Once an unstoppable box office powerhouse, the Terminator movie franchise has seen its fortunes dwindle with subsequent installments as audiences moved on to other sci-fi diversions, many of which have borrowed from the foundation James Cameron originally built. Nevertheless, the property remains valuable enough to keep active in some form, if no longer on movie theater screens. The latest revival comes as a Netflix anime series called Terminator Zero.
Much like the recent Godzilla Minus One, the show’s mathematical title might suggest that Terminator Zero is a prequel to the original movie, but that’s not exactly the case. Can there even be such a thing as a prequel in a story that involves time travel? Notions of what happened first get awfully complicated when temporal paradoxes are involved. More accurately classified as a spinoff, Terminator Zero takes place in the same narrative continuity as all the Terminator live-action movies (as well as The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series), but is the first Terminator story that has no interaction with, nor even mention of, either John or Sarah Connor.
| Title: | Terminator Zero |
| Season: | 1 |
| Number of Episodes: | 8 |
| Release Date: | August 29, 2024 |
| Watched On: | Netflix |
The date is August 29, 1997: Judgment Day. Malcolm Lee somehow knows this. The top scientist at Cortex Industries in Tokyo, Malcolm has known about Skynet for years, and has worked to build his own rival A.I. called Kokoro that he hopes will fight Skynet and save humanity from the coming apocalypse. Yet as the countdown timer quickly runs out, serious doubts remain and he hesitates to launch the system online beyond the closed network in his lab. Once Kokoro has access to all the same data and knowledge from the world that Skynet does, will it judge humankind and reach the same conclusion that Skynet did? Is humanity worth saving?
In the post-apocalyptic year of 2022, Skynet detects another threat in the timeline and sends a new Terminator back in time to stop Malcolm and prevent Kokoro from coming online. Once again, the surviving human resistance sends a badass warrior – this time a woman named Eiko – to follow it. But the specifics of Eiko’s mission are cloudy, and she doesn’t seem to want Kokoro online any more than Skynet does. Are Malcolm’s apprehensions about launching Kokoro well-founded after all? Is the new A.I. just as much a threat to the world as the one it was built to stop?
Created and written by Romanian filmmaker Mattson Tomlin but animated and directed by Production I.G, the Japanese studio behind the long-running Ghost in the Shell franchise, Terminator Zero offers a blend of both Western and Eastern sensibilities that mostly come together to support and build upon the established Terminator mythology in a satisfying manner. At times, it feels like a more successful Terminator entry than the last three or four movies. On the other hand, the show also gets bogged down in some silly anime clichés, and far too much of the season is devoted to a frustrating storyline involving the Terminator chasing Malcolm’s three annoying children to use as leverage against him, while Eiko fights to protect them.
Both Malcolm and Eiko are rather cold and unsympathetic characters – especially Malcolm, who never much cares about his children’s lives. This seems to be a deliberate storytelling decision, and I can understand it rationally given what we eventually learn about both characters’ backstories, but it still makes them difficult to relate to.
By the time the first season wraps up, Terminator Zero doesn’t necessarily shake up the Terminator franchise too dramatically. I’m not sure that it’s really essential viewing for fans of the first two movies who aren’t committed to watching any- and everything with the Terminator name in the title. However, the last couple episodes deliver some plot twists that bring an interesting spin to the series’ mythos. For my money, I’d rank this somewhere solidly in the middle of the Terminator pack. Should it be successful enough to get renewed for another season, I’d watch again.
Video Streaming
Timed for the anniversary of Judgment Day, Netflix debuted the eight-episode first season of Terminator Zero on August 29, 2024. Per Netflix specs, the animated series technically streams in 1080p HD format with HDR. Honestly, from appearance, I wouldn’t be surprised if the full-screen 16:9 animation were actually rendered around 720p resolution. To my eye, I’m also hard-pressed to see any discernible sign of High Dynamic Range contrast or Wide Color Gamut.
That’s not to say that the show looks bad, per se. It looks fine, but I see no point in Netflix bothering to stream it in HDR when the program gains nothing at all from doing so, and visibly looks just the same as any other anime the platform streams in SDR, at least on my screen.
The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack is offered in a few different language options, the most relevant being English or Japanese. The English track has a few notable stars in the voice cast, including André Holland as scientist Malcolm Lee, Rosario Dawson as the A.I. called Kokoro, and Timothy Olyphant as the Terminator. However, the story is set in Japan and all the characters are Japanese, so it seems most fitting to me to watch in that language. Also, I flipped back-and-forth between the two tracks a few times and Olyphant felt miscast to me. I like him in other roles, but the actor has entirely the wrong type of creepy vibe to play a Terminator. In a scene where he’s trying to lure one of the kids out of hiding, he comes across more like he’s playing a pedophile than a robot assassin. The Japanese actor (Yasuhiro Mamiya) does a much better job.
In other respects, the 5.1 track has some mild bass in the musical score and an occasional deep bass hit here or there, but dynamic range in general is unimpressive. Gunshots are a little flat, and most explosions are weak (though one in Episode 6 lands pretty hard).
When watching with Japanese audio, English subtitles are positioned strangely high in the image.
The Video File Blog 
You’re right about Malcolm and Eiko; the story seemed to slow down whenever they were on screen. It also got a little too anime with the myriad gasps characters expelled during many dialogue exchanges; they were a bit much.
What I did find interesting were the questions Kokoro asked Malcolm about why it (she?) should save humanity (I’m trying not to spoil anything). It showed me the creators were looking to do something more than just rehash old action scenes, and some thought had been put into the narrative.
I also have to give the creators a tip of the cap for bringing in a new mother-son dynamic into the franchise.
I’m with you, Josh…I’m curious to see where the series goes.
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Since first publishing this review, it’s been pointed out to me that this show doesn’t actually stream in 4K. The specs in the Netflix menus cite it as HD with HDR. I’ve updated the review.
I could’ve sworn that those menus said 4K when I first watched it, but I guess I might be misremembering that.
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