Does humanity deserve saving? Are we worthy of a future, despite our compulsion for violence, propensity for war, and thirst for environmental destruction? Netflix’s latest animated series Terminator Zero confronts heady themes as it sets itself apart from the Terminator films.
The first two films in the franchise by writer-director James Cameron, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day are timeless action films that pitted humans against the franchise’s ubiquitous Terminators, advanced murder machines operated by the rogue artificial intelligence called Skynet hellbent on the extinction of the human race.
Like the films, Zero follows the franchise’s basic, tired template: Skynet sends a Terminator back to the past to assassinate a key figure capable of stopping the AI in the future. However, Zero is a serialized series, so it has more time to flesh out the big ideas that the films could not do due to the standard two-hour film format.
Race against time
Instead of focusing on franchise hero John Connor, Zero is set in 1997 and revolves around Malcolm Lee (Andre Holland/Yuuya Uchida), a scientist in Japan.
Besieged by visions of the future, where Skynet gains sentience and launches nuclear bombs on every country on Earth to kickstart “Judgment Day”, Lee develops Kokoro, an AI he hopes will save humans by thwarting Skynet.
In the future, resistance soldier Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno/Toa Yukinari) is sent back to the past to stop Lee from activating Kokoro. At the same time, Skynet sends a Terminator to assassinate Lee and his young children, deeming the entire family a threat to the robots in the future.
Finish the mission at any cost
Zero is split into two different identities. The first involves the typical cat-and-mouse game involving Eiko and the Terminator, as they seek to complete their respective missions, which showrunner Mattson Tomlin demonstrates through decent action and sometimes great horror sequences.
Another aspect that strengthens the action in Zero is how it is set in Japan. In the films, the setting is America, which grants both the heroes and Terminators an arsenal of heavy weaponry due to guns being more available than candy.
The situation in Japan is entirely different as guns are outlawed. The only people with weapons in Zero are the Japanese police, with the firearms being relegated to six-shooter revolvers, a shotgun, and a few semi-automatic submachine guns. The lack of firearms gives an added dimension to how Tomlin storyboarded the action, having Eiko and the Terminator resort to a variety of homemade “weapons”.
That said, director Masashi Kudo does not do enough to innovate the action. For example, a great action sequence in Zero involves the Terminator launching an assault on a Japanese police station, as the unstoppable android brutally massacres the ill-equipped police.
The only reason it was great is due to the sequence being a homage to the same sequence in Cameron’s The Terminator.
A stronger half
The other identity of Zero, and arguably its most interesting, involves Lee. A bulk of the scientist’s scenes involve him being locked in the chamber that houses Kokoro, as they engage in conversation involving heavy themes on human nature.
Like our real-world AI, Kokoro is self-learning and needs convincing on why it should save humans, as the extensive data Kokoro has extrapolated shows that they are not worth saving and that Skynet’s actions might be valid.
Why should Kokoro stop Skynet from turning the planet into a nuclear hellscape, if humans will only continue their history of violence and carnage afterward?
These conversations are rarely addressed or discussed in the franchise before the series, often briefly mentioned before being thrown aside for some explosions and guns being shot, and it is very welcomed in Zero, particularly from the Japanese point-of-view involving nuclear bombs and the human capability for change.
As it stands, Zero is singularly strong due to its philosophical examination of the franchise’s core AI-human friction but falters in bringing anything new with its action by cribbing too much from past films.
Terminator Zero is streaming on Netflix.
