In just a few short hours, the clock will strike midnight and it'll be August 29th -- Judgment Day. Terminator fans are all too familiar with what that means for humanity. August 29th also happens to be the date that Netflix will drop its new anime series, Terminator Zero.
Ahead of the series' highly anticipated debut, Netflix has dropped another sneak peek. This time, the streamer has shared the first six minutes of the show.
In just six minutes, the Cold Open pretty much sets the tone for what we can expect from Terminator Zero. It's dark, gritty, and brutal with what will seemingly be some intense action.
“I realized the first minutes of the show have to declare what it is,” creator and executive producer Mattson Tomlin told Tudum. “The way to do that was to have a sequence that had no dialogue, that was really planting a flag in letting everybody know this is going to be violent, it’s going to be dark, it’s going to be action-driven, it’s going to be horrific, and it’s going to be arresting. That’s just what it has to be.”
In the opening minutes, we are quickly introduced to Eiko (voiced by Sonoya Mizuno) as she's being stalked and hunted by a Terminator (Timothy Olyphant) through what appears to be a nuclear silo in 2022. Despite being overpowered and overmatched, Eiko uses her quick wits and resources to get the upper hand on the Terminator.
Netflix revealed that this was the first scene written by series creator and executive producer Mattson Tomlin for Terminator Zero "and early proof that his own highly detailed vision and Production I.G’s interpretation of that vision were aligned."
“They took what I wrote as a jumping-off point, and they just made it so much better,” Tomlin stated. It was a realization that “all I have to do is do my work, arm [the animators] as much as possible, and then just get the [frick] out of their way.”
Despite absolutely no dialogue, we get a good idea of Eiko's motivations and intelligence when it comes to facing off against the machines.
“It’s not just survival,” Tomlin explained. “She’s planned this. Getting to that sky bridge, blowing it up, getting him right there in this precarious situation, she knows she can’t beat him. You can’t [frick]ing kill a Terminator. So what can she do? She can put distance between them by dropping him 1,000 [feet] into this garbage pit below.”
After momentarily defeating the Terminator, the clip then shifts back in time to 1997. As previously revealed, Terminator Zero's story will be told across two different time periods: the future war of 2022 and the past of 1997.
2022: A future war has raged for decades between the few human survivors and an endless army of machines. 1997: The AI known as Skynet gained self-awareness and began its war against humanity.
Caught between the future and this past is a soldier sent back in time to change the fate of humanity. She arrives in 1997 to protect a scientist named Malcolm Lee who works to launch a new AI system designed to compete with Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. As Malcolm navigates the moral complexities of his creation, he’s hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future, which forever alters the fate of his three children.
“I found myself thinking about a Bond film and how Bond films always have the cold open before the musical [credits],” explained Tomlin. “The cold open has implications going forward into the story. It doesn’t usually work if it’s just an action sequence, and it’s the end of some other movie that we’re not seeing … It’s not just action for action’s sake.”
Terminator Zero is set to premiere on August 29, exclusively on Netflix.