Netflix's Anime Spin-Off Comes to Japan

The rather unlikely success of Terminator 2: Judgment Day — a big-budget sequel that overturned the entire plot of a low-budget original released nearly a decade earlier — led Hollywood to learn the wrong lesson.

Instead of attributing box office success to James Cameron's creative versatility, the industry has decided that audiences must have an insatiable appetite for all things… Terminator. AS Terminator 3: Dawn of the Machinescursed for being a completely decent sequel to two far superior films, it was followed by Terminator The Salvation AND Terminator Genisys AND Terminator: Dark Fate — three films that were considered the start of potential trilogies, but spawned, between them, zero sequels. While each has flashes of creativity and token nods to the originals, they are so collectively indistinct that I need online assistance answering big questions like “Which films featured Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron?” or “How many of these films featured Jai Courtney?” or “Is there a semicolon in the title or not?”

The best sequel to the franchise, if you ask this TV critic, was Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicleswho had a series of two unlucky seasons between Terminator 3 AND Terminator The Salvation. It's the only one Terminator an offshoot that seemed to tell a story, rather than trying to blackmail the public into subscribing to a tale that would eventually be told.

What's new on Netflix Terminator Zero — without a colon and less immediately self-explanatory than the previous title Terminator: The Anime Series —it's my favorite franchise since The Sarah Connor Chronicles. With a distinctive look courtesy of Japanese animation studio Production I.G. and a solid voice cast seemingly led by Timothy Olyphant (with no Jai Courtney in sight), the series is still in that frustrating holding pattern of spending an entire first season putting the pieces in place for what will presumably be its ongoing narrative. But it’s a pretty promising holding pattern.

Written entirely by Mattson Tomlin and directed by Masashi Kudō, Terminator Zero begins in the future, namely 2022, with a high-octane action scene pitting resistance soldier Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno) against an unnamed cybernetic killing machine (Olyphant, except he doesn't say anything in the first episode and doesn't have more than half a dozen lines in the entire series).

Thanks to the wonders of time travel, everyone quickly returns to late August 1997, a destination that lets fans of the series know that Judgment Day is approaching.

Trying to prevent the impending apocalypse is Tokyo scientist Malcolm Lee (André Holland). Malcolm… knows things. He has nightmares about mushroom clouds and robot rebellions, but that's just the beginning of Malcolm's prescience about what's coming to Skynet. His strategy to prevent human genocide relies on a complex artificial intelligence model he's developed, called “Kokoro” and voiced by Rosario Dawson in multiple guises.

With time running out, Malcolm must lock himself in a room and determine if Kokoro is ready to go online. When both the Terminator and Eiko arrive in 1997 determined to stop Malcolm, chaos ensues.

To understand why these two entities with very different goals both think they want to eliminate Malcolm requires the franchise’s usual geekery about questions of fate and free will, as well as some fresh thinking about the paradoxes of time travel that the last three or four films have turned into a hodgepodge that can be either enjoyable or exasperating, depending on your level of engagement.

One thing that is beyond dispute is that you can't just use “Time Travel!” as a Terminator Get Out of Jail Free Card like you could in the first two films. Much of Tomlin's mission here is to reconcile/justify/ignore what viewers thought they understood about what happens when you send assassins and soldiers into the past with a singular objective. As good as the opening action scene is, and as solid as several scenes throughout the film are, long stretches of Terminator Zero It’s just chatter, delivered in the weary, wise tones of Ann Dowd as a spiritual leader or in the warm cadences of Dawson, whose Kokoro includes several types of consciousness. I’m not convinced that it took eight episodes (each less than 30 minutes) of exposition to get the plot to where it is at the end, especially since there are two or three surprises that almost any attentive viewer will have predicted several chapters in advance.

There are new elements here, though. Resetting the narrative to Tokyo allows for a move away from another blandly messianic coronation of “John Connor” as humanity’s last hope. And it’s a relief that (spoiler alert) the reliance on occasional Easter eggs doesn’t extend to a character saying something stupid like “Sure, you can call me Bandit, but when I was born, my name was Kyle Reese.” This is a new set of characters loosely adapted for the anime genre, particularly Malcolm Kenta’s (Armani Jackson) children, Reika (Gideon Adlon) and Hiro (Carter Rockwood), left under the watchful eye of their nanny/housekeeper Misaki (Sumalee Montano). They manage to be likable and energetic, but not overly sappy.

Terminator Zero introduces a completely different cultural approach to robotics: in this 1997 version, Tokyo is overrun with benign 1NN0 models, while the most popular toy on the market is an AI cat, and, more importantly, guns. Time travel still requires arriving muscled and naked in the signature kneeling position, but while heavy artillery was always easy to come by when your average Terminator or soldier arrived in Los Angeles, guns are harder to come by for heroes and villains in '90s Japan. This forces some ingenuity into Tomlin's approach, and allows Kudō to stage the action with a welcome intimacy, while keeping the violence and gore within the franchise's generally R-rated trappings.

Initially, I veered between the “original” Japanese audio track with subtitles and the English dubbed audio, before settling on the latter because I appreciated Holland's stern wisdom and Mizuno's confident courage. When his Terminator speaks, Olyphant makes him a bit of a plucky Midwestern everyman, more Robert Patrick than Ah-nold, though again I caution that this is a particularly concise Terminator. Olyphant completionists would be wise to rewatch. Santa Clarita Diet once they're on Netflix.

Two things to note about the different audio tracks: I noticed that the English audio includes occasional, but non-aggressive, swearing that isn't in the subtitles that accompany the Japanese dub. Also, there are specific references in the subtitles that aren't in the English dub, including the only mentions of “I'll be back” and “Come with me if you want to live.” This isn't a rating in any way. Just a footnote!

Regardless of the language you watch it in, and despite the small expository delays and disappointing revelations, Terminator Zero establishes a solid framework for an ongoing story that, like the best parts of the franchise, is as much about very human choices as it is about spectacle. Given the brand name and Netflix’s clear success with anime properties, this should be the start of an interesting multi-season series, rather than yet another dead-end.