Terminators of future past.
The Terminator files has an old thread with a possible leak of what was once Terminator 5, a very different approach than the shitty McG one where all the Skynet robots come to the present. It seems to have been drafted back when Arnie was the Governator so he's not in it, but it seems closer to the original continuity and more reminiscent of the stuff Kyle Reese talked about in T1. Plus it has Robert Patrick!
A bit of googling found that it was also discussed on Sarah Connor Fans and the Facebook Terminator Forum, but didn't get into the mainstream (which may or may not hint at its authenticity). Anyway, I found it interesting:
I remembered one or two things so here it is again. Keep in mind that I didn't have the script all that long, so some bits may be in the wrong order and some are from a couple of conversations I had after. Also keep in mind it’s an early draft- all bets are off with how much of it will even see shooting. The female roles will probably be made stronger, for a start.
--
It opens in a place described as "metallic and organic"- a Skynet nerve centre. Spidery drones are clambering over a flourescent metal plunger interlaced with circuitry, as thick as an arm and long as a truck.
Cut to Kate Connor in the throes of childbirth. Kyle Reese is there. Kate is barking orders and calling out to John, but he’s not there. Cut back to the Skynet plunger. Activity and sound builds in intensity.
It cuts back and forth between the two. Kate and John's baby is born. It's a girl, and named Susan. At Skynet, whatever the hell they're doing finishes and the plunger is pushed. Out onto the floor oozes a single drop of liquid metal.
Cut to some resistance herding wounded and old extras onto a large boat to flee the fighting (It doesn't say where to. I guess Skynet doesn't go to Hawaii or something) and fighting a rearguard action against a group of T-1s and T-600s. Barnes is one of the fighters and Star is on the boat. Pipe bombs are mentioned in the fight. Barnes is screaming at Connor to get there quick when two harvesters appear at the end of the bay, wading through the water.
John arrives with the resistance in small fast boats with mounted guns and a couple of RPGs. It's a messianic cavalry moment that sounds a little cheesy. I can see the point of it though, because Connor gets his ass handed to him. Blair Williams’ plane is hit and she does a kamikaze into one of the harvesters. Barnes destroys two T-600s that crawl up the side of the fleeing boat, but the other harvester holes the ship and picks people off the deck as it sinks (the humans can't swim for it because of those little swimming robots in the last movie). Barnes swims for it anyway and makes it, but the harvester walks off with a bunch of humans in a chest cage, including Star.
John really loses it, kicking the crap out of dead machines and saying some savior he is, and that Williams was a great soldier. Barnes tells him to deal with it and move on, like he had to when his half-brother died.
At the resistance base, Susan is now a toddler and Kate has number 2 on the way. Kyle’s pretending to shoot toy guns with her (apparently the fans will like that.. ??). Kyle is listening to one of Sarah’s tapes about how to out-think machines (don’t act logically) and saying she sounds awesome. He asks for another tape but Kate says there are some that are personal to John.
John gets back. Kyle tells John that Susan is walking now and he missed it. John says that his dad missed him walking too, and that Star has been taken.
The Resistance holds a war council, MC’d by a woman named Perry (who has “a distinctive accent”). It includes status reports from resistance groups around the world and various teams, the Resistance seems to be getting more organised. There was something about the Chinese taking out Skynet satellites and Sydney being overrun. Perry, who seems to be head of tech, reports they’ve developed a “cold coat” overcoat and facepaint that dampens your body heat and makes you harder to see in infra red, and that they’ve almost figured out how to break a T-600’s programming code. Intel says that on the US west coast, Skynet is rounding up more and more people- they're planning something.
John wants to see what they're doing with the prisoners, and Kyle wants to rescue Star. John and Kate have an argument. She doesn't see why it has to always be him that has to go- generals don’t lead from the front and he takes too many risks. Does he want his child to grow up without a father too? John says it took him a long time to accept that this job is what he was born for. He can’t take care of his family AND take care of the resistance. The best way he can care for his child is to give her a future, even if it’s one without him. He walks off and Kate calls after him that his father is a better dad to his child than he is. There was also something about John dealing with his legend status and Barnes being the only one who understands.
