much broader and more important job: relating the rather airless, abstract concepts of cyber-terrorism and internet espionage to their real-world consequences.
Clear, urgent and positively terrifying at times.
What Zero Days lacks in subtlety and formal innovation, however, it compensates for in breadth and lucidity.
An excellent documentary that dives into the murky and complicated subject of the stuxnet computer virus that attacked iran's nuclear program. As rich a subject as that is, director Gibney does not confine things to just that, and shows us how, like the malware itself, the subject stretches out and touches on a lot of major issues. There are fascinating interviews with a lot of major players, and it provides an excellent - and troubling - look at the hidden world of nation-states attacking each other's computer systems.
As a former documentarian myself, I was riveted by this film. My last production for PBS took four years to complete. It also combined elements of CGI, live action, 3D graphics and international filming. It also involved subjects unwilling to address controversial subject matter. So, maybe I was favorably predisposed to Gibney's efforts here. But, nonetheless, he has taken an enormously complex tale and distilled it into accessible material for lay audiences. And, he has done so without that annoying Michael Moore self-promotional bravado. A real tour de force!
An interesting watch but the female NSA agent twist was very obvious early on and as a result completely jarred the sense of intrigue the rest of the film portrays. Her over-played, over-dramatic delivery was at odds with the other people interviewed. Otherwise worth a watch but I recommend the **** article on the subject instead if you have an interest in the subject material.
As usually Alex Gibney knows how to make a highly informative and compelling documentary. This one really disturbed me, it’s frightening. To think we're so connected to the system in everything we do that one blip can have massive repercussions. Can cyber warfare have the same treaties as Nuclear weapons? The USA/Israel opened a can of worms giving other countries an open playground to retaliate, now how do they close it before it's to late?
Another quite entertaining and informative documentary by Mr. Gibney about a subject you wouldn't think that, computer science. And, quite prescient indeed to our national security, in understanding there's a much greater threat than when we had just nuclear armed states in the old days; now, we have hackers worldwide, where actions are so covert, you can't attribute those actions easily at all, and demonstrates the need for much more savvy and temperament than ever before in the Presidency. And, gives much weight to the fact we had the Iran deal, and why that was so important.
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