Let’s face it, the Terminator franchise was all but dead, deactivated, terminated, if you will.
After James Cameron’s first two movies managed the impressive trick of both being two of the greatest action sci-fi movies ever made, a string of sequels pushed the series to breaking point with continuing installments of varying quality even though the scale increased substantially with every subsequent movie. If I’m being truly honest, I’m fairly forgiving of the sequels as a whole with only 2015’s Terminator: Genisys being the only true stinker of the bunch, but even my accepting ass will freely admit that a series of directors that included the likes of Jonathan Mostow, McG, Alan Taylor and Tim Miller struggled to fully crack the code that Cameron laid down back in 1984. However, in a flash of blue lightning, another pretender has appeared to try and get the franchise back on line in the form of a Netflix anime, so can the studio that fittingly gave us Ghost In The Shell finally prove to us that the Terminator’s future is not set – or is it finally judgement day for the beloved series?
The year is 1997 and Japanese scientist Malcolm Lee has been plagued with nightmares about the rnd of the world at the hands of a genocidal AI that we all know as Skynet. As he struggles to raise his three kids, Kenta, Reika and Hiro with the help of his housemaid, Misaki, he toils long hours in his lab in order to perfect Kokoro, an AI of his own that he hopes he can ready in time before Judgement Day occurs and nukes start going off like fireworks on New Years.
Meanwhile, in the desolate, dystopian future of 2022, we meet a member of the human resistance named Eiko who is introduced to us as she battles to the death with a Terminator unit in order to smuggle out a piece of glowing blue tech that seemingly can cause a temporary system reboot in the killing machines. However, after delivering this to her superiors, disturbing news hits; it seems that Skynet is up to it’s old tricks and is preparing to send a Terminator back to the past, but what is it’s mission this time?
Often, it’s been the non-movie projects that’s manages to be the more interesting entries in the Terminator lore with Dark Horse producing some pretty cool comics back in the 80s and 90s and the tragically brief Terminator: The Sarah Chronicles TV series offering such intriguing tidbits as Terminator sleeper agents and the lead singer of Garbage playing a CEO T-1000. Well, even though it’s early days yet, it looks like the folks behind Terminator Zero have managed to nail that dark and gritty aesthetic of Cameron’s orginal film that merged hard hitting action and desolate sci-fi in order to create a techno-slasher that was a far cry from Arnold Schwarzenegger pulling on a pair of star-shaped sunglasses or saying “talk to the hand”.
The show delivers a rousing opening sequence that acts as something of a statement of intent as the plucky (and incredibly limber Eiko) squares up to one of the eponymous killer machines in a way that harkens to the original movies darkness (brutal violence), but also plays up to the rather heightened reality that affords anime to pull off some complex action sequences. While those more used to the original movie’s more buttoned down, grounded approach (if you can call an unkillable robot slaughtering an entire police station grounded) may initially be thrown by the sight of Eiko pulling some Matrix-esque, gravity defying, Ethan Hunt style gymnastics as she runs along the walls of a silo while clinging to a rope – but the sight of the malevolent murder machine, baleful red eyes blazing from under its mangled, human visage should be proof enough that Terminator Zero could very well be the real deal.
Of course, this is only the first episode and there’s still presumably a hell of a lot of things still to come so aside from that opening scene, everything else is still fairly basic. The relocation to Japan makes sense (Judgement Day wasn’t just confined to America, you know) and gives things a slick feel as various robot servants that work in shops and homes seem to be disturbingly going on the fritz. Elsewhere, the expansive AI known as Kokoro seems to have been built by Malcolm Lee purely to thwart Skynet when it makes itself aware, but if that’s true, how can Malcolm Lee possibly know about it? Well, we’ve got seven more episodes to figure that out, but aside from this central mystery, the 1997 cast are still fairly vanilla.
Speaking of casts, the makers of Terminator Zero seems to have neatly covered numerous bases when it comes to the voice acting as the production has hired both Japanese and American casts of high quality to dub both versions to an impressive standard so those who would rather watch the show from a more Americanised standpoint (acceptable in this instance seeing as Terminator is an American property), get such actors as Timothy Olyphant and a francise collecting Rosario Dawson adding their vocal chords to proceedings.
However, the biggest sell so far is the wonderfully bleak and claustrophobic tone of the original movie which, after decades of sequels trying and failing to equal the blockbusting nature of Terminator 2, is a hugely refreshing switch and is utterly imperative in making the T-101s something they haven’t been in a good, long while – absolutely fucking terrifying.
So with only one episode under its belt, Terminator Zero seems content to stick to the basics while allowing it’s more mysterious attributes to gradually unfurl over the following instalments, but to judge it solely on a single episode so far, it seems that Terminator Zero is already a plus with me.
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