John, Barnes and Kyle (in cold coats) leave in a car. Kyle drives and Barnes backseat drives. Kyle is eager to fight but John reins him in. He stresses to Kyle that they’re not rescuing anyone themselves, they’re on recon. They scope it out, set up some ordinance and call in the rest of the resistance. The last camp they tried to liberate, only one helicopter full of people made it out alive. He wants this one to be better planned.
They reach the Skynet installation at night. It’s between some ruins and the ocean, “surrounded by energy fences and laid out like a computer chip”. At one end is a smoking factory. Our heroes watch it from a ruined building. John and Barnes note perimeter patrols and start sneaking through the ruined buildings laying out remote controlled missile launchers. Kyle watches the camp with binoculars and thinks he sees Star, dragging a body. A hovering barge passes by filled with scrap metal, floats over the fence and into the camp. Around that point there’s a lot of lightning and a time-travel ball appears, but the ball doesn’t vanish and John’s face appears on it. John’s face tells Kyle that Skynet is experimenting with time travel and he’s sending a transmission from the future. Within 24 hours Kyle will find himself running for his life from a terminator and it’s vital that he escape. John advises that he turn on every machine that he can find, as the electromagnetic interference affects their tracking systems.
Another hovering barge approaches and Kyle jumps in (“don’t act logically”) from a second floor window, to find that the barge is filled with human bodies.
The barge dumps the bodies and Kyle into the camp. Other humans load them onto a conveyor belt that feeds into a blue-lit hole. The human workers are watched over by T-1s that can’t see Kyle in his coat. Kyle meets Allen Baltzer (the character they have in mind for Robert Patrick), a depressed philosopher type who walks around like a doctor tending to the other humans. When Kyle asks what’s going on, Baltzer replies “nature”; as we superseded the Cro-Magnons, so machines supersede us. He says that he’s in a hell of his own making- he created artificial stem cells before the war and feels he contributed to the evolution of artificial life.
All the “survivors” in the camp shuffle around like zombies, resigned to their fate and loading the bodies. Kyle asks what they want with the bodies- what’s in the hole? Baltzer shrugs and says that they don’t think like we do. They could be reusing the organics, or learning human anatomy, or maybe they’re just copying us. The holocaust drips from every page. Why the machines can build themselves but they need humans to dump bodies onto a conveyor belt isn’t explained. There are also T-600s walking the perimeter with energy guns. Kyle looks for Star but can’t find her.
Meanwhile John and Barnes have been watching the camp from a rooftop and arguing. John wants to go after Kyle. Barnes calls him a hypocrite for telling Kyle not to go after Star. John says Kyle is more important because of what he will do. Barnes says that’s crap because there’s no fate, and John has been listening to his fan club too much. John says that at least he has accepted who he is and doesn’t hide behind a false name and calls him “Danny”. He says that his father wasn’t the man who built Skynet, he was the man who gave his life fighting it. Barnes slugs him, and they fight. An HK is drawn by the noise and rises up next to them.
Kyle goes back to Baltzer who is checking a woman’s vitals, and asks him for help. Baltzer asks him to accept that he’s an obsolete human, tells the woman she can’t work anymore, and pushes her into the blue hole. Kyle punches Baltzer in the face. Baltzer spits out a tooth to show us he’s human, and wags a finger at Kyle. He says that evolution is something to be embraced and not fought, and rips Kyle’s suit so the terminators can see him. The bullets fly. Kyle shoots a T1 and runs but with the terminators and the fence he has nowhere to go, so he tackles Baltzer and they both go into the hole.
The HK’s spotlights light up John but Barnes pushes him out of the way and takes a blast to the stomach. John jumps onto the HK and starts blowing holes in it. Barnes is barely alive and crawls toward their transmitter.
John rides the HK as it scrapes through the buildings. When it passes the building they were in earlier, John triggers the remote missiles and wings the HK. He holds on for dear life as it slides to earth, then shoots a T-1 that the HK stops next to. He climbs to the top of the HK and finds he’s in the camp, surrounded by survivors.
