Series Review: Terminator Zero is a visually elegant anime and a clear respect for the franchise

One of the things that makes the 80s so remembered and copied today is the franchises and sagas that were formed in it, cinematography saw a before and after for what we have today, and science fiction as a genre was able to develop this in a way that we had never seen before.

Sagas like Back to the Future, Predator, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Batman, Conan, Robocop, Mad Max, and of course, Terminator had a lot to tell and much more to develop about their characters and stories.

Along with this, the directors and studios planned what to do with all this and where to take these franchises in the following years, every one of those already mentioned has become a classic in the genre that occupies them, and have tried to stay current to this day.

In the very particular case of Terminator, James Cameron’s idea of ​​a killer robot from the future was a very interesting and original idea in this approach and context, Terminator (1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Terminator Salvation (2009), Terminator Genisys (2015), Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), and the rumor that there will be a seventh installment Terminator: End of War written and directed by Cameron himself, it also had a television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008 – 2009) that only lasted 2 seasons before being canceled and Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series (2009)

Video games, comics, and novels have been a fundamental part of the development of more stories in this universe, now and in 2024 Netflix and the animation studio Production IG and Skydance Television present Terminator Zero as an action and science fiction anime series developed by Mattson Tomlin and set with these characters.

What is the Terminator Zero series about?

Malcolm Lee, an AI scientist who is developing Kokoro, an artificial intelligence system intended to compete with Skynet, the day before Judgement Day, Lee finds himself and his three children being hunted by an unknown killer robot and a warrior and survivor from a future has been sent to protect him.

Indeed, this film saga has not had a continuity that respects its origin, outside of the first 2 installments everything has gone from bad to worse, each director has done what he could with what he had, and the scripts have gone from being uninteresting to complete crap and the fact that the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger is the most remembered antagonist and that neither the directors nor the studios have wanted to risk telling a new story without him has resulted in the recycling of the same story.

The series is canonical in its timeline, the events take place on Judgement Day in 1997, they happen as we have already seen but now from the perspective of an anime and with its own rules, although in this new story, John and Sarah Connor are not named as such and directly, there is mention of the attempts that Skynet has had to assassinate the leader of the resistance which as we see here is not only a small group in the United States but worldwide as mentioned in Terminator Salvation, with John being the most well-known.

The explanation that this series gives us about time travel and what its timelines are is to give a more coherent, absolute, and indisputable sense to the entire franchise that we have seen in the movies, these timelines are told and taken differently in comics and video games, and how they connect with everything else, the concept of time is exciting, the screenwriter Mattson Tomlin understands perfectly well that everything that has been done has been shit because the concepts have not been properly raised, moving away from explanations like the one said in Back to the Future or even in Avengers: End Game here each timeline corresponds to a specific point in the stories that we already saw.

Terminator is set in 1984, where a woman tries to escape from an unknown threat that has traveled back in time and wants to annihilate her. To protect her, Kyle Reese, a resistance warrior sent by the woman’s son, arrives from the future and manages to defeat the robot, a T-800 model, the most advanced to date.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day, after failing in its first attempt, Skynet sends another more advanced robot to 1995, but not to kill the mother, but her son and future leader. Now things change, it is John himself who steals and reprograms a Terminator of the same model and appearance as the one in the first film and sends it to protect him, which represents another failure for this AI to continue dominating the world; and it is at this point where the saga is divided into several films that not only went towards the same future but also rethought and rewrote the timeline at the discretion of the studios, directors and scriptwriters.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines takes place 10 years after its predecessor with the same plan and delaying a few more years the final judgment that ended up happening again, in this film John Connor is again protected by a reprogrammed T-850 model robot and now the new threat is a machine with the appearance of a woman and with T-X abilities better known as Terminatrix which is a design programmed to hunt and destroy Terminators and other specific targets.

Terminator Salvation already presents us with what many fans of the saga wanted to see, the development of a story in this very different and reinvented post-apocalyptic future from the past films and this new anime series, here is where we meet an adult John Connor as the leader of a resistance that fights to continue fighting this artificial intelligence, something that had not been raised as such and that in its execution was left very halfway.

