About That "Terminator" Anime
Well, this was pretty unexpected. I know I say that about a lot of upcoming movies that I didn't know were coming out until I saw the trailer, but was really, really, really unexpected. I genuinely did not see this one coming. But, maybe I should have considering the pop culture landscape of today, but I'll get to that. There's a Terminator anime coming out. It's called Terminator Zero, and it's set to release on August 29, 2024, which is actually the same date, as some Terminator fans have pointed out, as Judgment Day, the day that Skynet launched a nuclear war ☢️ against humanity and won, only for a human resistance to emerge some time after.
A lot of Terminator fans in the comments really appreciated that little easter egg that they're releasing this anime on the same day as Judgment Day is said to have happened within the Terminator lore. I watched both trailers, and I got say, this anime actually looks pretty good. The animation looks solid, although I try not to get too fixated on animation whenever I talk about an anime or a cartoon, but the animation does look solid. There's a lot of cool imagery, a lot of cool Terminator stuff, as well as plenty of new stuff. It genuinely looks like something new, a genuinely new and fresh take on the Terminator story and the Terminator mythos. Which is all you can ask for in a franchise that has gone on as long as the Terminator franchise has, and has varied in quality as much as it has.
The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day are still beloved to this day. They're pretty much considered classics at this point, even if I myself have fallen kind of out of love with both of them for different reasons. While pretty much every Terminator sequel afterwards has been hated on by the fans, the critics, and the general audience at one point or another.
Terminator: Genisys and Terminator: Dark Fate are generally considered to be the worst of the franchise, with Dark Fate only being considered a marginal improvement over Genisys. Though, I won't lie, I did actually like Genisys when it first came out, and after I rewatched it on Blu-Ray 💿. But that was a long time ago, and I'm not sure if I would even like it now. I feel like I would find the movie to be cringy and kind of bad.
Dark Fate got a lot more hate than it probably deserved, and it was all because it had three female leads ♀︎. That movie came out during a time when the anti-feminist and anti-SJW movement was still going strong, and still somewhat had influence over pop culture discourse on the Internet. Their influence and relevance in Internet discourse has diminished significantly after Trump lost the 2020 election and Biden became the president, since a lot of the reason why these anti-feminists and anti-SJWs rose to prominence and gained such large followings and such a large influence is that they were emboldened by the election of Trump to office in 2016.
So, the 2017-2020 time frame was their time to shine, their time to influence pop culture discussions and make it about politics while insisting that it was the Left, the "evil Left," that was making pop culture discussions political and bringing politics into movies. Which of course ignores the fact that a lot of movies are political, including many of the ones that these anti-feminists and anti-SJWs purport to like.
The truth is that these people were right-wing, far-right in many cases, and they were really just upset that their politics weren't represented in movies (which is right-wing conservative politics or even far-right fascist politics), and they were upset that they could no longer say racial slurs and pass them off as jokes, they could no longer ignore gay people 🏳️🌈 and pretend they don't exist, and they could no longer make fun of gay people 🏳️🌈 without receiving any sort of pushback, and that they had to treat women ♀︎ as equals with respect and dignity rather than purely as sex objects with very little autonomy and agency, who exist only serve the pleasures of men ♂︎ and always submit to male authority ♂︎.
That's really what all of this was about, that was really what was at the heart of their grievances with Hollywood. The fact that Hollywood was trying to be more diverse, and trying to be more inclusive towards women ♀︎ and marginalized groups that many of these people (who were mostly straight white men ♂︎) still wanted to have dominance over, and didn't truly respect. They are misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic white supremacists, and felt that they were owed everything, when of course, they were apart of the most privileged group in America 🇺🇸. They always had an edge above everyone else, and they saw the leveling of the playing field for everyone else as a personal attack on them and their identity.
But, once Trump was defeated in the 2020 election, and we had a moderate Democrat in office once again, more and more people started to see these guys ♂︎ for they truly were and what they truly stood for: bigots who stood for the worst form of politics, and only exist to artificially generate outrage and grift off of it 🤑, and they promptly stop watching them. Their influence had significantly diminished, and their reputations were in tatters along with the reputations of the Republican Party and the right-wing as a whole, and these bigots quickly retreated and scurried back to their little fringe corner of the Internet.