Kyle and Baltzer slide down the blue hole to a room with terminator skeletons who have a steel spike that shoots out of their arm. Each body is scanned, a sample of tissue is taken, it’s stabbed through the head a la John’s stepdad, and dumped into a grinding shaft. Kyle blows the terminators away.
They find a computer that is cycling through scans of all the dead people. With each cycle, a tub of liquid metal is shifting into a lumpy approximation of the face. Baltzer croons how beautiful it is . Kyle asks how they could create something like that. Baltzer says they couldn’t on their own and that it’s taken him years to get it to that point, it’s one of a kind and in many ways alive. Kyle asks him why he’d work with the machines- they’ll kill him. Baltzer says that he accepts that. Humanity is doomed and this is the way he’ll live on in the next dominant species. The machines have built a better humanity, one that doesn’t only look out for its own self-interest, and one that won’t destroy itself.
Star’s face appears on the screen and in the metal (ie she’s dead). Skynet then identifies “Kyle Reese” and Star’s face says that she has made something special for Kyle. Kyle smashes the screen and runs off, leaving Baltzer talking to the changing metal faces and how his baby is growing up so fast.
John’s HK demolished a section of fence when it came down. He tells the crowd of humans to run for it, but they just stand there. He asks them if they want to live. They say if they run they die today, but if they stay they die tomorrow. John gives a speech about today being their independence day. He says that he’s seen people die before letting themselves be controlled. That so many good people died on Judgement day and the survivors owed it to the dead to get out there and live. That we created machines to give them control of our lives, and it was time to take it back. Two guys take the guns from the T-1 and others pick up steel bars as the first T-600 comes into view. The scene doesn’t mention a big cheer and I hope it stays that way.
Kyle finds a huge room filled with a red waterfall and vats growing hair, eyeballs and skin. A deactivated T-800 is having its flesh applied. One wall is a window where he can see all hell breaking loose outside. He makes a break for the door, which opens and John steps out. Only he doesn’t have a scar.
Kyle shoots T-John in the chest but T-John breaks his gun. They have a running fight through the base.
Meanwhile the breakout is in full swing. The survivors are using the terminators guns, pushing them into energy fences etc. There are a lot of casualties but they seem to be winning just with numbers. John leads from the front, gets a group through the wire then turns back. One of the survivors asks “aren’t you coming?” and John says he has to take care of his family, running back and looking for Kyle. The guys that break through the wire are chased by T-1s, and almost make it to the ruins when they are confronted by some T-600s. The 600s then shoot the T-1s (they’ve been reprogrammed). Perry and the resistance come into view along with a wounded Barnes. The firefight goes epic.
Kyle turns on every machine he can find, including a red machine that looks like a reactor. Kyle runs into a huge room where a giant machine covered with cables is being built, one of those enormous tank things from the beginning of the second movie. Kyle climbs up it to get away from the T-John. It comes after him but the real John swings in, stands between them and tells Kyle to run. Kyle won’t so John pushes him off the tank. John and T-John start to fight on the giant tank when its lights come on- Baltzer has powered it up from a console nearby. Kyle fights him and they smash the console, and the tank goes bezerk. It starts rolling right through the wall and the rest of the base, shooting its cannons and destroying anything in its path. Kyle ends up almost going under the treads, Baltzer’s head does.
The tank rolls right through the base and into the ocean. John swings on the wildly shooting cannon to try and blast T-John with it, but ends up shooting the tank’s power core. John ends up losing the fight and T-John grabs him by the coat just as the tank explodes.
Cut to Kate at the resistance base, talking into a radio and directing an operation in London that appears to be losing. Perry radios in and Kate asks her if they’ve recovered any survivors. Perry says “survivors? We’ve got ourselves an army”. She says “And John?”
Cut to T-John standing in the skin and eyeball room, wearing John’s coat and having his skin repaired. He reviews an image of John’s face and cuts his own face where the scar is. A machine buzzes over it and creates the scar.
Cut to Kyle waiting with Barnes. T-John walks up with a couple of survivors as the base is blown up. Barnes tells “John” to go home and change some diapers.
