'Terminator Zero' Review: Netflix's Anime Spinoff Revives the Classic Franchise with a Bold New Vision!

Terminator Zero Netflix Review: A Fresh(er) Take on a Familiar Franchise.

'Terminator Zero' Courtesy of Netflix

The short answer is that a high-budget sequel caused the somewhat unlikely blockbuster success of Terminator 2: Judgment Day — which essentially offered more of everything while upending the entire plotline, overwriting its low budget original from nearly a decade earlier (leaving Hollywood to learn all kinds of wrong lessons).

So instead of seeing the box office as a product of James Cameron's diverse ambitious, his skin-of-their-teeth launches into blockbookbusting careers production decided that audiences just wanted more Terminator all along. Which means that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, an inoffensively fine followup to two better movies, was followed by three films — Salvation and Genisys as well as Dark Fate; each billed at one time or another presumably about a heard-of-before potential new trilogy — combining for just zero future entries.

While all of them have glimmers of innovation and that tip-they-hats-to-the-originals feel to it, together they are so identifiably homogeneous — I would need consult the internet while pondering the existential question “Which ones were actually involved with Arnold Schwarzenegger and/or James Cameron? or even simply “How many of these starred Jai Courtney? or “Should that title have a colon in it or what?

If you ask this TV critic, the franchise's best follow-up was Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-09), which played between Terminator 3 and Salvation before dying along with most of that network. It was the only Terminator spinoff that told a story and not an extortion racket in which audiences would have to pay for part of a movie now, with fingers crossed their money might someday become a fully realized narrative.

Netflix's best franchise entry by a longshot since The Sarah Connor Chronicles - and way less immediately self-explanatory in title form than Terminator: The Anime Series, (which was thankfully rechristened the more promisingly ambiguous yet bold @allen_gregok.) With a unique visual flair provided by the Japanese animation studio Production I.G., and a quality voice cast headlined — seemingly! — by Timothy Olyphant (though no sigh of Jai Courtney yet), the show is still in first season set-up mode; it's laying all its pieces on this board, from which presumably future episodes will be played. But what if it's like, a good holding pattern of something?

All of it is penned by Mattson Tomlin and helmed by Masashi Kudō, with Terminator Zero opening in the future (2022) during an action set piece where resistance soldier Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno) squares off against a nameless cybernetic killer machine (Olyphant doesn't speak at all in the first episode and tops out at no more than half-a-dozen lines across the show.).

Almost at once — time travel is a glorious thing!— everyone jumps back to late August 1997, and franchise fans everywhere know that Judgment Day is upon them.

Tokyo-based scientist Malcolm Lee (André Holland) is determined to stop the impending apocalypse. Malcolm … knows things. He dreams of mushroom clouds and robot uprisings, but that was just the tip of Malcolm's foreknowledge about what is to happen with Skynet. To stop the impending human genocide, he has a complex AI model called “Kokoro,” which will manifest as different forms voiced by Rosario Dawson.

Time is running out and Malcolm has to shut himself in a room with Kokoro and decide whether she is fit to be connected. This causes mayhem and chaos in 1997 when Terminator (CHARLES GRODIN) and Eiko have both traveled to the future where they confront Malcolm.

The usual franchise noodling around with issues of fate and free will (why do these two entities so seemingly disparate in goals both believe they want to kill Malcolm) also apply — not to mention brand new musings on the time travel paradoxes that series has turned into a delightful or infuriating, dependent your level interest mess over the last three-to-four movies.

The only thing you know for sure is that “Time travel!” won't cut it. as a Terminator get out of jail free card like you kinda sorta could in at least the first two movies. Much of what Tomlin is doing here involves reconciling/justifying/ignoring existing audience perceptions surrounding “oh, so that’s how everything works if you start sending assassins and soldiers back past one way.” For as strong as that opener and most of the set pieces in general are, Terminator Zero is a long conversation delivered wearily like Ann Dowd playing your spiritual leader or pleasantly conveyed with Cameron’s warm cadence (not only does Kokoro have multiple consciousnesses but so too does Dawson). I really dont think it needed eight episodes each and fewer than half an hour of explanation to telegraph every false trail, all the way up until however this mess ends; two or three surprises that literally popped into my addled little brain with about one-third left in its run time.

Nonetheless, there are new elements in this. Tokyo kind of reset the narrative where it was about to be just another blandly messianic coronation of “John Connor” as humanity’s last hope. And thanks fuck for small wonder that — spoiler alert! – the intermittent reliance on Easter eggs never at any point extends to a character blurting out something incredibly asinine like, “Yes you may refer to me as Bandit but my real name Kyle Reese.” Its a fresh group of anime-styled characters — particularly Malcolms young children Kenta (Armani Jackson), Reika (Gideon Adlon) and Hiro some which are looked after by their nanny/housekeeper Misaki( Sumalee Montano). They pull off being cute and active, but also not too obnoxiously adorable.

In the version featured in Terminator Zero, Tokyo is infested with basically friendly 1NN0 models and this of course doesn't approach AT ALL on how awesome killer robots SHOULD be or even a good one (that market-leading cat plaything could also think). You Travel through time, arrive and drop into your naked trademark kneel — that has not changed yet in the entire Terminator world of course since LA is like finding heavy artillery back then for you normal humans (robot or soldier) where as guns are much harder to come by for heroes or villains during the 1990's Japan. This spells a touch on inventiveness in Tomlin's methods and allows Kudō to orchestrate action with some nice, tight-quarters intimacy — enabling the violence & carnage generally right around what you'd expect from this relatively soft-R-rated franchise.

I at first toggled back and forth between the “original” Japanese with subtitles and an English language dub (which is what I watched) before sticking with it — Holland’s gruff wisdom, Mizuno fierce confidence. Olyphant gives voice to his Terminator in a very folksy Midwestern everyman kind of way — think Robert Patrick more than Ah-nold, though I must remind you all again that this is one super-brief-ass TERMINATOR. Local Olyphant completists would be better off rewatching Santa Clarita Diet once it gets on Netflix.

Note on the two audio tracks: I did find it interesting that there's perhaps some cursing in the English but not a lot and nothing worse than what must also exist in Japanese, although none shows up overtly in subtitles for this version. There are also subtitles-specific references that aren't so present in the English dub, like the only "I'll be back" and "Come with me if you want to live" nods. And that does not evaluate anything at all! Just a footnote!

In any language, and despite a few expositional stumbles and the anticlimactic twist (and almost-shot) Takeuchi goes for here,Terminator Zero lays down an intriguing foundation for what could be a continuing story that's as much about very human choices as it is high-flying action. Thanks to Netflix's track record with anime properties, it should be the onset of a ​prolonged multiseason run rather than just another one and done or dead end.