They still exist now, they still make content, and they do manage to penetrate the mainstream and generate some outrage now and again, but they don't have nearly the level of influence they once did, and most people (most normal people) just ignore them and continue on with their day, and watch whatever they want regardless of what they say about it. But, they have since become more radicalized, and even more extreme than when they were at the peak of their powers.
They aren't hiding it anymore, they're more open and honest about who they are, and who they are ugly and hateful people. I'm sure if Trump is ever re-elected, these people will be emboldened once again, and the anti-feminism and anti-SJW movement could see a significant resurgence if they have their guy back in charge again. Another reason why we must go out there and vote this November to make sure Trump never gets back in the White House, and he disappears from our politics.
So, a lot of the outrage against Dark Fate was really just thinly veiled sexism. These "alpha males ♂︎," these pretend tough guys ♂︎ just hated the fact that this Terminator movie dared to have three women ♀︎ in the lead roles. Sure, they pretended to like strong women ♀︎, they said that they liked Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley, and the other usual examples of strong women ♀︎ they always like to go to make it seem like they aren't sexists and they don't hate women ♀︎.
But, that was just one woman ♀︎, they were fine with it when the movies usually only had one strong woman ♀︎ each. Terminator 3 and Terminator Salvation were kind of an exception to, but in Terminator 3, other strong woman ♀︎ was the villain, was a robot, and was highly sexualized (femme fatale and all that), so they were still fine with it, and while there way more women ♀︎ in Salvation, they still weren't the main focus or the main characters and were still playing second fiddle to the men ♂︎. The women ♀︎ were never really the main characters in the Terminator movies. They always played second fiddle to the men ♂︎, and they were always outnumbered by the men ♂︎ in the cast, with again there usually being one or two women ♀︎ in the main cast, and on top of that they were always white up until Dark Fate.
I mean, at the end of the day, it was John Connor who was destined to be the savior of humanity, he was the one who was going to lead humanity to victory against Skynet and the Machines, not Sarah Connor or Katherine "Kate" Brewster. I mean, T2 tried to add this element to the lore that the future wasn't set, and there was no fate but the one we made for ourselves (which is something that I do genuinely believe, as I'm sure many people who saw T2 do as well), but come on, John Connor was very much the chosen one. He was still the most important person in the story of both The Terminator and T2. He wasn't even born yet in The Terminator, and yet he was still the most important person in the story, even more important than his mom.
Terminator 3 and Terminator Salvation were the two movies that did try to switch things up by making John only the second most important person in the story. Though, T3 does make it clear that future is indeed set, that Judgment Day is inevitable no matter how much the timeline is changed, and that it is still John's destiny to lead the Resistance to victory against the Machines, and that it is also Kate's destiny to become John's wife and bear his children. Which she does in Salvation, she's his wife in that movie, and she is pregnant with his child. That's all much more true to the "chosen one" trope, it's a lot more honest than what T2 tried to feed us.
Speaking of which, even in Salvation, it's pretty clear that while John may be that important in that particular story for that particular film, he will become more important later on. He will fulfill his destiny as being the leader of the Resistance. And that was fine with these anti-SJW and anti-feminist types because they only watched the first two and didn't care about T3 or Salvation or even Genisys. It still kind of fit their world view that men ♂︎ are more important than women ♀︎, and make bigger contributions than women ♀︎ do, and it's men ♂︎ who always save the day. Whereas women ♀︎ only exist to support the men ♂︎ in their endeavors, but are never the true heroes themselves. They weren't the chosen ones.
But, in Dark Fate, there were three women ♀︎, a triple threat, and they were the main characters, not the men ♂︎. Not to mention one of them wasn't white. Two of them were white, but the main, main one wasn't, she was Latina. The anti-feminist and anti-SJW lied, and tried to make it seem like they were pushing the men ♂︎ to the side, when that really wasn't the case.
They also made fun of the argue main lead, Mackenzie Davis's appearance, saying that she looks "transgender 🏳️⚧️," or looks androgynous, or looks "butch," or looks "like a lesbian ⚢." I will admit, Mackenzie Davis did look very androgynous in the picture that they initially released for the film, and the picture that the anti-SJW community based all of their outrage on, but as far as I know, she is neither a transgender 🏳️⚧️ nor is she is a lesbian ⚢ in the film, and she still female presenting ♀︎. It was just that one picture that made her look like that.
