Three billion human lives ended on Aug. 29, 1997, according to Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor in 1991's Terminator 2. But Aug. 29, 2024, the date known as Judgment Day, will bring the debut of Netflix's anime series Terminator: Zero.
Set to a remix of The Smashing Pumpkins' "Disarm," an action-packed new trailer shows what could happen on the horrible date — human extermination by the artificial intelligence known as Skynet — and those willing to do anything to stop it.
According to Netflix, the new series follows two related timelines: 1997 and 2022. A female soldier from 2022 is sent back through time to save Malcolm Lee, a scientist with the key to stopping Judgement Day — an alternative AI known as Kokoro.
Netflix teases, "As Malcolm navigates the moral complexities of his creation, he's hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future, which forever alters the fate of his three children."
André Holland voices Lee, Rosario Dawson voices Kokoro and Sonoya Mizuno plays Eiko, the soldier charged with stopping the Terminator.
Timothy Olyphant plays the relentless killing machine.
"Encompassing flesh-and-blood resistance fighters and time-traveling cyborgs, this battle spans across the last decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st," the streaming service says.
The trailer bears this out: There are not only eye-popping battles with skeletonized Terminators fighting humans in the future, as glimpsed in the 1984 original and James Cameron's follow-up T2, but some of the 1997-set action apparently takes place right up to mankind's ultimate deadline, the eve of Judgement Day.