Metacritic reviews

What Zero Days lacks in subtlety and formal innovation, however, it compensates for in breadth and lucidity.

Clear, urgent and positively terrifying at times.

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.

Zero Days is an intriguing, disturbing watch.

But as with every other film in his fast-growing canon, Gibney wields his authoritative research and storytelling skills like a scalpel, getting at a subject we aren’t talking about with blunt facts and informed, cautionary speculation.

Few will emerge from its story of intelligence tradecraft and egregious lapses in oversight without feeling seriously freaked out.

Because it wants to be a primer on a serious subject, an exciting cinematic exposé and an argument for more openness and some kind of regulatory framework, the necessities of these different strands end up getting in each other’s way.

While the urgency of the message emerges powerfully, the details are often hard to absorb, as Gibney skips from political information to technical specs.

The film does the job; it holds your attention. Overall, though, this is a classic “Say, why not read a book instead?” situation.

Gibney’s problem here, in a way, is his main point: the very lack of transparency about these missions, which operate in ill-defined spheres of international law, obstructs informed public discussion.