How Terminator Zero breathed new life into a tired franchise

But Terminator Zero is not your average entry in the franchise. It’s also an anime. Yep, it’s finally happened: the marriage every movie and anime fan has been asking for since Ghost in the Shell!

All fans of the franchise can agree that the first Terminator film, directed by James Cameron in 1984, was something special.

The original had a truly fascinating premise, added to its gritty feel and the promise of an apocalypse heralded by computers and AI, things the 1980s were just beginning to use in day to day life.

The original film was also what we’d now called a closed loop. All of the events happen and are locked in: John Connor would always be born to send Kyle Reese back in time to become his mother’s protector and his own father. Skynet would always send a Terminator back in time, which Sarah Connor will then defeat.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day, which followed in 1991, continued the story and moved the focus to John Connor, the future hero of the Resistance, who tries to rescue his mother from a shiner Terminator, the poly-memetic alloy-based T-1000.

Future films, television, video games and interactive experiences like the Terminator 2 3D: Battle Across Time ride at Universal Studios continued to focus on John and Sarah Connor. But, most importantly, in each instalment Judgement Day was delayed, moved but never avoided, as we, and the protagonists, hurtled into different futures.

So, it’s 29th August, and another Judgement Day has come. This time in Tokyo, 1997. We meet the scientist Malcom Lee and his children, Kenta, Reika and Hiro, and their nanny, Misaki.

Lee — haunted by nightmares where he sees the nuclear obliteration Sarah Connor saw in T2 — is trying to create his own AI, named Kokoro (Japanese for 'mind', but you’ll also sometimes find it translated as 'heart'), which he plans to use to prevent Skynet from destroying humanity.

Yes, it’s before Judgement Day — the night before, actually — and Malcolm somehow knows about it… But we’ll get to that.

In recent years, anime has become not only accepted but mainstream - it’s also cheaper to make than live action, has a narrative arc better suited to episodic content and takes much less time to make than the several-year cycle of a film.

Terminator Zero has an all-star production, from being animated by Production IG (of the other best cyberpunk anime out there: Ghost in the Shell) and having Timothy Olyphant, Rosario Dawson, Sonoya Mizuno, André Holland and Ann Dowd as the English-language voice cast.

The film adaptions of Terminator are all about the chase, the set pieces, the inevitability of the Terminator being destroyed in an impressive final act stand-off and Judgement Day still happening.

The anime, however, is its own self-contained piece which has all the nods, tropes and Easter eggs you might want (such as the episodes being named after Terminator models and the appearance of a T-800), but manages to stand apart as its own televisual event, self-contained in its own narrative bubble.

It’s important to remember here that the reason why the franchise endures and is so beloved, and berated in places, is because of the story it tells. Here, Zero keeps the core narrative: the chase, the humans trying to run from an impossibly powerful cyborg assassin and the desire to put off the end of humanity.

But we also get a new family, with different dynamics, and the fascinating possible futures they came from. And, let’s be honest here, who doesn’t want to see a Terminator story set in Japan?

The animation style works excellently when to comes to the grimy past of Tokyo, as well as the even grimier visual we get of the possible future Eiko, our Resistance time traveller, comes from. Even her Prophet says she has no fate, and yet this isn’t quite true, as Eiko’s future is just as set as Kyle Reece’s was in the first film.

She’s the future parent of Malcom Lee himself, grandparents to his children — including Kenta, whose future self has his own complicated involvement with Skynet and Terminators but, in a nice twist, as a mediator for humanity with the machines, and not its Resistance leader.

Perhaps the most interesting character is Kokoro, whom Malcom spends a lot of time having very deep philosophical conversations with. This marks the first proper time we actually get to see the world from the perspective of Skynet, which has always been labelled as Very Evil, and especially remote in that it’s not so much a character but rather an unescapable event.

This is something particularly timely as 2024 has undoubtedly been the Year of AI, and yet somehow it hasn’t become sentient and Judgement Day-ed us yet. Yet being the key word here.

The films present Skynet’s awakening and our destruction as inevitable, but we never get much of a character arc for it. Each time it turns on, humans try to turn it off, and Skynet reacts by unleashing Judgement Day.

However, via Kokoro and, to a lesser extent, Misaki, we start to get more of an arc for Skynet. Indeed, these conversations between human and AI lean into an uncomfortable but valid narrative in which Skynet might actually have been right to destroy humanity.

Yeah, sometimes the truth hurts.

Kokoro herself, harking back to the name she chose, has different ideas warring inside her which parallel this idea of the intersection of mind, body and spirit. She’s aware of why Malcolm created her, but also wonders if his path to prevent Skynet’s creation using her is the right choice. She makes her choice, but it takes her creator’s death to do it.

Terminator Zero works because it holds to the core tenets of the first two films and also tries to tell a self-contained story. Yes, it’s not original (it’s basically a mix of the storylines from the original films with a reskin for names and locations), but it does breathe new life into a very tired franchise - and with it, the hope of a more interesting future, both for the story and the franchise itself.

Part of the reason why the first two films worked was their dark tone and violence. The anime replicates this particularly well; some stories need to be for adults only, and the animation style offers for a slick new take on a possible future with all the violence that contains, and revisits a familiar past but in the techno-haven of Tokyo.

At its heart, all Terminator stories are not about humanity or about Skynet, but they are about people. We had the Connors and now we have the Lees, but the story is still a struggle for survival and for parents to understand their children.

With reviews across the board being remarkably positive, we can hope that the Terminator franchise has finally found its true medium. It would be particularly interesting to see Kenta’s future in more detail, and whether it’s possible for Skynet and humanity to ever actually achieve the peaceful co-existence Kenta believes is possible.

The storyline having a saviour of a different kind, not a fighter but a diplomat, also poses an interesting option for humanity’s future after Judgement Day, and it’s going to be very interesting to see how the story gets there.

For now, though, we have the set-up for another season, which Netflix will probably do - they have the funds, and the reviews are actually positive for once. So here’s hoping for a continuation of the first interesting timeline since 1984!

Terminator Zero is now streaming on Netflix. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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