Cut to the wreckage of the base as the helicopters fade into the distance. The red reactor that Kyle turned on (it’s on fire) reaches 100% and liquid metal pools onto the floor. It oozes up into a humanoid form, walks out of the flames and morphs into Baltzer.
Cut to John washing up onto a beach.
A bit of googling found that it was also discussed on Sarah Connor Fans and the Facebook Terminator Forum, but didn't get into the mainstream (which may or may not hint at its authenticity). Anyway, I found it interesting:
I remembered one or two things so here it is again. Keep in mind that I didn't have the script all that long, so some bits may be in the wrong order and some are from a couple of conversations I had after. Also keep in mind it’s an early draft- all bets are off with how much of it will even see shooting. The female roles will probably be made stronger, for a start.
--
It opens in a place described as "metallic and organic"- a Skynet nerve centre. Spidery drones are clambering over a flourescent metal plunger interlaced with circuitry, as thick as an arm and long as a truck.
Cut to Kate Connor in the throes of childbirth. Kyle Reese is there. Kate is barking orders and calling out to John, but he’s not there. Cut back to the Skynet plunger. Activity and sound builds in intensity.
It cuts back and forth between the two. Kate and John's baby is born. It's a girl, and named Susan. At Skynet, whatever the hell they're doing finishes and the plunger is pushed. Out onto the floor oozes a single drop of liquid metal.
Cut to some resistance herding wounded and old extras onto a large boat to flee the fighting (It doesn't say where to. I guess Skynet doesn't go to Hawaii or something) and fighting a rearguard action against a group of T-1s and T-600s. Barnes is one of the fighters and Star is on the boat. Pipe bombs are mentioned in the fight. Barnes is screaming at Connor to get there quick when two harvesters appear at the end of the bay, wading through the water.
John arrives with the resistance in small fast boats with mounted guns and a couple of RPGs. It's a messianic cavalry moment that sounds a little cheesy. I can see the point of it though, because Connor gets his ass handed to him. Blair Williams’ plane is hit and she does a kamikaze into one of the harvesters. Barnes destroys two T-600s that crawl up the side of the fleeing boat, but the other harvester holes the ship and picks people off the deck as it sinks (the humans can't swim for it because of those little swimming robots in the last movie). Barnes swims for it anyway and makes it, but the harvester walks off with a bunch of humans in a chest cage, including Star.
John really loses it, kicking the crap out of dead machines and saying some savior he is, and that Williams was a great soldier. Barnes tells him to deal with it and move on, like he had to when his half-brother died.
At the resistance base, Susan is now a toddler and Kate has number 2 on the way. Kyle’s pretending to shoot toy guns with her (apparently the fans will like that.. ??). Kyle is listening to one of Sarah’s tapes about how to out-think machines (don’t act logically) and saying she sounds awesome. He asks for another tape but Kate says there are some that are personal to John.
John gets back. Kyle tells John that Susan is walking now and he missed it. John says that his dad missed him walking too, and that Star has been taken.
The Resistance holds a war council, MC’d by a woman named Perry (who has “a distinctive accent”). It includes status reports from resistance groups around the world and various teams, the Resistance seems to be getting more organised. There was something about the Chinese taking out Skynet satellites and Sydney being overrun. Perry, who seems to be head of tech, reports they’ve developed a “cold coat” overcoat and facepaint that dampens your body heat and makes you harder to see in infra red, and that they’ve almost figured out how to break a T-600’s programming code. Intel says that on the US west coast, Skynet is rounding up more and more people- they're planning something.
John wants to see what they're doing with the prisoners, and Kyle wants to rescue Star. John and Kate have an argument. She doesn't see why it has to always be him that has to go- generals don’t lead from the front and he takes too many risks. Does he want his child to grow up without a father too? John says it took him a long time to accept that this job is what he was born for. He can’t take care of his family AND take care of the resistance. The best way he can care for his child is to give her a future, even if it’s one without him. He walks off and Kate calls after him that his father is a better dad to his child than he is. There was also something about John dealing with his legend status and Barnes being the only one who understands.
