Terminator 2

O M I T T E DS C E N E S

by

James Cameron

and

William Wisher

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EXTENDED FUTURE WAR

5/10/90

The original 5/10/90 draft contained an extended future war scene that not only addressed the defeat of Skynet and the backstory of how Reese and the Terminator went back through time as mentioned in the first film, but also the backstory of the second film on how the second Terminator was sent through.Cut from the script after the first draft, the scene -- although rich in action and resonance to the first film and its concepts -- was a narrative tangent to the main story of the film and would have cost an inordinate amount of time, money, and effort to produce.This future scene also had the adult John Connor as its narrator.

EXT.CITY STREET - DAY

Downtown L.A.Noon on a hot summer day.On an EXTREME LONG LENS the lunchtime crowd stacks up into a wall of humanity.In SLOW MOTION they move in herds among the glittering rows of cars jammed bumper to bumper.Heat ripples distort the torrent of faces.The image is surreal dreamy... and like a dream it begins very slowly to...

DISSOLVE TO:

EXT.CITY RUINS - DAY

Same spot as the last shot, but now it is a frozen landscape in Hell.The cars are stopped in rusted rows, still bumper to bumper.The skyline of buildings beyond has been shattered by some unimaginable force like a row of kicked-down sandcastles.The sky glows, dark as iron.

A freezing wind blows through the desolation, keening with the sound of ten million dead souls.It scurries the snow into drifts, stark white against the charred rubble.Fire and ice.The image is without color... lifeless as the moon.A TITLE CARD FADES IN:

LOS ANGELES, AUGUST 11, 2029

ANGLE ON a heap of fire-blackened bones.Skulls identify them as human.WE BEGIN TO TRACK, revealing beyond the mound a vast tundra of bones and shattered concrete. Skulls like eyeless sentinels.The rush hour crowds burned down in their tracks. We hear a MAN"S VOICE, gentle, though rich in authority, and tempered by the pain of watching a world die.

WE DISSOLVE TO a playground... where intense heat has half-melted the jungle gym, the blast has warped the swing set, the merry-go-round has sagged in the firestorm. Small skulls look accusingly from the snow-drifts.WE HEAR the distant echo of children's voices... playing and laughing in the sun.A silly, sing-songy rhyme as WE TRACK SLOWLY over seared asphalt where the faint hieroglyphs of hopscotch lines are still visible.

CAMERA comes to a rest on a burnt and rusted tricycle... next to the tiny skull of its owner.A metal foot crushes the skull like china.

TILT UP, revealing a humanoid machine holding a massive battle rifle.It looks like a hydraulically-actuated CHROME SKELETON.A high-tech death figure.It is a combat chassis, the underlying component, or endoskeleton, of a Series 800 Terminator.An antipersonnel weapon controlled by Skynet, a computer which is threatening the human survivors of the war with final extinction.

The endoskeleton's glowing red eyes compassionlessly sweep the dead terrain, hunting.Then suddenly snap toward CAMERA.

ENDOSKELETON POV (DIGITIZED) as it racks a RUNNING FIGURE across the desolate landscape.Through these eyes we see the world as a computer-generated image.Symbols and graphics rapidly appear on the center display as the machine acquires its target.

THE FIGURE, a young boy in rags, is centerpunched by the deadly round.He sprawls to a smoking heap on the blackened sludge.

ANOTHER FIGURE, a guerrilla soldier hefting a battered RPG rocket launcher.

THE ENDOSKELETON turns, too late.The rocket vaporizes the top half of it.Its bottom half takes a few uncertain steps, then topples to the earth.

The figure quickly takes cover at the approaching SOUND of ROARING TURBINES.A shadow blackens the sky as a formation of flying HK (Hunter-Killer) patrol machines passes overhead. PAN WITH THEM toward the jagged horizon, beyond which we see flashes, and hear the distant thunder of a pitched battle in progress.

