‘Terminator Zero’ Anime Channels James Cameron’s Embrace of Family as Humanity’s Last Hope
Creator Mattson Tomlin (“The Batman II” co-writer) had a lot on his mind with “Terminator Zero,” now streaming on Netflix. He wanted to honor the essence of James Cameron’s sci-fi franchise yet reinvent it through anime with Japanese animation studio Production I.G., Skydance, and director Masashi Kudo (“Bleach”). There was a new storyline set in Tokyo, a stealth Terminator (Timothy Olyphant) that was the antithesis of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and philosophical discussions about the existential threat of AI and the paradox of time travel.
The breakthrough, though, was deciding that it should take place in Japan, where scientist Malcolm Lee (André Holland) has developed a powerful AI system, Kokoro (Rosario Dawson), to thwart Skynet’s impending attack on humanity in 1997. Enter Olyphant’s Terminator, sent from 2022 to kill Lee and stop Kokoro. He’s hunted by resistance soldier Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno), also from his timeline, whose mission is to protect Lee and his three kids.
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This opened up a whole new world to explore. “I thought that since I’m going to be over here in the States writing, the people who actually have to make it are going to be in Japan,” Tomlin told IndieWire. “So it seems like I should really make use of their lived experience to have this set in Japan. And also that felt like such a new thing because, watching through all the ‘Terminator’ movies, I realized these all take place on the U.S./Mexico border. And there really isn’t a moment where you [wonder about] what’s going on the other side of the world. It felt like an organic way to go.”
In addition to the “Terminator” movies, Tomlin re-watched every other Cameron movie and realized that they all embrace “very clear primal stories about families.” This became humanity’s last hope for salvation, around which he refashioned the familiar tropes of nuclear apocalypse, killer robots, and time travel.
But it was also important to play to the stylistic strengths of anime, which leaned heavily into the noir look of “The Terminator,” yet with more graphic body horror. “So I was grappling with two different pockets of fandom,” added Tomlin. “They’re the people who are ‘Terminator’ fans and they are used to big blockbuster action movies that are live action. And then you’ve got anime fans who are into the pantheon of all the different things that anime can be.”
With an eye toward the iconic James Bond action set piece cold opens, Tomlin kicked off with a thrilling, dialogue-free, six-minute fight between Eiko and the Terminator in 2022. He comes at her with a Gatling gun and climbs up her body, but she breaks free, swings around athletically on a rope, and eventually gets the best of him while retrieving important Skynet intel.
“It felt very clear to me that the opening had to be really strong and declarative for both groups, to bring everybody together,” he said. “Because an anime fan isn’t necessarily a ‘Terminator’ fan, and a ‘Terminator’ fan isn’t necessarily into anime. So this had to be visual storytelling: violent, gutsy, action-driven. We also thought a lot about physics in this world and how high people can jump. We did a lot of work to calibrate it as far as the reality of keeping it on the ground, but then, every so often [later on], it takes off in a stylish flourish.”
While “Terminator Zero” revels in the bloody destruction perpetrated by the Terminator and other robots, this is offset by philosophical conversations between Lee and Kokoro about humanity’s destructive impulses that have led to the existential threat of AI. Given that Tomlin got the gig while making his directorial debut on “Mother/Android,” the 2021 sci-fi thriller about a violent android uprising, he was already in the right frame of mind.
“I think that’s kind of the dichotomy of the world and of the franchise,” Tomlin added. “And it’s very rare that you’re able to take what is normally subtext and create a space where characters can just make it text and actually speak it out loud and still be compelling.”
But what Kudo and Production I.G. did with these conversations was stunningly ethereal in the physical depiction of Kokoro as ghostly phantoms. “In the very first draft, Kokoro was just one entity,” said Tomlin. “It was a lot less visual. You could almost picture being in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ talking to HAL, everything projected on the walls like being almost in a black box theater.
“And it was director Kudo who came up with the idea of Kokoro really being split in how she feels about these conversations. And the name Kokoro mildly relates to this idea of heart, mind, and spirit all being one. And so he pitched splitting Kokoro into three entities, and then it instantly became more dynamic because it’s one person surrounded by three people who are all one person.”
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