In a packed hotel ballroom at the Los Angeles Anime Expo, the showrunner of the upcoming Terminator Zero series introduced fans to the next Terminator chapter: the franchise’s first animated show, which revisits the horror tone of the Terminator flick that started it all. The new, eight-episode series, animated by famed studio Production IG, is set to debut on Netflix on Aug. 29.
In front of a platoon of Terminator fans, Netflix’s Jacki Jing interviewed Terminator Zero showrunner Mattson Tomlin, who writes and executive produces Terminator Zero. Tomlin cited The Animatrix; Peter Chung’s animated works, like Aeon Flux; and Samurai Champloo as his personal influences that he carried into the show. Over an hour of conversation and trailer teases, Tomlin and Jing revealed a series that seems to pointedly avoid the later films and TV show and directly follows the original two films, effectively soft-rebooting the franchise in a new direction.
That was evident in some teaser footage Jing and Tomlin presented, which focused on one of the main characters: Eiko, a fighter from the future, hiding from and fighting a human-looking Terminator as it relentlessly pursues her.
The show flips between the machine-dominated future of 2022 and Japan in 1997 in the weeks ahead of Judgment Day, the apocalyptic date foreseen in Terminator 2 when the machines attack mankind. Main character Malcolm Lee, a “Steve Jobs of Japan” as Tomlin described him, is working on an AI, Kokoro, that could oppose the Skynet AI his prophetic visions have warned him about. Netflix PR asked that the press avoid spoiling plot points, but Tomlin and Jing had plenty of hints for attending fans.
“Can I do one spoiler?” moderator Jing asked while interviewing Tomlin. “OK: robot cat.”
Netflix host and interviewer Jacki Jing with Terminator Zero showrunner Mattson Tomlin in front of the anime expo crowd.
Tomlin noted that Terminator Zero is more like the original Terminator film than the first flick’s popular sequel, embodying the “serial killer” vibe of the first movie as opposed to the action focus of the second. Those first two films are love stories, Tomlin said — the first features a relationship between a fighter from the future and the heroine; the second is a mother-son love story.
The Terminator Zero show evokes more of the horror of the first flick. Despite the fluid anime-style animation of the series, the Terminator comes across as a relentless machine, Tomlin said. The Terminator Zero animation studio, Production IG, was the outfit behind iconic anime series like Ghost in the Shell and Psycho Pass.
The panel also featured a prerecorded presentation from director Masashi Kudo, in a behind-the-scenes featurette about the previously mentioned teaser footage. Kudo echoed Tomlin’s desire to give the series the horror vibe of the first Terminator movie. Tomlin was also in the prerecroded video, commenting on the interesting challenge of giving the Terminator weapons and threats that weren’t guns, since those were scarce in late-’90s Japan.
“I think we have managed to present a new form of the Terminator,” Kudo said.
For Tomlin, the show may be set in our past of the late ’90s, but the fears of the Terminator franchise remain pertinent — and even prescient.
“A year ago we were laughing about AI, and here we are now,” Tomlin said. Technology, he said, “moves quick.”
As far as casting, actress Sonoya Mizuno voices Eiko, a resistance fighter from the future. Tomlin said the character is the strong female heroine that’s a hallmark of the series — hard-hitting but also vulnerable. Eiko may be hard as nails, Tomlin said, but “the pressure of saving the world sucks.”
The iconic villain role of the Terminator is played by Timothy Olyphant, the grizzled star of Justified, Deadwood and Santa Clarita Diet. Tomlin said that as a child he was haunted by the scene in the original film where the Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) pulls out his eye — a feeling he brought to the new show. He wanted to go back to the machine killers as creepy, scary and not someone you wanted to meet in a dark alley — and all the characters end up meeting the Terminator in a dark alley, Tomlin said. Of course, Olyphant’s Terminator disguises itself as a Japanese businessman infiltrating ’90s Japan, with a cold look Tomlin described as the “fishman Terminator.”
Malcolm Lee is voiced by André Holland. The most important thing about Lee is that he’s complicated, Tomlin said: “Sometimes you have to make sacrifices to save the world.” Lee’s AI, Kokoro, is voiced by Rosario Dawson, and there’s a quality of therapy sessions in her scenes and conversations with Lee, Tomlin said. They needed a voice that “felt very human but felt very godlike — I needed a character to voice God, and who should that be?”
The final main character is the Prophet, voiced by The Leftovers’ Ann Dowd. In the future of 2022, the Prophet is “the person who’s going to give you the bad news,” Tomlin said, though her identity is a mystery that’ll be revealed as the series rolls on.
Other characters include Misaki, who helps take care of Lee’s children, and Kenta, one of those children, who’s a tinkerer like his father, with a big role in the future, Tomlin said. Hiro, Lee’s second son, is the middle child, with a warm heart. Reika, Lee’s daughter, is caught up in family drama during the week of Judgment Day.
As the panel wrapped up, fans were left with another teaser trailer, and they broke out in raucous applause. After several adaptations have tried to continue the franchise into the future, the aptly named Terminator Zero returns to the past, resetting the franchise to bring back the basics of human versus machine. In a year of generative AI infiltrating everyone’s devices, Terminator Zero aims to make viewers afraid of deadly robots again.
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