I mean, she is a cyborg in the film. She is a soldier from the future who was enhanced with cybernetics, and therefore has abilities comparable to that of a Terminator, but she still needs to eat, sleep, and take medications to replenish her energy and strength. The whole story with her being that she's basically Dani Ramos's bodyguard. She was adopted by her as a child, and she raised her as her own, and eventually grew up to be a soldier and became apart of Dani's personal security detail, which is why she decided to become a cyborg in the first place.
So, she wouldn't really need to be female presenting ♀︎ since she's a cyborg, and her body's been altered with robotics 🦾. But, she does, she does look female presenting ♀︎ as far as I can tell. She is a woman ♀︎ I know that for sure. It's just that she has short hair and wears a wife beater or a bullet proof vest for most of the film. So again, that was just their sexism, homophobia, and transphobia showing through.
I think they were just upset she didn't look the way she did in Blade Runner 2049, where she played a Replicant prostitute/rebel spy since she was apart of the Replicant rebellion that was forming to resist the Wallace Corporation, and she was specifically sent to meet up with K to find out what he knows about Rachael's child. She even puts a tracker on him after she merged with Joi and had sex with him. If she looked more like that in Dark Fate, they wouldn't have had a problem with her.
People were also outraged at the fact that they killed John Connor at the very beginning of the movie but that also tied back to the whole sexism thing because many people within the anti-feminism and anti-SJW community and those that were influenced by them interpreted that scene as the movie pushing the men ♂︎ to the side to make way for the women ♀︎, who a lot of them felt weren't deserving of being in the spotlight. They felt that they only killed John Connor off, not to shake up the status quo and create a new situation, but to replace him with a woman ♀︎.
The new character they introduced in Dark Fate, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) pretty much fills the same role that John Connor did in the story, only she brought a new twist to it, with not just being a woman ♀︎, but being a Latina woman ♀︎, and having a much different personality than John did. It didn't help that she was a Latina woman ♀︎ because we all know that American right-wingers 🇺🇸 really hate Latinos/Latinas, especially Mexicans 🇲🇽, which what Dani is, she is a Mexican 🇲🇽. She lives and works in Mexico City. She specifically works for an automobile assembly plant located in Mexico City.
I originally thought that she worked for the company that developed Legion, the AI that replaced Skynet as the evil AI threatening humanity in the new timeline that Sarah, John, the reprogrammed T-800, and Miles Dyson unknowingly created after they destroyed Cyberdyne in 1995, which is the actual year that T2 is supposed to take place. It didn't take place in 1991, the year the movie was released.
That probably would've been more interesting. The savior of humanity working for the company that created the AI that eventually tries to end humanity. It's pretty poetic. But no, I checked the Wikipedia page for Dark Fate, Dani actually just works at a regular automobile factory in Mexico City. Mexico 🇲🇽 is kind of becoming a new manufacturing hub in real life since the US 🇺🇸 and many other western countries are trying to diversify their manufacturing sources, since being solely reliant on China 🇨🇳 for manufacturing is no longer viable or sustainable anymore.
The COVID pandemic 🦠😷 proved that without a shadow of a doubt, and the growing tensions between the US 🇺🇸 and China 🇨🇳 proved that even more. So, Mexico 🇲🇽 has joined a growing number of countries that the West is turning to for alternative sources of manufacturing, along with Vietnam 🇻🇳, Thailand 🇹🇭, Malaysia 🇲🇾, the Philippines 🇵🇭, Poland 🇵🇱, Taiwan 🇹🇼, the Czech Republic 🇨🇿, Turkey 🇹🇷, and India 🇮🇳, although very little progress has made made in trying to turn India 🇮🇳 in a viable alternative to Chinese manufacturing 🇨🇳. So, it does make sense and is sort of forward looking to have Dani work at an automobile factory in Mexico 🇲🇽 in the year 2020, which when Dark Fate is supposed to take place.
While Dani is Mexican 🇲🇽, the actress who plays her, Natalia Reyes is not. She's Colombian 🇨🇴. American racists 🇺🇸 hate them too, in fact, they probably can't even distinguish a Colombian 🇨🇴 from a Mexican 🇲🇽. Considering that Genisys turned John into a villain, by making him a nanotech Terminator who's working directly for Skynet, is killing him off really that much of a "betrayal" of his character? Had Dani been a man ♂︎, would these people have complained nearly as much? I doubt that they would.
