It’s no accident that Netflix chose Aug. 29 as the date on which to release its new Terminator Zero anime, which debuted with a perfect critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes.
In 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, of course, Aug. 29 is revealed as the date in 1997 when Skynet becomes self-aware — with the ensuing all-out war that it launches between machines and humanity sparking a long and bloody resistance between time-traveling cyborgs and human resistance fighters. That conflict stretches into the first decades of the 21st century, a fight that forms the basis of Terminator Zero, the streamer’s new eight-episode anime collaboration between Skydance and Japanese studio Production I.G.
In the series, the voice cast of which includes Timothy Olyphant and Rosario Dawson, a soldier is sent back to the past to change the fate of a humanity that’s grappling with the nightmare of the past and that nightmare’s impact on the future. The soldier arrives in 1997 in order to protect a scientist named Malcolm Lee, who’s working on the launch of an AI system to counter Skynet. At the same time, an unrelenting assassin from the future is hunting Malcolm, who’s also grappling with the moral dilemma that his creation presents.
What happens to Malcolm also impacts the fate of his three children. “I was looking at the franchise and the first two movies in particular,” creator Mattson Tomlin said in a Netflix promotional interview. “And why are we still talking about this franchise 40 years later? You strip away killer robots, you strip away Judgment Day, what do you have left? You have stories about families.”
That’s part of why I feel like Terminator Zero is a surprisingly thoughtful addition to the Terminator franchise — thoughtful, in the sense that it has a focus on the importance of family, as well as taking the viewer to places that the movies didn’t with regards to humanity. Going a step further than a mere good guys vs. bad guys showdown, Terminator Zero actually broaches ideas, like why is humanity worth saving? I’m not the biggest anime fan in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but that’s a deep and profound question that can turn something as simple as a TV show into a work of art.
