It’s 2022, another attempt is being made to save our future from Judgment Day.  But to get there Netflix is going to take us back to 1997.  Terminator Zero is an eight-episode anime series, arriving on Netflix this week, and the first scenes look and sound great.  Watch a preview of the first six minutes of the series below.  Expect the same blood-and-guts violence from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1980s movies.  One of the twists is the action happens in Tokyo.  The other is that it doesn’t include Sarah or John Connor.  The Mandalorian actor Timothy Olyphant will voice the new Terminator, with Rosario Dawson as Kokoro, an advanced AI–Japan’s answer to Skynet.  Ex Machina co-star Sonoya Mizuno voices the role of Eiko, a resistance fighter like Sarah Connor.  Quarry and The X-Files’ Ann Dowd will provide the voice of a mysterious character called The Prophet.  André Holland will play a new character named Malcolm Lee, a key participant in AI development from the 1990s, haunted by prophetic nightmares of an apocalyptic future.  He’s spent the last decade creating a secret artificial intelligence that he believes will be humanity’s last hope.  Oops.  Another concept from a big movie franchise comes to mind: Just because we can do something, it doesn’t mean we should.

Here is Netflix’s full trailer for Terminator Zero, and if you’re ready, the first six minutes of the series:

And here are the first six minutes of the series:

It’s 2024.  By 2010 the Terminator franchise had made $3 billion, meaning a lot of Earthlings have seen at least those first two movies.  All you see on the Internet is how wonderful Artificial Intelligence is going to be for everyone.  In truth, the experts–the ones not backed by the mega-corporations and data miners themselves–will tell you none of those time-saving promises will touch most people.  What is in process is the ownership of your data, your creative works via generative AI scraping everything you ever touched being pulled away from you, if it hasn’t already.  If the Terminator franchise was warning us of anything (and warning us of the consequences of technology is a big piece of what science fiction is all about), it was warning us against those big corporations that tap into every part of your life, that are here and now, just like Cyberdyne, Skynet, and Genisys.

Don’t forget Terminator is up there with sci-fi’s biggest and best franchises with Doctor Who, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Alien, Star Trek, and Predator.  Like the fifth movie in the series (Terminator: Genisys), and the sixth (Terminator: Dark Fate), Terminator Zero is going back to the beginning–to Skynet.  Let’s get our arms around AI and regulate it before we have a real Skynet moment, shall we?  Who knows if there will be any heroes left to save Earth when a real Cyberdyne takes away your ability to do anything.

Watch all eight episodes of Terminator Zero, coming to Netflix this Thursday, August 29, 2024.

C.J. Bunce / Editor / borg