So, when take away all the manufactured outrage about the three female leads ♀︎, Dark Fate isn't anywhere near as bad as it was made out to be, but it still wasn't very good. It's still considered the second worst Terminator film of the franchise. Terminator Salvation, while it was hated initially when it came out back in 2009, has developed a reputation as a "middle of the road" Terminator flick, while it has developed some what of a cult following with some fans considering it to be the best Terminator movie since T2. Which honestly isn't saying a whole lot given what it's up against. The thing that fans appreciate about Salvation in comparison to Genisys and Dark Fate is that it did try something new. It was different from the usual Terminator formula. It was set in the future, during the Future War, and it wasn't a time traveling chase movie.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines used to be considered the worst Terminator movie, and in some instances, it still is, but since it was released back in 2003, and since the release of movies like Genisys and Dark Fate, people have started to lay off of it a little bit. Kind of like what happened with Jurassic Park III after the Jurassic World movies came out, especially Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Jurassic World Dominion, even if I think that Dominion is kind of overhated.
In fact, some have even started to reevaluate it, and now consider it to be one of the better Terminator movies. Indeed, there are plenty of people out there who really love T3 😍. My dad is a huge Terminator fan, and T3 is the one that he rewatches the most. He barely even watches The Terminator or T2. Can't say I entirely blame him since the Internet has kind of ruined those two movies for me, and also James Cameron kind of ruined those two movies for me.
The video games have been hit or miss with people, with most of them being misses, although people liked the arcade game that they made for Salvation surprisingly. There's another Terminator video game that came out more recently called Terminator: Resistance, which was a first person shooter game that was kind of open world…maybe. It has multiple endings, and it seems like one of those games where you can choose which path you want the story to take, and even choose which romantic relationships ❤️ the main character has.
Kind of like Mass Effect in that way, although I'm not sure if the Mass Effect games were first person or third person shooters. I know Mass Effect: Andromeda was a third person shooter game, but I don't know about the main Mass Effect games, the original trilogy with Commander Shepard, who is either a man ♂︎ or a woman ♀︎ depending on which gender you select to play the character as. Though the option to play Commander Shepard as a woman ♀︎ wasn't made available until the third game, Mass Effect 3 from what I understand. I don't really know what the main consensus about Resistance was, but from I can see from the Wikipedia page about the game, it seems like it had very mixed reviews, with most of them leaning towards the negative.
So now, Terminator is dipping its toes into the world of anime for the first time. This is Terminator: The Weeb Edition, and so far, from I've seen, it looks solid. Just the involvement of Production IG alone is enough to instill confidence in me. For those that don't know, and I don't know how you wouldn't if watched the trailers, or read any of the previous posts on my blog, Production IG is the anime studio behind the Ghost in the Shell franchise, as well as other sci-fi and cyberpunk anime properties such as Psycho-Pass, FLCL, the Blood 🩸 franchise (Blood: The Last Vampire 🩸, Blood+ 🩸, and Blood C 🩸), Ghost Hound, and Gargantia and the Verdurous Planet, among many, many others. They also did the anime sequence in Kill Bill Vol.1 and contributed a short in The Animatrix. So, they're a pretty big deal within the anime industry, and they've managed to stay independent after all this time.
They have a lot of experience within the sci-fi and cyberpunk genre, so they can theoretically deliver the goods on a Terminator while also bringing something genuinely new to the table. One of the big issues that Terminator franchise has had ever since T2 was moving past the nostalgia and callbacks, and moving past Arnold Schwarzenegger. I've always felt that Arnold was holding this franchise back, by the insistence of putting him in every installment, even if it doesn't make sense for him to be there anymore.
The only Terminator thing that didn't have Arnold at all until Terminator Zero was Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but even then, that was likely because Arnold was the governor of California at the time (the "Governator" as he was referred to back then) and would've been way too expensive for them to get anyway. The Sarah Connor Chronicles was network television series in the 2000s after all. They didn't exactly throw a lot of money 💵 at those things the way they do shows on streaming nowadays.
That's why I always appreciated the Predator franchise for not including Arnold in every installment, even if they've tried repeatedly to get Arnold back in. They finally did with the video game, Predator: Hunting Grounds, but that's about it. They never got him into any of the sequels and now prequels, since Prey is a prequel, the Predator franchise's first prequel film. But I think we've seen how much damage tying Arnold to a franchise can be, and much he can limit a franchise's potential. I do think it's about time that Terminator moves on from Arnold. The man ♂︎ is now is in his late 70s, he'll be 80 in a few years, this franchise can exist without him, and it kind of has to since he's now pretty much too old for this shit, to use the famous Lethal Weapon quote that everyone uses.
