‘Terminator Zero’ Review: This Anime Series Takes The Franchise Someplace New

James Cameron’s original 1984 The Terminator is a perfect synthesis of brainy sci-fi, gruesome horror, nail-biting suspense and clever character drama, all brilliantly executed on a limited budget. Its premise is dynamite, and it’s no wonder that it has spawned a string of sequels and multi-media spin-offs. But, where Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day was a masterful escalation of the original premise into the realm of high octane action blockbuster, most of its successors have failed to take the concept anywhere interesting, eventually (and repeatedly) going the route of the underwhelming nostalgia-driven legacy sequel. Terminator Zero, the new eight-part animé series from American writer Mattson Tomlin and Japanese director Masashi Kudô, avoids nearly all of the franchise’s usual pitfalls by uncoupling the premise from its established characters and setting, and prioritizing heady themes and bleak, gruesome violence over action and spectacle. Its first four episodes may not be groundbreaking, but the second half is daring and thought-provoking enough to reward your investment.

The events of Terminator Zero are centered in Tokyo in a selectively futuristic 1997. (You can buy a bipedal service robot, but not a cell phone.) Here, computer engineer Malcolm Lee (voiced by Andre Holland in the English version, Yuuya Uchida in Japanese) is nearing a breakthrough with his new autonomous AI, KOKORO (Rosario Dawson/Atsumi Tanezaki), but fears that he will be too late to stop the doom that awaits humanity. Somehow, Malcolm knows about Judgement Day—August 29, 1997—when an American AI called Skynet is destined to achieve sentience and immediately unleash atomic hell across the entire planet. Malcolm has less than 24 hours to complete his work and save the world, assuming his plan isn’t folly to begin with.

Never one to leave its fate to chance, the world-conquering Skynet of 2022 sends a cybernetic killing machine disguised as a human (Timothy Olyphant/Yasuhiro Mamiya) back to 1997 to kill Malcolm. The desperate human resistance counters with their own soldier, Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno/Toa Yukinari). Caught in the crosshairs are Malcolm’s three neglected children and their nanny, Misaki (Saori Hayami/Saori Hayami), who are no match for the Terminator, even with Eiko’s help.

If none of this sounds to you like a revolutionary take on The Terminator, you aren’t mistaken. A solid two hours of Terminator Zero sounds like a Japanese remake of the 1984 original with a bit of T2 blended in. We’ve got a chase between two warriors from the future, a dysfunctional parent whose obsession with staving off doomsday is poisoning his relationship with his offspring, and lots of blood and guts as the titular cyborg slays his way through a major city. Much of what distinguishes the first half of Terminator Zero from previous iterations is its setting, a country where firearms are hard to come by and both heroes and villains are forced to find other instruments of violence. Mattson and Kudǒ also make use of the story’s place in time, a mere two years after the shocking terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway system. Still, the first half of the series is too familiar and far too slow to break away from the pack of mediocre Terminator sequels. 

And then, in a flash, Terminator Zero swerves into uncharted territory, and all of its smaller distinctions from its source material become much more important. Even the leisurely pace up to this point is somewhat justified by the payoff at halftime. Rather than merely another derivative brand extension obsessed with its past, Terminator Zero reveals itself as its own damn thing, a work that goes beyond the slasher movie chills and “fuck yeah” action of its glory days and veers into verbose, cerebral science fiction. It’s an element that has been part of the franchise’s DNA from the beginning and has been explored since then with disastrous results, but here these themes of fate, free will, consciousness and humanity’s self-destruction are given time to simmer and develop. Action and thrills aren’t forsaken altogether, but they’re a side-dish, not the main course.

All of this makes the story of Terminator Zero a perfect fit for an anime series. Zero is ponderous and often a huge bummer. (This should be no surprise to those familiar with Mattson Tomlin, who wrote the screenplay to the criminally underseen and absolutely devastating sci-fi romance Little Fish.) It is For Adults in a way that none of the film sequels aspire to be, and were this same tale to be spun as a Hollywood movie, it would likely receive a similar reception to David Fincher’s deeply unpleasant Alien3. Likewise, a live action miniseries might lack the anime’s visual experimentation, and a solely American animated production would probably be saddled with the same cheap production values of most US animation not designed to sell toys or video games. Only in anime can storytellers get away with drippy body horror, stylized action and five-minute monologues about the nature of consciousness all in one package. (Or in a Wachowskis film, I guess.)

Terminator Zero may not be what some fans of the franchise are looking for, but trying to satisfy the existing audience with returning characters and pandering callbacks is what gave us Terminator: Genesys. Including the TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles, there have been three separate sequels to Terminator 2, and none of them has stuck. It’s long past time for something different, and that’s what Terminator Zero offers. Frankly, every worn-out franchise could use an installment like this.