by The new anime series’ executive producer and showrunner, Mattson Tomlin, tells EW how he embraced the horror aesthetic of the first two movies.
Mattson Tomlin, a writer for Project Power and The Batman Part II, encountered an unexpected obstacle when he started writing Terminator Zero.
Given all the time tampering throughout six movies, it seems like a glaring question why it has nothing to do with continuity. According to Tomlin, Entertainment Weekly, the program considers every previous movie to be canon. We won’t act as though the third movie never happened. “We won’t act as though the sixth film never happened,” he declares.
No, the particular difficulty was inherent in the environment. The executives at Skydance, Netflix, and the animation studio Production I.G. desired to see some sort of Japanese influence in Terminator Zero. Going one step further, Tomlin decided to have the eight-episode anime air in Japan. Regarding his situation, he remarks, “I don’t think I quite appreciated how real that was. I was aware that there aren’t really guns in Japan.”
That incident serves as a good example of how Terminator Zero deviates from the franchise’s established conventions. There are more sword fights with a Terminator that has blades for arms and less breaking into a neighbor’s car to take the pistol that just so happens to be in the glove compartment. Tomlin continues, “There’s also a real Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle kind of vibe in there,” alluding to the well-known Martin Scorsese film character played by Robert De Niro. “What are some weapons I could make if I were going to fight a Terminator without any guns?”
The absence of Sarah and John Connor, the Connors, is the anime’s largest departure. Terminator Zero will forgo the main characters from the previous iterations of the franchise in favor of a group of entirely new ones. It’s time, in my opinion, to move on to new characters and stop worrying about writing another John and Sarah Connor tale. There have been several attempts at that, according to Tomlin. “There are a lot of callbacks to the other films,” he continues. “Fans who really know the movies are going to be doing the Leo meme from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but it’s not going to be as direct as John Connor walks in, because John Connor does not walk in.”
The main action of the show takes place in Japan in 1997, just before Judgement Day, which is the critical point at which Skynet’s military artificial intelligence network becomes self-aware and sparks a protracted struggle between an unending army of machines and the human survivors that lasts for decades. The typical Terminator beats are still present: Malcolm Lee, a scientist working to create a rival artificial intelligence system against Skynet, is being protected by a soldier transported back in time from this horrific future. He is being pursued by a relentless robot killer who is impersonating a person, endangering his three children in the process.
“I knew that I wanted to tell a time-travel story, and I knew that I wanted to tell a multigenerational saga that would follow this family with these kids in the end, almost like Godfather,” Tomlin states. “If we get to do multiple seasons, I wanted to watch these kids grow up and see what kind of people they become.”
The first two Terminator films, The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), greatly influenced Tomlin. He aimed to mimic the feeling of not knowing who is good or bad, even though the anime might not have a certain rifle-wielding robot with a thick Austrian accent and a killer motorcycle jacket. Tomlin says, “You don’t know what’s going on with that guy,” pointing to Michael Biehn’s character Kyle Reese from the first film. You are unaware that he is the protagonist. He continues, “These are entirely original characters, much like Terminator Zero. We have no idea who any of them are. Without a doubt, all of those answers will come to light, and they will do so rather soon.
The series’ tone reflects this inspiration even more. In contrast to subsequent entries that feature “muscular sci-fi action,” as Tomlin puts it, he embraced the horror aspects of James Cameron’s films. “There’s a completely valid version of the Terminator franchise where the Terminator is synonymous with Jason [Voorhees] and Freddy [Krueger], where he is this unrelenting serial killer,” he says. A hint of Friday the 13th can be found here. This place has a hint of Michael Myers from Halloween.”
Simply put, no guns.
On Thursday, August 29, at 3 a.m. ET/12 a.m. PT, all of Terminator Zero’s episodes will be available on Netflix.
