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“You can never go back,” warns Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno) in the trailer for the upcoming Netflix anime series Terminator Zero.
That’s a strange thing to hear from a character who literally went back in time. A human resistance soldier from 2022, Eiko has been sent to the year 1997. She’s there to stop a Terminator (voiced by Timothy Olyphant), itself sent to kill someone who might threaten the Machines in the future.
That sure sounds like Terminator Zero is moving back, all the way to the timeline of the first two (and easily best) Terminator movies. But Terminator Zero puts a twist on the proceedings by focusing not on any Connors or even Miles Dyson, the scientist who co-creates evil AI Skynet.
Rather, Terminator Zero features Malcolm Lee (voiced by Andre Holland), a scientist living in Japan. Lee is working on an AI that threatens to compete with Skynet. As the trailer shows, Lee is haunted by visions of Judgment Day, even if he doesn’t exactly understand what he’s seeing. Things grow worse when a Terminator arrives to kill him before he can complete his work.
On one hand, the trailer plays like a greatest hits of Terminators past, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing: children getting obliterated during a vision of Judgment Day, a big dude with half a robot skull peering from his torn face, a tough lady shooting at the robot.
On the other, Terminator Zero stands apart from the others thanks to its anime production, courtesy of famed Japanese animation studio Production I.G. The imagery has an overheated quality that befits the feeling of dread and inevitably that drive the best Terminator stories, but the fluid animation gives it a unique immediacy. As fitting a story about an alternate battle against evil AI happening alongside Terminator 2, Terminator Zero seems like a different version of the Terminator stories we know so well.
It’s not the first time that the franchise has revisited those first films, of course. The disastrous Terminator Genisys created a convoluted reimaginng of the first movies, complete with its own new evil AI and a terribly cast Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor. The opening of the underrated Terminator: Dark Fate shows another Arnold Schwarzenegger-style T-800 killing the young John Connor right after T2.
Given the terrible results of the two movies that tried to move forward in the storyline, first with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines then with the dishwater dull future-set film Terminator Salvation, it’s easy to see why Zero is going back to the golden age of the franchise but from a new perspective.
Will an alternate take on the battle of AIs in 1997 be enough to breathe life into the Terminator franchise? We’ll find out when Terminator Zero arrives on Netflix.
Terminator Zero lands on Netflix on Aug. 29.
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