CUT TO:

EXT.BATTLEFIELD - DAY

THE BATTLE.Human troops in desperate combat with the Machines for possession of the dead Earth.The humans are a ragtag guerrilla army, made up mostly of troops from Southern Hemisphere countries... Africans, South Americans, Australians.The survivors of the nuclear war between the Northern Hemisphere super-powers.This is the reality of the post-Apocalyptic world.North of the equator we all die.

We hear radio chatter in Spanish, interspersed with Swahili and other African languages.The occasional Aussie unit can be heard. The humans use RPG launchers, plasma-pulse battle rifles, and home-built armored personnel carriers.

Skynet's weapons consist of the massive ground HKs (tank- like robot weapon-platforms) flying HKs, medium weight four-legged gun-pods called Centurions, the humanoid Terminators in various forms (600, 700, and 800 series), and small, fast-crawling kamikaze units called Silverfish that look like 5' long chrome centipedes.The Silverfish snake into gun emplacements and explode.

SEQUENCE OF RAPID CUTS

Explosions! Beam-weapons firing like searing strobe-lights. Energy bolts crisscrossing frame. Hand-launched Stinger missiles blowing an aerial HK out of the sky. A Sapper team tries to disable a ground HK.They get riddled by its rapidly tracking gun turret.

A TEAM OF GUERRILLAS is being overrun by terminator endoskeletons in the ruins of a building.One by one, the soldiers fall in desperate hand-to-hand combat.One of the terminators looms over a wounded soldier, its battle rifle's barrel swinging down toward the guerrilla's head. The man stares defiantly into his death.Then... Suddenly, amazingly, the terminator stops, freezing in place...

Aerial HKs tilt slowly, out of control, and crash to the ground.All the terminators stand frozen, unmoving, like a bunch of toy soldiers.

The sudden silence takes the humans by surprise.They slowly emerge from their rat-warren emplacements and approach the frozen machines.We hear a voice speaking over a radio headset.It is filled with awed emotion.

CAMERA TRACKS along the soldiers, bleeding, frostbitten, wrapped in rags... Valley Forge with better weapons. The wounded soldier in the ruins of the building cautiously approaches the chrome skeleton before him.He pushes against its chest with one finger.It topples with a crash and lies still. The soldier turns to his comrades with an idiot grin. Tears are streaming down his face.A mighty cheer goes up from the men and woman of the Last Army.

INT.TIME DISPLACEMENT COMPLEX - L.A. - LATER

A STAINLESS STEEL ELEVATOR SHAFT, going deep into the bowels of the earth.Tiny figures stand on an open platform which descends rapidly, becoming a speck.

ON THE PLATFORM.An imposing man, surrounded by a team of guerrilla officers stands on the platform as it descends. He is JOHN CONNOR.Forty-five years old.Chiseled. Stern.The left side of his face is heavily scarred.An impressive man, and clearly one forged in the furnace of a lifetime of war.The voice we heard continues now.

The platform reached its destination.Connor and the officers step off.Begin moving down a long corridor.

INT.CORRIDOR

This place was designed by machines for machines.The architecture is alien, without aesthetics, without even such human basics as doorknobs and lights.Connor leads the team past more frozen terminator endoskeletons, deactivated like the ones on the surface.

As they continue on, they pass other teams of guerrilla soldiers.

INT.TIME DISPLACEMENT CHAMBER

Vault-like doors open.Connor strides through with authority and purpose.He is saluted smartly by everyone he encounters, though he wears no insignia of rank.

There is a bustle of hurried activity here.The chamber is the size of a high-school gym and consist totally of machine surfaces.Nothing in the design makes any sense. We can't tell what anything does.It is a technology we cannot imagine.

Technicians have pulled up floor panels and tapped directly into cabling of the machine, using portable terminals that they have wheeled in.Many of the soldiers in this war against machines are technical specialists... you have to fight fire with fire.

