Terminator Zero

The aptly named Terminator Zero, offers fans of the franchise, nothing new.

This animated series mixes woke social engineering, with a heavily feminised cast, sitting alongside a bland story that simply re-imagines tropes, that have played out in various Terminator productions.

I found myself thoroughly bored and disengaged, by the end of the third episode.

In summary, innovative storytelling should be front and centre. Simply dropping the Terminator story into a Japanese setting but doing nothing remotely new or interesting, isn't going to cut the mustard.

NOTE: Please ignore any trolling of my reviews. Speaking for myself, I've never felt the need to malign someone else's review because I'm confident enough in my own opinions to let my reviews stand or fall, on their merit. Thanks all.

"This animated series mixes woke social engineering, with a heavily feminised cast, sitting alongside a bland story that simply re-imagines tropes, that have played out in various Terminator productions."

Half of the above statement is true and the other half is bigoted bullshit. There are numerous successful and acclaimed anime series with female leads going back decades. Ghost in the Shell released in 1995 for goodness sake. The bigotry mind-virus is real and it's rotting people's brains. I truly fear for the future of our species.

As for Terminator Zero - it's boring, contrived, boring, dragged out, boring, and nonsensical. I opted to watch the English version after my last outing with Asian media (Alice in Borderland) left me wondering if the subtitles were just dog !@#$, but even Timothy Olyphant's smooth voice can't save this nonsense. The subtitles don't even match the English sometimes!

Zero takes us to an alternate Terminator reality in which a Japanese AI is built in secret to combat the coming threat of worldwide annihilation by Skynet. Five episodes in and I still have no idea how Malcolm Lee is having these prophetic "knightmares". Yes, it is as stupid as it was in the DCEU. Terminator has never had a paranormal or pseudoscience twist to my knowledge. Even Malcolm's AI creation, Kokoro, cannot comprehend his prophetic visions.

The best thing this season has done so far is Kokoro's writing, and maybe that's the "woke engineering" MovieGuy whines about, because nowadays, acknowledging the past and how things like poverty and crime and our classist society is all engineered by us to discriminate against those we deem lesser than is too much reality for some to digest. They'd rather cling to notions about gods and their superiority to women and people who don't look or act like them.

I enjoyed Terminator: Salvation and Terminator: Dark Fate. Salvation gave us a look into the future that we rarely see in Terminator media and Dark Fate gave us Mackenzie Davis, a dead John Connor, and an internet full of raging fanboys who couldn't accept it as an alternate story. It also gave us some cringy dialog and Natalia Reyes who just didn't stick the landing with her big future war speech, but I can say that without resorting to bigotry and misogyny. Reeling it back in - compared to these two, Zero is just too boring.

The most fun I've had with Zero is the robot cat and then watching everyone get annihilated at the start of episode 5. It takes 20 seconds, which was 10 seconds too long, but I'll give it a pass. They really wanted you to feel something for those pixel kids.

_Boy, do I miss the days when we understood the need for censorship against irrational hate speech._

---

I'm back with an update! The final two episodes finally answer our burning questions and offer some interesting twists, one of which I hope they don't explore further because it makes ZERO sense. Episode 7 gives us the backstory we should have gotten 4 episodes prior. The writers could have pivoted off of this story and given us something a lot better than what we got. Also, that explanation of MCU time travel was overly convoluted.

Wasted potential and wasted time. That's what Season 1 of Terminator Zero is.

As a Terminator story, the status quo. A basic evolution. As 2024 animation, solid and clean, but certainly not creative top end. However, its main problem was a script decision to place the father in a non-descript room with the AI for almost the entire story. So much damn exposition; lazy, tedious and boring storytelling.

If you are invested in the Terminator IP and have Netflix it is worth catching at barely 3 hours of content, but I wouldn't go out of your way to watch it 🤷‍♂️.

Strange, subdued sound effects.

Yet another show where the characters’ motivations are long-winded, tedious philosophical, contrived ideals.

Was the lead character (the one from the future) male or female?