A clumsy thriller for Robert De Niro

Netflix has released Day zero (Day zero), a series that is being sold as the new crown jewel of the Netflix catalogue. It is logical: it has Robert De Niro playing the role of a revered former president of the United States. Following the most basic codes of thriller, the action starts in half nothing, with the star protagonist trying to open a safe in a hurry while someone violently knocks on the door to enter his office. An exciting start that, minutes later, we will see that it deflates. But they have already given us the first shock.

The fiction, of six chapters, begins like a countdown. The United States suffers a cyber attack of enormous dimensions that suddenly turns off the entire communications network for a minute. On all mobile phone screens a threatening warning appears: "This can happen again." The global blackout causes thousands of deaths. The narrative approach to address the story is disconcerting. The United States has as president a black woman who, seeing the proportion of the catastrophe, delegates the official follow-up to a former president and she is left in a secondary role. A retired, white, elderly man is the one who assumes the true leadership. To top it off, this respected former president begins to show symptoms of a supposed dementia but at all costs wants to take charge of that responsibility as a good patriot. It is inevitable to make a sibylline reading in relation to the last few months of the political news in the United States, especially with the last electoral campaign and the duo Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. If Harris had won the elections, the series would have seemed like a permanent subliminal message.

Day zero It's typical thriller where everything is told in half and you don't quite understand the details of what the characters say but you have the peace of mind that in the end you will tie heads. The protagonist always has more information than the viewer, and so the scriptwriters defuse the danger of being too obvious. Simply put, when important information is revealed they use the resource of changing the scene or locking the characters in soundproof rooms. They also abuse the resource of insinuating and even provoking false suspicions to guarantee the confusion of the audience.

At a time when Trump and Putin are at each other's throats, Day zero The series once again resorts to the classic enemy: the Russians. But always with the feeling that it is only a distraction strategy, constructing the fashionable alternatives: either a far-right movement or the terrorism of a radical left-wing group. The dialogues are the most precarious. In a meeting at the Pentagon, under maximum secrecy, with the highest officials of the CIA, the former president must specify: "Not one word should leave this room." And despite this clumsiness and resources that are more effective than bold, the series is engaging and entertaining, partly to comment from the sofa on the production's botched jobs.