At the far end of the room, a young soldier stands surrounded by a team of technicians.KYLE REESE.Sarah Connor's defender, teacher, and lover in the first film. A simple soldier who is about to walk point-blank into the gaping maw of history.At the moment, he is the center of activity.As he finishes stripping off his battle uniform, the techs begin smearing his body with a conductive so the time-field will follow his outline.

Reese looks around at all the activity.Battle and the prospect of death have never scared him.But the importance of what he is about to do terrifies him.

The techs move aside and suddenly John Connor is standing beside him.Connor... their grim messiah.Their leader. He fixes Reese with an intense gaze.There is so much he wants to say, but cannot bring himself to.Finally Reese speaks.

Connor nods.

Reese nods.Suddenly understanding everything.

Connor shrugs enigmatically. One of the techs interrupts them

THREE ENORMOUS CHROME RINGS, one inside the other, are suspended in a circular hole in the center of the room's floor.John and Reese approach them.

Reese steps onto the first ring.It bobs under his weight.We see that the rings are freely floating in a magnetic field.Reese steps to the inner ring and looks into the hole.A vast echoing darkness below.He looks back at John.The messiah is waiting for him to step into the bottomless pit.

Reese takes a breath, then steps into open space and is buoyed up by an unseen field of force.He floats in the middle of the rings.The techs start the time displacement sequence.

THE RINGS BEGIN TO MOVE, slowly rotating around each other on different axis like some complex gyroscope.

THE FLOOR BEGINS TO SPLIT OPEN, like wedges in a pie which begin to pull back from the center.The rings are spinning faster now, suspended in space in the middle of the receding floor wedges.The rings begin to descend.

JOHN AND REESE LOCK EYES as they move apart.Reese is dropping into an unbelievably vast circular space... the time-field generator.John watches him go, until Reese is a tiny figure.The rings are spinning so rapidly now they almost disappear, becoming a sphere of whirling steel. Technicians pull John back from the edge.

LIGHTNING BEGINS TO ARC across the vast room below.A huge charge of energy is building up.Everyone takes cover behind blast walls they have set up.They put on goggles like they used to do at A-bomb tests.This is going to be big.

The chamber below has become a Hell of energy with Reese at its center.The drone and crackle of the machines builds to thunder, there is a BLINDING FLASH OF LIGHT!

When the glare fades the floating rings are empty.They slow to a stop, seared and smoking.Reese is gone.

FUENTES, one of the officers, turns to Connor.

Connor's gaze seems far away from this time and place.

Connor solemnly nods. CONNOR Yes... He's also my father.

Fuentes stares at Conner in amazement.He has just been given a glimpse into his leader's private Hell.Connor turns from the smoking chamber.He seems suddenly ten years old as his features drain of strength, shoulders sagging.

Fuentes shouts an order to a waiting Sapper team.

Connor shakes his head no.Mustering his strength.

TIGHT ON MASSIVE DOORS OF STEEL, covered with a thin sheet of ice.Locking bolts slam back.Ice shatters like glass as the doors begin to open.We are in--

INT.COLD STORAGE FACILITY

Connor walks into the darkness, followed by a few technicians.They are in a vault-like cold-storage room. Hanging in steel racks from ceiling tracks are hundreds of what appear to be men.They are in rows of ten.Within each row, each of the bodies are absolutely identical.

Connor signals the techs to remain by the door and walks out among the dark bodies.They are UNACTIVATED TERMINATORS.He stops at a row in which they are identical to the terminator which was sent to kill Sarah (the Arnold model).

He walks to the end of the row.There is one empty rack. He faces the terminator in the next rack.Its eyes are closed. John seems distant as he studies that face. Fuentes enters the chamber, pushing past the technicians. Calls for his leader in the darkness.

TIGHT ON CONNOR, his face pensive as Fuentes calls his name.Fuentes voice slowly dissolves to ANOTHER VOICE.A woman's.Echoing as though from a great distance...

CUT TO:

This audio transition takes us directly to the scene of young John Connor in the Voights' garage in the present- day.The use of a sound dissolve between the two voices calling John's name while holding a tight shot on his face works as a flashback-style transition to bridge the future and the present.