After a break in these productions comes Terminator Genisys which begins to work with a concept more like what we see in this anime series but much worse told and executed, and it is explained to us that an anomaly in the past has created a new future, one very different from what we already know, in 1984 Sarah Connor is raised by a T-800 model robot. Where the villain is John Connor himself who has been infected by Skynet’s new nanotechnology, this twist in its plot ended up not convincing anyone that its protagonist and base character was now an antagonist with a simple, poorly carried out, and stupid explanation.

At this point the franchise had already lost a lot of its credibility by breaking the rules it imposed on itself and so all this needed a reboot, James Cameron takes up the franchise as producer and rethinks things putting an end to the 3 previous films and presents Terminator: Dark Fate, with a script written by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, Billy Ray generate a different future, John Connor is killed 3 years after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day generating a new future without a resistance leader now being a woman who assumes this position, again we tell the story of a robot comes from the future to kill blah blah blah, and the good guys face the bad guys and blah blah blah and in the end it seems that this artificial intelligence survived for future installments from this point on, which they haven’t done and we don’t think they will.

Terminator Zero now has 8 episodes available which are:

“Model 101”

In 1997, a tormented scientist is estranged from his family for an absorbing project, while in the year 2022, a renegade fighter faces a powerful robot for crucial information.

“Model 102”

Eiko and the Terminator arrive in 1997 with the same mission: to find Dr. Malcolm Lee, one to protect him and the other to kill him, meanwhile, the scientist’s children run away from home.

“Model 103”

Malcolm tells Kokoro the new AI about his most recurring nightmare, the 3 boys continue their underground expedition without knowing that they are in grave danger.

“Model 104”

As Eiko desperately tries to elude the police, Misaki’s mysterious past comes to light revealing who he is, Malcolm reflects on the essence of destiny and the purpose he has in this life.

“Model 105”

Malcolm connects Kokoro to the network, trusting that the decision she makes is the right one for the good of all, the boys can’t agree on Misaki’s motivations, and Eiko realizes that she is entering uncharted and very dangerous territory.

“Model 106”

The prophet debates the paradox of time travel with Eiko and why she is chosen to make that trip, Malcolm talks to Kokoro about a painful memory and the boys hope to meet again in Cat City.

“Model 107”

Malcolm recalls previous efforts to stop the machines and his desire to build an artificial God that will be the salvation and hope of all humanity, having Kenta in his hands the Terminator prepares for the outcome that will put an end to a fight from which only one can survive.

“Model 108”

Kenta is faced with a difficult decision and the Terminator reveals a shocking truth that could change everything as the future of humanity hangs in the balance.

Now, what Terminator Zero intends to do is to rethink things again and this time it will be the most logical response that humanity has against Skynet, we know that this artificial intelligence takes control of everything by connecting to the internet when it realizes what humans were doing, it reprograms itself when it realizes that humans have a destruction protocol which leads it to use all the world’s weapons to use them against them, here we see that there is a lot of the blah blah blah that we already know but its new addition is that it clearly states that it is to try to develop in the past another AI that is capable of facing Skynet in the same way and level, a software called Kokoro created by a new character named Malcolm Lee.

What is new about this program is that its name can already express the rules of the anime what is mind, heart, and spirit, which is based on the names of its 2 children Kenta, Reika, and Hiro, each one having their personality, for example, Kenta is the brain in everything, the mastermind who has managed to develop an intelligence at a young age that allows him to create technological things, Reika is more rebellious, she is the girl who can break the rules and get out of what is established as rules and finally there is Hiro who is the heart of this family, the one who is clear that humans and robots can coexist, the idea that it is now a family that is in danger and at risk gives it a very special suspense that we have not seen since the 84 films.

