Netflix’s anime spinoff is coming to Japan

The rather unlikely blockbuster success of Terminator 2: Judgment Day – a big-budget sequel that upended the entire plot of the low-budget original released nearly a decade earlier – taught Hollywood the wrong lessons.

Instead of attributing box office success to James Cameron’s creative versatility, the industry decided that audiences must have an insatiable appetite for everything Terminator. So Terminator 3: Rise of the Machinesdoomed to be a thoroughly decent sequel to two far better films, was followed by Terminator: Salvation And Terminator: Genisys And Terminator: Dark Fate – three films that were touted as the start of a possible trilogy but failed to spawn a sequel. While each of them contains a spark of creativity and symbolic nods to the originals, they are so blurry overall that I need online help to answer big questions like, “Which films did Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron participate in?” or “How many of these films did Jai Courtney appear in?” or “Is there a colon in the title or not?”

The best successor to the franchise, if you ask this television critic, was Fox’ Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicleswhich ran for two doomed seasons between Terminator 3 And Terminator: SalvationIt is the only Terminator a spin-off that felt like it was telling a story rather than trying to blackmail the audience into supporting a story that might one day be told.

The new Netflix Terminator Zero — no colon and less self-explanatory than the previous title Terminator: The Anime Series — is my favorite franchise entry since The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Boasting a distinctive look thanks to Japanese animation studio Production IG and a solid voice cast reportedly led by Timothy Olyphant (Jai Courtney is nowhere to be seen), the series is still in the frustrating holding pattern of spending the entire first season putting the pieces together for what will presumably be its ongoing narrative. But it’s a promising holding pattern.

The screenplay was written entirely by Mattson Tomlin and directed by Masashi Kudō. Terminator Zero begins in the future – in the year 2022 – with a fast-paced action scene in which resistance fighter Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno) faces off against a nameless cybernetic killing machine (Olyphant, although he says nothing in the first episode and has no more than half a dozen lines in the entire series).

Thanks to the wonders of time travel, everyone quickly jumps back to late August 1997 – a place that tells fans of the series that Judgement Day is approaching.

Tokyo-based scientist Malcolm Lee (André Holland) is trying to prevent the impending apocalypse. Malcolm… knows things. He has nightmares about mushroom clouds and robot rebellions, but that’s just the beginning of Malcolm’s foresight about what will happen to Skynet. His strategy to prevent the genocide of humanity is based on a complex AI model he has developed called “Kokoro,” voiced in several forms by Rosario Dawson.

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

Understanding why these two beings with very different agendas both believe they want to kill Malcolm requires the franchise’s usual consideration of questions of fate and free will — and also new considerations of the time travel paradoxes that have become a tangled mess over the last three or four films that is either entertaining or infuriating, depending on your interest.

It is undeniable that “time travel!” cannot simply be seen as Terminator Get out of jail free card like 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 back in time with a single goal in mind. As good as the opening action scene is, and as solid as several scenes are throughout the film, long stretches of Terminator Zero are just talk, delivered in the weary, wise tones of Ann Dowd as the spiritual guide, or in the warm tones of Dawson, whose Kokoro encompasses several different types of consciousness. I’m not convinced that eight episodes (each under 30 minutes) of explanation were needed to get the plot to the level it is at in the finale, especially since there are two or three surprises that almost any attentive viewer will have expected several chapters earlier.

Still, there are fresh elements here. Re-setting the action in Tokyo allows it to move away from another boring messianic coronation of “John Connor” as humanity’s last hope. And it’s a relief that (spoiler alert!) the reliance on the occasional Easter egg doesn’t go as far as having a character say something silly like, “Sure, you can call me Bandit, but when I was born, my name was Kyle Reese.” This is a new group of characters loosely tailored to the anime genre—specifically, Malcolm’s children Kenta (Armani Jackson), Reika (Gideon Adlon), and Hiro (Carter Rockwood), who are left under the care of their nanny/housekeeper Misaki (Sumalee Montano). They manage to be likable and energetic, but not overly cutesy.

Terminator Zero introduces a very different cultural approach to robotics—in this 1997 version, Tokyo is overrun by harmless 1NN0 models, while the hottest toy on the market is an AI-equipped cat—and, most importantly, to weaponry. Time travel still requires arriving muscled and naked in the typical squat, but while heavy artillery was always easy to come by when the average Terminator or soldier arrived in Los Angeles, guns are harder to come by for heroes and villains in 1990s Japan. That forces Tomlin to be a little ingenious, and lets Kudō stage action with a welcome intimacy, while keeping the violence and gore within the franchise’s generally mild R-rated trappings.

I was initially torn between the original Japanese audio track with subtitles and the English dub, 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 plucky average Midwesterner – more Robert Patrick than Ah-nold – though I warn again that this is a particularly brief Terminator. Olyphant completists might want to watch the film again. Santa Clarita Diet as soon as they are on Netflix.

Two things worth noting about the different audio tracks: I noticed that the English audio track occasionally, but not aggressively, contains swear words that aren’t present in the Japanese dub’s subtitles. Also, there are specific references in the subtitles but not in the English dub, including the only nods being “I’ll be back” and “Come with me if you want to live.” This is in no way judgmental. Just a footnote!

Regardless of what language you watch it in, and despite the small delays in explanation and the disappointing revelations, Terminator Zero lays 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 obvious success with anime properties, this should be the start of an interesting multi-season series, rather than just another one-off dead end.