Mattson Tomlin
Netflix
How many times can Judgment Day arrive and/or be averted before it loses all meaning? That question has plagued every instalment in the Terminator franchise later than James °ä˛ąłľ±đ°ů´Ç˛Ô’s brilliant first two movies. It is something that the new Netflix animated series Terminator Zero attempts to address – perhaps in order to justify its own existence.
Cameron has no involvement in Terminator Zero, which was created and written by Mattson Tomlin and animated by Japanese studio Production I.G. There is no mention of Sarah Connor or her son, John, the supposed future saviour of humanity and key to all previous Terminator stories. Even without the Connors, the series explores the well-worn themes that have defined the franchise, while failing to introduce compelling characters or storylines of its own.
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The show begins in the far-flung future of 2022, in the familiar post-apocalyptic landscape of the war between humans and machines. Once again, the evil artificial intelligence known as Skynet plans to send a Terminator, one of its cybernetic killing machines, back in time to eliminate a human who poses a threat to its dominance. “They wouldn’t be… trying it again, would they?” says an exasperated resistance fighter after discovering Skynet’s plans. The resistance duly sends back its own agent to protect Skynet’s target, setting up a showdown in the past.
While previous sequels have inched back the date of °ä˛ąłľ±đ°ů´Ç˛Ô’s planned Judgment Day, Tomlin returns it to its original designation of 29 August 1997, but the 1997 of Terminator Zero is clearly different from the real one. Resistance fighter Eiko (voiced in the English-language version by Sonoya Mizuno) arrives in a Tokyo where robot helpers known as Innos are common, though they are much less sophisticated than Terminators.
Eiko is there to track down and protect scientist Malcolm Lee (André Holland), who has been developing his own AI to counteract Skynet, thanks to seemingly prophetic dreams he has about Skynet’s imminent destruction of humanity. Malcolm spends most of Terminator Zero stuck inside an augmented reality chamber communing with Kokoro (Rosario Dawson), the AI he believes is the key to salvation.
That leaves the action to Eiko as she tracks down Malcolm’s three whiny, annoying children, whom the Terminator plans to use as leverage to force Malcolm to destroy Kokoro. Confusingly, Eiko also wants to destroy Kokoro, and Tomlin’s additions to a convoluted franchise mythology undermine the plot’s stakes rather than enhance them.
The Terminator (voiced by Timothy Olyphant), which has been the most iconic villain of the series, is truly a zero, speaking only a handful of lines throughout the episodes and lacking the presence of previous android adversaries played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Patrick and Kristanna Loken. Tomlin relies on callbacks and audience goodwill for much of the momentum, but the tone is rote rather than invigorating. “He’ll be back,” Eiko sighs after pushing the Terminator down an elevator shaft.
The later episodes offer bolder storytelling choices, but, as in his underwhelming 2021 feature film Mother/Android, Tomlin delivers a muddled take on the connection between humans and AI. The animation, from veteran anime director Masashi Kudō, is often dynamic and striking, but it can’t make up for the shortcomings in narrative and character development.
Malcolm goes out of his way to negate the importance of previous time-travel efforts (sorry, to explain further is to spoil), but in the process he renders his own attempts meaningless. Whether or not this Judgment Day arrives, there will be another on the way tomorrow.
Josh Bell is a writer and critic based in Las Vegas, Nevada
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