Netflix
★★★☆☆

Canadian film-maker James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) launched a film franchise with robot and human soldiers on both sides of a human-machine war across time. Their aim: to either aid or kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and her son John (Edward Furlong). Their exploits might involve the T-800 robot, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in an iconic role.

By the sixth film, that concept had run out of steam, judging by the weak box-office performance of Terminator: Dark Fate (2019).

Enter this project: A spin-off anime series set in the Terminator universe, featuring Japanese characters living in Tokyo. Absent are the characters of Sarah and John, and Schwarzenegger’s voice is never heard.

Terminator Zero is headed by American creator Mattson Tomlin – a rising talent who contributed to the screenplay of the 2022 superhero film The Batman – but employs a Japanese animation studio. The visual team is headed by director Masashi Kudo (Bleach, 2022 to present).

This mix of Western-style storytelling with Asian visuals is a Netflix signature, as seen in series such as the comic-book adaptation Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (2023).

The Terminator Zero story is set in 1997 Tokyo, where scientist Malcolm Lee (voiced by Andre Holland in the English dub) has become obsessed with the artificial intelligence he has created, causing the widower to neglect his three children.

In the year 2022, human soldier Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno) is sent back in time to protect Lee and his children from a T-800 cybernetic assassin (Timothy Olyphant).

Here are three reasons to give the eight-episode series a chance.

1. No Connor family, no storytelling baggage

The concept of resistance fighters Sarah and John sending soldiers back in time to alter the future and save humanity has been done to death.

Terminator Zero is not just set in Japan, but it also takes place just before the rise of the genocidal Skynet system. And it tells the story from another point of view – at its heart is the relationship between Dr Lee and his children.

It is a reboot of sorts, and it achieves the goal of all reboots: to make the old stuff feel new again.

2. It honours the 1990s Japanese setting

“This is Japan, we don’t have gun stores,” says one character in reply to Eiko as she searches for a weapon.

In 1997 Japan, a Terminator robot finds shelter in a little-used Shinto shrine. The Tokyo police are reluctant to shoot, in contrast to trigger-happy American cops.

Showrunner Tomlin might be American, but there are signs that he consulted with Japanese writers.

3. Creative action

Animators can show off massive set pieces because they are not limited by special-effects budgets.

Instead of displaying bigger hardware, Tomlin makes sure the fights are intimate and bloody, with many featuring bladed weapons and darts. This story is, after all, set in gun-free Japan.

Save for the odd explosion, the heroes resort to a mix of visually interesting weapons, including trucks, swords and bats.