A race to stop a dark artificial intelligence waging a bloody war on humanity is revealed in the first trailer for Terminator Zero, Netflix’s Terminator franchise reboot, that dropped on Monday.
The teaser set in Japan introduces as its narrator the animated character Eiko, a resistance fighter voiced by Sonoya Mizuno, who is sent back in time to protect Malcolm Lee (André Holland) as he develops Kokoro, or an advanced artificial intelligence as a rival to the malicious Skynet and its impending attack on humanity.
“There’s only one thing standing between you and him… Me!,” Mizuno, the House of Dragon star, exclaims as the figure of a young woman aiming a gun at a dystopian cyborg assassin from the future, and then firing, fills the screen.
The Netflix anime series from The Batman II writer Mattson Tomlin is set to debut on Aug. 29, or “Judgment Day,” and will premiere opposite The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime Video.
The Terminator Zero voice cast includes Timothy Olyphant voicing the Terminator, Rosario Dawson as Kokoro and Ann Dowd as The Prophet, a philosophical guide for the human resistance helping shepherd survivors in the darkness of the unknown future ahead.
According to a synopsis from the producers, Terminator Zero will be set in 2022 where a future war has raged for decades between the few human survivors and an endless army of machines, and 1997 where the AI known as Skynet has gained self-awareness and has begun its war against humanity.
The eight episode series hails from Japanese animation studio Production IG and is directed by Masashi Kudo. Terminator Zero promises new characters and is the first-ever iteration of the movie franchise to be animated. Tomlin is the showrunner, writer and executive producer on the series, with David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Don Granger executive producing for Skydance.
In 2023, Skydance Animation unveiled a multiyear pact with Netflix to develop and produce animated movies for the streamer.