The series manages to take advantage of itself by locating all this in Japan, one of the most technologically developed countries today, it is more credible that this happens in this framework if we are talking about artificial intelligence, software, and above all robotics, a new and different concept that It gives a more realistic and credible sense within its context to the entire film saga and strives to restore all the mistakes it has made, the difference between these 2 AI is that Skynet was dedicated to collecting data and was activated as self-defense to end its threat, humans, while Kokoro is a program that is rewritten based on what it learns and understands to be able to choose what it wants to do without being corrupted and influenced by anything or anyone and only based on what it sees, understands and learns.

The latter raises a series of interesting questions between its central character and its creation, such as: Are humans capable of evolving without war? Can humanity make good use of technology? As selfish and individualistic human beings, can we live together in peace? Can we make this evolved technology more useful to us in every sense without having to be enslaved to it? Are humans capable of recognizing that they should not let AI control everything? The convenience of the media today is what has allowed us to have useful tools at hand since most things are acquired through the use of applications.

It might seem that this series complicates itself with the approaches it makes, but we know well that when the East takes something from the West and transforms it into its way of seeing things, it can be a success or a failure, as when we see the flashback of Malcolm who was born in 2025 and at only 7 years old was already a resistance soldier who hacked systems and fought against Terminators, a child who was born in the middle of a war and who knows nothing but to defend himself and try to survive, pretending to make a new program and protocol in a Terminator created by himself called Misaki to whom he wanted to allow deciding what he wants to do with his existence, that he did not have predetermined programming to kill or be a warlike element but also not to develop emotions but rather that he had free will.

On the other hand, the humans of this new future that are part of the resistance hate machines and everything that has to do with technology, which makes them unable to see and rethink a new future in which machines and they can coexist peacefully, but humans are predestined to self-destruct due to lack of empathy, lack of knowledge, selfishness, and envy, Kokoro as a program in development without orders and influences and without any other factor beyond what it is seeing and learning that is evolving more simply, while Skynet has been programmed based on all the defects of humanity, how destructive they can be and that is why it ends up destroying them, nothing further from reality, as humans we are imperfect and we have virtues but also defects.

So, at this point, we know that Misaki is Kokoro’s mother program so that the latter connects to the network and decides what to do with humanity, but is this a good idea or is it creating something even worse than Skynet itself?

The series develops its characters at the same time as its story, the first step to being able to fix all this is to travel to 1983 a year before the events of Terminator in 1984, Malcom Lee as a character feels very apart from everyone else, his way of posing things makes him be like the conscience that the same series needs, the neutral interaction he has with Kokoro, he doesn’t tell anything about himself or his life until it is the same AI that connects to the network and discovers everything about its creator, information that it could or could not use against him, understanding the meaning of life and what motivates us is a very deep point from the perspective of a machine.

The evolution that Kokoro has as a ghost character within the series is like a limited participative observer who constantly observes us and based on his learning he can begin to make his own decisions, on the one hand, he has saved us from the atomic bombs launched by Skynet but on the other hand being at the same level and having a point of advantage can be even more destructive believing that what he does is for the good of all of us such as extermination and that we can no longer hurt each other, at the end of it all the death of Malcolm makes the same series rethink what direction it should take.

The approach to how time travel works in this world and in this universe is explained in episode 6 and it goes like this, Eiko is a resistance soldier sent from the year 2022 to protect Malcolm and his children from a Terminator and prevent Malcolm Lee from activating Kokoro since in the future he has seen that humans along with Skynet are a threat to its existence, it was to be expected that between the 2 artificial bits of intelligence, there would be a war of powers or that it represents 2 problems, on the one hand, the final judgment and on the other surviving the decision that this new program has made.

The blah blah blah that we already know is that Skynet sends a Terminator to confront Eiko while Kenta Lee has managed to ally with Skynet to stop his father from activating Kokoro, and all this is set and taken as a base date on August 29, 1997, just the day of judgment and which also served as the release date for the series, making reference to it but in an alternative timeline that connects with the events of the films, as it is explained to us, time is not a single timeline that is rewritten but branches out on itself as the past has its alterations.

