Not the Terminator, but not bad either. As soon as not to be mocked over the universe of the Terminator in cinema for the last twenty years. Starting with the third part, the entire franchise cubarem rolled like a derailment. And this despite the fact that the third part, as it turns out much later, did not remain the worst in the series. On the contrary, it may well seem very worthy against the background of all that came later. About "Genesis" and even more disgusting "Black Fate" with Mexican terminators and do not want to remember. What can I say? The franchise just lost its face and went into full swing. We had everything, even a whole TV project, which, meanwhile, very quickly shut down, and just at the moment when it was just starting to catch on. What else did we not have in the Terminator universe? Right! No anime! And this omission decided to eliminate the notorious Netflix, who ordered the series from one of the studios specializing in anime and animation.
Plot: "The Terminator: Zero is as old as the franchise itself. And it tells the story of a young girl who is a soldier of resistance from the future, which people sent to protect some important scientist in Japan – Malcolm Lee. The thing is, Malcolm is literally obsessed with Judgment Day, he constantly has visions that Skynet will destroy humanity, and his Terminators will march in formation across the planet, destroying the last handful of people. In contrast to Skynet, Malcolm decides to create his own artificial intelligence – Kokoro. Kokoro will have to prevent Skynet from destroying most of humanity by launching nuclear missiles. But only now, as before, Skynet manages to send a time machine one of his terminators, which must eliminate not only Malcolm, but his entire family.
In fact, when watching this anime, you have a lot of conflicting feelings. And this is due to the fact that you are constantly poked with one or another curtsey and references to the main films of the series. Then one of the characters meaningfully says: “A storm is coming soon”, then the local terminator will change into a motorcycle suit of a policeman, in the manner of the T-1000. Such content anime rashes in almost every series, it is certainly recognizable and even causes some pleasant feelings. But everything else in “Terminator: Zero” is perceived somewhat foreign. To begin with, we don’t have the same timeline as the original movies. Here we have in the story generally dominated by the concept of multiverses. And that same Terminator that was with Sarah and John Connor, Kyle Reese, Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 and Robert Patrick's T-1000, it was somewhere in a different timeline, in a different universe. There's nothing like that here. Malcolm Lee and his family of three gifted children come to the fore. In the same AI Kokoro, controlled robots look completely different than the usual terminators. And the truth is, the comparison will not favor the former. In this regard, literally the whole plot is perceived as something strange and foreign, here all the characters appear to you as some kind of alien. They really do not catch anything and are perceived by another faceless dummy.
The only thing that pleases Terminator: Zero is the “killer cyborg” himself, who was shown even more cruel, even more ruthless, with a much more refined arsenal and methods of killing than it was in the original films. He is really perceived as a kind of maniac who creepily moves around the night city and kills everything that gets in his way. Very impressive implementation. No, it’s still not the level of our beloved Arnie, but in this format it looks very decent and impressive, much more than the Mexican illegal from “Dark Fates”. And, of course, the cruelty and blood here is just a mass. The creators clearly worked out the rating to its fullest and tried to make the most rigid work possible. On the surface, it’s still much better than the shame we saw in Dark Fate or Genesis. Here the unstoppable killer at least does not sew curtains and does exactly what he is programmed to do – kill, kill and kill again.
6 out of 10