“Terminator Zero” Sneak Peek Unveils High Stakes Action on the Highway

August 27, 2024

Netflix has released a nearly two-minute sneak peek at a scene from its upcoming animated series Terminator Zero, an eight-episode expansion to the iconic sci-fi franchise.

The sneak peek is a highway standoff in which a soldier sent back from the future to protect scientist Malcolm Lee (voiced by André Holland) rams her truck into what appears to be a worker on the bridge, smashing him and the car behind him over the railing. Is this just wanton murder? Not quite. And the worker surely isn’t dead, nor is it a human at all, he’s another time-traveler, a part-machine assassin sent back in time to kill Malcolm before he can create a rival artificial intelligence system, known as Kokoro (voiced by Rosario Dawson), to the dominate Skynet system.

Terminator Zero comes from Mattson Tomlin, who told Netflix’s Tudum that he was inspired by James Cameron’s first two films in the franchise, The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991). “Why are we still talking about this franchise 40 years later?” Tomlin said to Tudum. “You strip away killer robots, you strip away Judgment Day, what do you have left? You have stories about families.”

Terminator Zero is partly set in 2022 during a raging war between the few human survivors of the machine apocalypse and partly set in 1997, when the artificial intelligence Skynet became self-aware and started its war against humanity. Joining Holland and Dawson in the cast are Timothy Olyphant as the Terminator, Sonoya Mizuno as Eiko, a resistance fighter sent back in time to stop Malcolm from creating Kokoro, and Ann Dowd as the Prophet, a philosopher who guides the human resistance in the future.

Check out the sneak peek below. Terminator Zero arrives on Netflix on August 29.