Terminator’s been largely on ice since 2019, but it’s returning with Terminator Zero. The upcoming anime is looking to expand the scope of the sci-fi thriller franchise by going to Japan and focusing on a new set of characters caught up in the Human/Skynet war. But war is hell, and as a mature animated series, it’s also coming with a ton of violence on display.
During Anime NYC, Netflix released a new red band trailer that shows a bunch of humans getting mutilated or killed in the meanest of ways. These new killer robots (and Timothy Olyphant’s lead Terminator) were created by an AI named Kokoro (Rosario Dawson) developed in Japan as the country’s Skynet equivalent, and who are hunting down its creator Malcolm Lee (André Holland) and his family. It falls to time-traveling resistance soldier Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno) to protect the Lees and try to stop Kokoro before it devastates the country like Skynet has in the west.
Ahead of the trailer’s release, showrunner Mattson Tomlin told Polygon his desire to “lean into the strength” of working with Japanese studio Production I.G (Kaiju No. 8, Ghost in the Shell). The earlier movies were so focused on the United States and Mexico, and gave no real mention of other countries beyond Russia. With that in mind, pivoting to Japan and away from the Connors wasn’t difficult at all, and in fact afforded him an incredible amount of freedom. “The movies have been…about this family and this saga,” he noted, “but I’m doing an animated show and that hasn’t been done before in this franchise. […] What’s going on anywhere else in the world?
While writing Zero, Mattson keyed in on three core Terminator pillars: killer robots, “fear and dread around nuclear holocaust,” and family-centric stories. If the first two films are respectively about “a man and woman making a baby” and “a mother’s love for her son,” this series is about a fractured family coming together again. In his eyes, you don’t get Terminator without those three tenets, they’ve all led to an enduring franchise aiming to make a comeback and take some new swings.
Terminator Zero premieres August 29 on Netflix.
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