In the world of Terminator, the future is never set, yet some things are guaranteed: The Terminator is still a cyborg that feels no remorse, pity, or fear.

The anime series TERMINATOR ZERO, landing on Netflix on Aug. 29 — known to fans as Judgment Day — looks different from any incarnation of the Terminator franchise we’ve seen before, but you can tell from these opening six minutes that the brutal, sophisticated action will remain. 

“I realized the first minutes of the show have to declare what it is,” creator and executive producer Mattson Tomlin tells Tudum. A joint production between Skydance and the Japanese animation studio Production I.G, TERMINATOR ZERO has the challenge of drawing in both anime fans and fans of the Terminator series. “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,” says Tomlin, who previously wrote Project Power for Netflix and is currently writing The Batman Part II. “That’s just what it has to be.”

In the clip above, the dialogue-free opening sequence shows Eiko (voiced by Sonoya Mizuno) being stalked and hunted by the single-minded Terminator (Timothy Olyphant) through what looks to be a nuclear silo in 2022. Eiko proves a wily and resourceful target, even as the Terminator relentlessly attacks her with a Gatling gun and uses her body as a human climbing rope. It was the first scene Tomlin wrote in TERMINATOR ZERO and early proof that his own highly detailed vision and Production I.G’s interpretation of that vision were aligned. “They took what I wrote as a jumping-off point, and they just made it so much better,” he says. It was a realization that “all I have to do is do my work, arm [the animators] as much as possible, and then just get the fuck out of their way.”

Starting things off with a bang — a nuclear one, at that — will have reverberations for the rest of the eight-episode first season, which takes place in both 2022 and 1997. “It’s not just survival,” Tomlin explains of Eiko’s motivations. “She’s planned this. Getting to that sky bridge, blowing it up, getting him right there in this precarious situation, she knows she can’t beat him. You can’t fucking kill a Terminator. So what can she do? She can put distance between them by dropping him 1,000 [feet] into this garbage pit below.”

Eiko later arrives in 1997 to protect a scientist named Malcolm Lee (André Holland) 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’s hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future, which forever alters the fate of his three children.

“I found myself thinking about a Bond film and how Bond films always have the cold open before the musical [credits],” says Tomlin. “The cold open has implications going forward into the story. It doesn’t usually work if it’s just an action sequence, and it’s the end of some other movie that we’re not seeing … It’s not just action for action’s sake.”

Prepare yourself for Judgment Day when TERMINATOR ZERO streams Aug. 29, only on Netflix.