John, Barnes and Kyle (in cold coats) leave in a car. Kyle drives and Barnes backseat drives. Kyle is eager to fight but John reins him in. He stresses to Kyle that they’re not rescuing anyone themselves, they’re on recon. They scope it out, set up some ordinance and call in the rest of the resistance. The last camp they tried to liberate, only one helicopter full of people made it out alive. He wants this one to be better planned.
They reach the Skynet installation at night. It’s between some ruins and the ocean, “surrounded by energy fences and laid out like a computer chip”. At one end is a smoking factory. Our heroes watch it from a ruined building. John and Barnes note perimeter patrols and start sneaking through the ruined buildings laying out remote controlled missile launchers. Kyle watches the camp with binoculars and thinks he sees Star, dragging a body. A hovering barge passes by filled with scrap metal, floats over the fence and into the camp. Around that point there’s a lot of lightning and a time-travel ball appears, but the ball doesn’t vanish and John’s face appears on it. John’s face tells Kyle that Skynet is experimenting with time travel and he’s sending a transmission from the future. Within 24 hours Kyle will find himself running for his life from a terminator and it’s vital that he escape. John advises that he turn on every machine that he can find, as the electromagnetic interference affects their tracking systems.
Another hovering barge approaches and Kyle jumps in (“don’t act logically”) from a second floor window, to find that the barge is filled with human bodies.
The barge dumps the bodies and Kyle into the camp. Other humans load them onto a conveyor belt that feeds into a blue-lit hole. The human workers are watched over by T-1s that can’t see Kyle in his coat. Kyle meets Allen Baltzer (the character they have in mind for Robert Patrick), a depressed philosopher type who walks around like a doctor tending to the other humans. When Kyle asks what’s going on, Baltzer replies “nature”; as we superseded the Cro-Magnons, so machines supersede us. He says that he’s in a hell of his own making- he created artificial stem cells before the war and feels he contributed to the evolution of artificial life.
All the “survivors” in the camp shuffle around like zombies, resigned to their fate and loading the bodies. Kyle asks what they want with the bodies- what’s in the hole? Baltzer shrugs and says that they don’t think like we do. They could be reusing the organics, or learning human anatomy, or maybe they’re just copying us. The holocaust drips from every page. Why the machines can build themselves but they need humans to dump bodies onto a conveyor belt isn’t explained. There are also T-600s walking the perimeter with energy guns. Kyle looks for Star but can’t find her.
Meanwhile John and Barnes have been watching the camp from a rooftop and arguing. John wants to go after Kyle. Barnes calls him a hypocrite for telling Kyle not to go after Star. John says Kyle is more important because of what he will do. Barnes says that’s crap because there’s no fate, and John has been listening to his fan club too much. John says that at least he has accepted who he is and doesn’t hide behind a false name and calls him “Danny”. He says that his father wasn’t the man who built Skynet, he was the man who gave his life fighting it. Barnes slugs him, and they fight. An HK is drawn by the noise and rises up next to them.
Kyle goes back to Baltzer who is checking a woman’s vitals, and asks him for help. Baltzer asks him to accept that he’s an obsolete human, tells the woman she can’t work anymore, and pushes her into the blue hole. Kyle punches Baltzer in the face. Baltzer spits out a tooth to show us he’s human, and wags a finger at Kyle. He says that evolution is something to be embraced and not fought, and rips Kyle’s suit so the terminators can see him. The bullets fly. Kyle shoots a T1 and runs but with the terminators and the fence he has nowhere to go, so he tackles Baltzer and they both go into the hole.
The HK’s spotlights light up John but Barnes pushes him out of the way and takes a blast to the stomach. John jumps onto the HK and starts blowing holes in it. Barnes is barely alive and crawls toward their transmitter.
John rides the HK as it scrapes through the buildings. When it passes the building they were in earlier, John triggers the remote missiles and wings the HK. He holds on for dear life as it slides to earth, then shoots a T-1 that the HK stops next to. He climbs to the top of the HK and finds he’s in the camp, surrounded by survivors.
Kyle and Baltzer slide down the blue hole to a room with terminator skeletons who have a steel spike that shoots out of their arm. Each body is scanned, a sample of tissue is taken, it’s stabbed through the head a la John’s stepdad, and dumped into a grinding shaft. Kyle blows the terminators away.
