This New Terminator Anime Looks Brutal as F*ck

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The Terminator movie series has long had a connection to rock and metal. Just look at 80s Arnold Schwarzenegger and tell me he’s not badass. Terminator II: Judgment Day had a killer soundtrack that included Guns N’ Roses and George Thorogood. And I dare you to try to find a single metalhead to watch this sequence and tell me they wouldn’t want to recreate it.

All that’s preamble to say that even if you’re not an anime fan, you should check out the trailer for Terminator Zero down below. If you’re a fan of horror, especially body horror and slasher films, this could be your jam.

In the Terminator universe created by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, this Thursday marks what would have been the 27th anniversary of the day an AI known as Skynet nuked humanity with their own stockpiles called Judgment Day. To mark the occasion, streaming platform Netflix will be dropping an especially brutal and NSFW anime titled Terminator Zero and judging by the trailer below, it looks metal as fuck.

Set in Japan, the show deals with the impending launch of that country’s version of Skynet known as Kokoro. Kokoro’s creator, a computer programmer and father of three Malcolm Lee has dreams about the impending AI uprising and apocalypse for years, has been working on the project for years as a way to stop the impending robot apocalypse. With this being a Terminator property, of course there’s time travel, as a freedom fighter named Eiko goes back in time to stop Lee.

Here’s the official synopsis:

“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 is hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future which forever alters the fate of his three children.”

In a recent interview with the show’s executive producer Mattson Tomlin said he wanted the anime to lean more in the direction of the first Terminator movie than any of the ones that followed. That means a more overarching horror feel to the final production.

“I realized the first minutes of the show have to declare what it is. 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.”

So yeah, I’m stoked to check this out when it hits Netflix this Thursday.