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SARAH'S E.C.T.

5/10/90

In the original 5/10/90 draft, the transition from future to present occurred through adult John's memory of his childhood, and both young John and Sarah are established in their respective environments before the arrival of the terminators.The transition from Sarah at the hospital to the scenes of the arriving terminators was accomplished through the following scene.

INT.HOSPITAL CORRIDOR

Sarah, strait-jacketed and strapped onto a GURNEY, is being wheeled down the corridor by Douglas and the other orderlies.Silberman is right behind her with the interns.Sarah's eyes are full of suppressed rage as she stares up and back at him.

Frustrated, Sarah begins struggling against her restraints.Douglas, blocking the action from the doctors, casually smacks her solar plexus with his baton. Sarah gasps for air.Douglas winks at her.

They sweep through a set of double doors.The doors swing closed into CLOSEUP.Big block letters stenciled across them read: ELECTRO-CONVULSIVE THERAPY Yes, they still do this shit to people.

INT.E.C.T. ROOM

Sarah's eyes go wide, clocking the sign on the door as she is wheeled in to a room full of ominous machines.Aging shock therapy equipment.

She struggles vainly against the gurney straps as a NURSE tapes electrodes to her head.Silberman leans down to Sarah.The interns and the orderlies watch from near the door.

Silberman sighs.They finish placing the electrodes on her temples.

The nurse sets the dials on the machine.Sarah starts to thrash now, becoming irrational.Starts shrieking at everyone in the room.She sounds exactly like what they say she is -- a whacko.

She screams incoherently as they jam the rubber biscuit down between her teeth so she won't bite through her tongue when the voltage jumpstarts her brain.Silberman is smooth and cheerful as he turns to the interns.

He nods to the nurse and the current blasts through Sarah's brain, locking every muscle in her body into a painful contortion.It triggers an epilepsy-like seizure and she bucks and flops on the gurney.

TIGHT ON SARAH'S FACE, contorted, jerking spasmodically. Then...

STROBOSCOPIC FLASH CUTS speeding up in rhythm, images coming at us like a roaring freight-train.

TERMINATOR'S STEEL HAND lunging for her in the punch press. A CHROME SKULL, eyes burning red, a demon after her soul. STEEL FINGERS closing on her throat.Then... SARAH'S FINGERS groping endlessly for the switch to the press.Then...

TERMINATOR'S RED EYES filling frame.Lightning arcing all around as the press crushes the hideous machine.But even as it dies it has her by the throat.Even now, long after it's dead, it still has her by the throat.The lightning gets brighter and brighter... WHITING OUT FRAME.

CUT TO:

This ending lightning and whiteout then cuts directly to the lightning arcing outside the trucker bar at night, heralding the arrival of the terminator through time.the stroboscopic flash cuts in the moments immediately preceding this transition were to be shots from the climax of the first film, as Sarah in the throes of her electroshock therapy relives the arcing destruction of the first terminator, a nightmare that is still ever-present in her mend.

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MISSILE DREAM

9/10/90

Sarah's second nightmare, which occurs at Salceda's camp, was originally more differentiated from the first nightmare she has while at Pescadero.While the essence of the dream and its visceral intent remained intact in the final film -- including her vision of the innocent waitress version of herself and her helplessness against the impending Judgment Day -- the Missile Dream scene from 9/10/90 draft was only a different version on the same theme and would have been a complex visual effects scene to produce, involving bluescreen, many extras, and very large-scale miniatures.The luxury of telling the same nightmare using different imagery was not an affordable one, either financially or, in the end, narratively.

SARAH'S HEAD droops.She closes her eyes.

TIGHT ON small children playing.Different ones. Wider now, to reveal a playground in a park.Very idyllic.A dream playground, crowded with laughing kids playing on swings, slides, and a jungle gym.It could be the playground we saw melted and frozen in the post- nuclear desolation of 2029.But here the grass is vibrant green and the sun is shining.