They find a computer that is cycling through scans of all the dead people. With each cycle, a tub of liquid metal is shifting into a lumpy approximation of the face. Baltzer croons how beautiful it is . Kyle asks how they could create something like that. Baltzer says they couldn’t on their own and that it’s taken him years to get it to that point, it’s one of a kind and in many ways alive. Kyle asks him why he’d work with the machines- they’ll kill him. Baltzer says that he accepts that. Humanity is doomed and this is the way he’ll live on in the next dominant species. The machines have built a better humanity, one that doesn’t only look out for its own self-interest, and one that won’t destroy itself.
Star’s face appears on the screen and in the metal (ie she’s dead). Skynet then identifies “Kyle Reese” and Star’s face says that she has made something special for Kyle. Kyle smashes the screen and runs off, leaving Baltzer talking to the changing metal faces and how his baby is growing up so fast.
John’s HK demolished a section of fence when it came down. He tells the crowd of humans to run for it, but they just stand there. He asks them if they want to live. They say if they run they die today, but if they stay they die tomorrow. John gives a speech about today being their independence day. He says that he’s seen people die before letting themselves be controlled. That so many good people died on Judgement day and the survivors owed it to the dead to get out there and live. That we created machines to give them control of our lives, and it was time to take it back. Two guys take the guns from the T-1 and others pick up steel bars as the first T-600 comes into view. The scene doesn’t mention a big cheer and I hope it stays that way.
Kyle finds a huge room filled with a red waterfall and vats growing hair, eyeballs and skin. A deactivated T-800 is having its flesh applied. One wall is a window where he can see all hell breaking loose outside. He makes a break for the door, which opens and John steps out. Only he doesn’t have a scar.
Kyle shoots T-John in the chest but T-John breaks his gun. They have a running fight through the base.
Meanwhile the breakout is in full swing. The survivors are using the terminators guns, pushing them into energy fences etc. There are a lot of casualties but they seem to be winning just with numbers. John leads from the front, gets a group through the wire then turns back. One of the survivors asks “aren’t you coming?” and John says he has to take care of his family, running back and looking for Kyle. The guys that break through the wire are chased by T-1s, and almost make it to the ruins when they are confronted by some T-600s. The 600s then shoot the T-1s (they’ve been reprogrammed). Perry and the resistance come into view along with a wounded Barnes. The firefight goes epic.
Kyle turns on every machine he can find, including a red machine that looks like a reactor. Kyle runs into a huge room where a giant machine covered with cables is being built, one of those enormous tank things from the beginning of the second movie. Kyle climbs up it to get away from the T-John. It comes after him but the real John swings in, stands between them and tells Kyle to run. Kyle won’t so John pushes him off the tank. John and T-John start to fight on the giant tank when its lights come on- Baltzer has powered it up from a console nearby. Kyle fights him and they smash the console, and the tank goes bezerk. It starts rolling right through the wall and the rest of the base, shooting its cannons and destroying anything in its path. Kyle ends up almost going under the treads, Baltzer’s head does.
The tank rolls right through the base and into the ocean. John swings on the wildly shooting cannon to try and blast T-John with it, but ends up shooting the tank’s power core. John ends up losing the fight and T-John grabs him by the coat just as the tank explodes.
Cut to Kate at the resistance base, talking into a radio and directing an operation in London that appears to be losing. Perry radios in and Kate asks her if they’ve recovered any survivors. Perry says “survivors? We’ve got ourselves an army”. She says “And John?”
Cut to T-John standing in the skin and eyeball room, wearing John’s coat and having his skin repaired. He reviews an image of John’s face and cuts his own face where the scar is. A machine buzzes over it and creates the scar.
Cut to Kyle waiting with Barnes. T-John walks up with a couple of survivors as the base is blown up. Barnes tells “John” to go home and change some diapers.
Cut to the wreckage of the base as the helicopters fade into the distance. The red reactor that Kyle turned on (it’s on fire) reaches 100% and liquid metal pools onto the floor. It oozes up into a humanoid form, walks out of the flames and morphs into Baltzer.
Cut to John washing up onto a beach.
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