And I think Terminator Zero will be a major step in moving the franchise away from Arnold, because from the trailers we've had so far, Arnold is no where to be seen. And I really don't think that Arnold is going to appear in this anime at all. All of T-800s the trailers have shown us don't look at all like Arnold, and I doubt Arnold agreed to let them use his likeness in any way. I think this will anime will definitely show people that the Terminator franchise can exist without Arnold.
I don't think that this anime will rely on nostalgia or callbacks, or at least not as much as the post-T2 sequels have, it'll all be new and fresh stuff. I mean, we see a new AI that isn't Skynet in these trailers that the main character (who is a scientist by the looks of it) created to try to counter Skynet. That's something new, it'll add a new dynamic to this conflict that we've never seen before. It also seems like it's going to be set primarily in Japan 🇯🇵, in Tokyo specifically, which is a country and a city that haven't been represented in this franchise before. Most of the Terminator franchise is set in either the United States 🇺🇸 or Mexico 🇲🇽.
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Yeah, there's still time travel, and there's still a Terminator being sent to the past to try to kill somebody, and someone being sent by the Resistance to stop them, whether it be a Resistance fighter or a reprogrammed Terminator, but it looks like they've put enough of a new spin on it to make it new and fresh and not the same old song and dance that they've come to expect from this franchise.
Terminator has now entered the ranks of sci-fi franchises that got anime adaptations or anime spin-offs. Blade Runner got an anime, Cyberpunk 2077 got an anime, NieR: Automata got an anime, Star Wars got an anime, kind of, Ultraviolet got an anime, Halo got an anime, and of course The Matrix got an anime, in fact, it was first of these big sci-fi franchise to get an anime tie-in, although it was an anthology film and not a series. Speaking of which, I'm not exactly sure if Terminator Zero is a movie or a series. I'm pretty sure that it's a movie, but I guess I'll find out when it comes out or after I finish writing this. I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones that I thought of off the top of my head.
Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰 was supposed to get an anime too, but it didn't get one because the movie was so poorly received, and Zack Snyder moved on to make the Rebel Moon movies which were also poorly received. So, all we got out of the Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰 franchise after the first movie was a prequel film called Army of Thieves, which was made almost simultaneously as Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰. It was released the same year, though months apart.
Maybe Zack Snyder and Netflix will return to the Army of the Dead 🧟♂️🎰 franchise one day, and maybe we will get that anime. The sequel, Planet of the Dead 🧟♂️🌎 is still apparently in the works according to Wikipedia, make of that what you will. So, maybe things are not quite over yet for this little franchise that Snyder created, we'll just have to wait and see if Planet of the Dead 🧟♂️🌎 does end up getting made. But for now, it seems that the franchise is pretty much dead. Deader than the zombies 🧟♂️ that infest Las Vegas 🎰 in those films. Now all we need is for Alien and Predator to get anime tie-ins of their own, and the trifecta will be complete. I think a Predator anime would be really cool, there's a lot of different things that you could do with a Predator anime.
This is the first time in a long time that I've been remotely interested in anything to come out of the Terminator franchise. Let's hope that it delivers. The only problem is that it's going to be on Netflix, and Netflix has ended password sharing, meaning that the only way you can watch Netflix is if you have your own account. You can no longer share an account with other people, and let them access your account with your password. They have to have their own account, and their own password to use the service. There are loopholes that you can use to get around this, but it is still kind of a hassle.
This is the main reason why I haven't watched any Netflix movies or shows like Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix, Skull Island, Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver, Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie 🐿️, and even that CGI animated Ultraman movie, Ultraman: Rising, where Ultraman adopts a baby kaiju as a pet. This also means that I may not be able to watch Season 2 of Wednesday if that's even still coming out.
But, I'll try to watch Terminator Zero when it comes out, and I will review if I do, but I make no promises. If I don't end up watching it on Netflix, then I might just end up watching it when it comes out on Blu-Ray 💿. Which might seem like a long shot since most Netflix movies and shows don't get physical releases, but you never know. Season 1 of Wednesday got a DVD and Blu-Ray release 📀💿 fairly recently, so you never know.
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Here's the teaser trailer:
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Here's the official trailer:
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