Sarah, short-haired, looking drab and paramilitary, stands outside the playground.An outsider.Her fingers are hooked in a chain-linked fence and she is staring through the fence at the young mothers playing with their kids.A grim-faced harbinger.

Some girls play skip-rope.Their sing-song chant weaves through the random burbling laughter of the kids.One of the young mothers walks her two-year-old son by the hands. She is wearing a pink waitress uniform.She turns to us, laughing. It is Sarah.Beautiful.Radiant.Sarah from another life, uncontaminated by the dark future.She glances at the strange woman beyond the fence.

Grim-faced Sarah presses against the fence.She starts shouting at them in SLOW MOTION.No sound comes out of her mouth.She grabs the fence in frustration, shaking it.Screaming soundlessly. Waitress Sarah's smile falls.Then returns as her little boy throws some sand at her.She laughs, turning away, as if the woman at the fence were a shadow, a trick of light.

Behind her the earth splits open. In a wide shot we see everyone stop and stare as the ground heaves upward all around them.As far as the eye can see the monstrous caps of missile silos are hinging up, ripping up through the grass and soil.Now the mothers are screaming, pulling their children to them... but it is too late to run.The silo caps open, rows of them marching to the horizon.As if a tranquil reality has split open to reveal another horrible reality which has always been there, hidden beneath it.

Thunder shakes the earth.We see the obscene heads of the missiles thrusting up out of the holes in the ground. Walls of fire erupt as the fat cylinders rise like awakened monsters from the earth.

Sarah stares in numb horror as the tail-nozzles clear the silo rims, and a wall of flame roars out, devouring the cowering mothers and children.Incinerating them and rolling on, toward her. She screams and we hear it now, shrill and terrifying, mixing with the thunder as the flames wrap around her, blasting her apart and she...

Wakes up.

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SALCEDA'S DEATH

9/10/90

Salceda's Death scene from 9/10/90 draft was scheduled but never filmed due to both scheduling and cost considerations; scheduled for the first week of principal photography, the scene would have involved a great number of mechanical makeup and pyrotechnic effects, not to mention a fair number of complicated visual effects plates for computer graphics shots.Since its only narrative purpose was to show how the T-1000 follows them to Dyson's house and a number of the T-1000 gags in the scene were reprised more effectively elsewhere, it was deemed redundant to the plot and unnecessarily complicated for the first week of shooting.

EXT.SALCEDA'S CAMP - NIGHT

SALCEDA'S DOG, teeth bared, barks a furious warning.The SOUND of machine gun fire erupts drowning him out. YOLANDA, clutching a .45 Officer's Colt, sweeps Paco and Juanita up in her arms and races away.

SALCEDA is firing an MP5K on full auto, its strobing barrel flash lighting up the camp.CAMERA PUSHING IN ON HIM AS...

THE T-1000 calmly walks toward him, unbothered by the stream of bullets.Unhurried.Salceda, amazed, is backing toward his truck, and the stacks of crated grenades and ammo boxes beside it. The T-1000 keeps coming.Steps right up to Salceda, knocks the weapon away and slams him to the ground.

Salceda sprawls against one of the open wooden crates. T-1000 kneels before him.Points its finger.THUNK. Salceda screams, pinned to the crate by a two-foot long steel needle through his left lung.

THUNK!!Another needle slams through him.Salceda struggles to breath against the excruciating pain.

Salceda's hand gropes in the open crate of grenades behind him.He clutches one.Then apparently ready to cooperate he clutches T-1000's shoulder and struggles to pull himself closer, up along the impaling spikes.

Behind the T-1000's neck, Salceda pulls the grenade's pin with his free hand.The spoon flies off... CLINK.

The truck, Salceda, and the T-1000 vanish in a MASSIVE EXPLOSION as the grenade sets off the other munitions.A huge ball of fire ascends into the night.

YOLANDA, huddled with her children, the .45 held before her in a combat grip, screams as--