To understand this we have as an example the Eiko we know in 2022 has not yet had a child and is sent to 1997 to stop Malcolm from activating Kokoro, this means that she has not traveled to the past of her timeline but to a completely different one because she has never been in the past of her line, which if so would generate a temporal paradox that you cannot be in a place you have never been, this is how this anime raises, rethinks and resolves that all the alternative lines generated are the movies that we have already seen as part of its branching, the same line constantly changing and creating new possibilities, or like what Skynet does, every time it sends a Terminator to the past it does so on the same timeline generating pasts and presents.

The above also has a variant, a small gap in which you can travel to the same destination as a Terminator but comply with the rule of the future and the past in a single line and direction, yes, this may sound complicated to understand but the series explains it very well, the disadvantage of all this is that time travel is only one way with no return, which means that with this there is already a variant in the past that alters everything else, which leaves us with the doubt and the question of whether this character of the prophet is the same Eiko but older and that was generated using these variants? A theory that is left to the discretion of the viewer and that is not explained.

The ending is equally confusing, we have Malcolm’s corpse but also the skull of a Terminator which gives us to understanding that all this is a cycle that is constantly recycled and changing but that the destiny of humanity is the same, its extermination and possible extinction, which is not entirely said, as an anime series it works perfectly well because the format allows it and at the same time allows its characters and its story to be developed well.

Being a different animation under other rules, its design and production are impeccable and it portrays a Western theme very well in a way that fits its rules and aesthetics, everything is in the right place and time, the only flaw it has is that it takes too long to explain everything due to its format, this type of subject must indeed be treated with great care so as not to put forward a culture to which it does not belong and completely lose the essence of what it is and what it intends to tell, its narrative is sometimes dynamic and agile and sometimes reminds us of any other anime, especially in the moments of more drama and less action.

The fact that there is only one director and one scriptwriter for the 8 episodes is what gives it the advantage of not having different points of view on the same thing, it is the understanding that everything that happens follows a very specific narrative line that develops the events step by step even if some are slower than others, the moral discourse is presented differently and how the Japanese see the concept of love and family without falling into excess and triteness, or in the concept of what is right and what is wrong and the consequences that each one can bring if the right decision is not made.

The references to the entire saga are subtle but very precise with phrases like the iconic phrase “come with me if you want to live” or a Terminator dressed as a policeman, or the massacre in the police station like in the first film, or the robots stepping on the skulls of the dead men, each of them is a surprise that tells us that everything that is happening has its purpose and meaning within the saga, which does not leave any out but tries to accommodate them in their context.

The result has been the best, it is not a love letter to the saga but to modify it and now, yes, to present this to the new generations without forgetting where it comes from and where it wants to take us without modernizing things just in a stupid way to have more viewers or wanting to revive something that is already dying from its idea, this shows that less is more and that in the right hands and the right format things can go from bad to much better for a franchise that from this point on has much more to tell.

The voice cast includes Timothy Olyphant, Sonoya Mizuno, André Holland, Rosario Dawson, Ann Dowd, and Sumalee Montano among others, and on the Japanese side, there are Yasuhiro Mamiya, Toa Yukinari, Yuuya Uchida, Saori Hayami, Hiro Shimono and Miyuki Sato who sound different because of their accents and do a great job.

The music composed by Michelle Birsky and Kevin Olken Henthorn has its personality, there are few occasions when we can hear the notes of the original theme composed by Brad Fiedel and some other pieces used in these 2 James Cameron films, a work that goes more towards the anime side and that works perfectly well and that synchronizes with each of the scenes.

In conclusion, Terminator Zero as a series turns out to be a very interesting work that is beautiful in an audiovisual way and has a very clear respect for the franchise, something that is not a continuation or a reboot that works very well in its context. It is still unknown whether or not there will be more seasons that continue to enrich a saga that was destined to die in the attempt to do something new, a round and concrete ending that leaves us wanting to know more.

Terminator Zero in its 8 episodes is now available on the Netflix platform.