SCRIPT: "TERMINATOR" by James Cameron


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The Terminator's eyes swivel as he hears the single non-rhythmic sound. Kyle and Sarah run to the end of the catwalk, but find the door there locked.


Kyle picks up a length of pipe to use as a weapon.

SARAH: Come on!

They double back to escape the cul-de-sac. The Terminator steps in front of them, cutting them off.

REESE (shouting): Run!

He pushes Sarah roughly and she stumbles away. Kyle raises the pipe with his good arm as the Terminator advances.

REESE (over his shoulder): Run, damn it!

She hesitates, backing away. The cyborg swings at Reese, steel clangs on steel. Kyle strikes and parries but is sledgehammered back. Kyle lands in a heap, smashed against a stanchion of the railing which prevented him from falling to the factory floor twenty feet below. Sarah turns and runs. The cyborg approaches Reese. A fuse burning, Kyle's face streaked with blood, pressed to the floor as a metal foot clangs down. His eyes snap open.

Sarah falls, gets up, runs on. The Terminator draws back for a death blow. And Kyle rolls with the last of his strength, raising the pipe bomb he has been cradling. He jams it between two hydraulic cylinders just beneath the cyborg's armored ribcage. Then rolls off the catwalk. Terminator has an instant to react, reaching for the bomb, before it explodes. Sarah is pitched forward by the blast and slides on the floor. Slams up against one wall.

A withering spray of shrapnel strafes the walls around her. Pieces of scrap metal clatter throughout the factory, raining down. Sarah, very still. She winces and opens her eyes. Slowly looks up as the smoke clears. The Terminator is gone. unrecognizable clumps of burning debris lie scattered about. Looking down through the grating floor she sees Kyle's body. Sarah on catwalk above.


Kyle's eyes are half-open. Still. His face peaceful. Fire is climbing some plastic tubing and triggering a sprinkler head. It begins to rain. Sarah, sitting up as the water runs over her. She looks down. Protruding from her right thigh is a twisted piece of metal. Shrapnel. Part of the cyborg. She pulls it out, grimacing. Her leg is broken. It is a long time before she can gather the will to move.


She sees a wall phone several yards away, beyond the debris from the explosion. She starts to crawl toward it. She passes a large clump of debris. Suddenly it rolls over! Now recognizable as the Terminator's head and arms, with half of the scattered torso trailing wires and twisted metal. It lunges for her! Sarah wants to scream this time, from the depths of her soul, but there is no scream, only a dry shivering sob.


The Terminator drags itself scraping over the floor, steel fingers clutching. Sarah is shaking and whimpering as she scrabbles away, crawling in agony. Sarah flops from the catwalk onto the moving strip. She is carried into the intricate lattice of equipment. Sarah rolls off weakly before going under a set of sorting rollers.


Terminator crawls after her, dragging its body. It tracks her unerringly, eyes glowing. Sarah moves deeper into the dark, clashing jungle of machinery. Around her is a rain-drenched tangle of cables, pipes and unforgiving mechanisms of steel. The Terminator clambers through after her.Water pours into her eyes as she catches sight of something. A familiar control box. She drags herself toward it. The Terminator spots her wedged in a tiny crawl space.


No way out. It crawls the last few feet, eyes red in the dark. Hypnotized, Sarah watches the Terminator reaching toward her. She is jammed in a corner. Sarah's hand claws around to the front of the control panel, seeking the red button. Her wet fingertips feel the button. The Terminator, his steel hand reaching out. Sarah's face inexplicably calm, eyes steady in that infinite instant. She clenches her teeth to keep from screaming as she waits.


The Terminator's hand reaches for her throat to crush the life out of her and end its long mission.

SARAH (voice icy): You're...terminated...fucker!

Her bloody finger stabs the button down.


The cyborg has been led into the maw of the hydraulic press. The stamping plate thunders down! Tons of mechanical pressure flatten the Terminator's head and body like tin-foil. The press screams, jamming solid. Lightning snaps out in one brief blaze, leaping to surrounding machinery, arcing to Sarah's wristwatch.


All the Terminator's energy is released in one second. The narrow gap between the upper and lower plates: a pinpoint of red light dwindles and goes out. Sarah, shivering uncontrollably. The steel fingers are frozen an inch from her throat. She can only stare as water runs over her.

Factory, later: We see the side rail of an ambulance gurney snapping up into position. Sarah's eyes are closed and she is rolled by two attendants past the site of the last explosion. Several police officers are picking through the debris.


From the gurnery as it is wheeled out, we see two factory employees. One, the plant manager, bends to examine a piece of the cyborg lying at the base of the hydraulic press. A Cop notices this.

COP: Hey look, I told you I don't want you touching anything until we're done. You got that?

MANAGER: Sure, officer.


He stands and palms a small object to his assistant. They step around the corner.

ASSISTANT: What's that?

MANAGER: Microcomputer chassis. But I never saw stuff like that anywhere.

ASSISTANT: Weird. Jap stuff, maybe?

MANAGER: Get it down to R and D first thing Monday morning, huh?

ASSISTANT: Good idea.


Sarah is being lifted into the ambulance. She looks up as the doors are latched shut as we follow her gaze.


The sign above the entrance of the building reads: Cyberdyne Systems.

Landover, later: close up on cassetter recorder, the center capstans of a tape turning.

SARAH (V.O.): ...and the hardest thing is deciding what I should tell you and what not to. Well, anyway, I've got a while yet before you're old enough to understand the tapes. They're more for me at this point... to help get it all straight.

Sarah at the wheel of a dusty landrover parked at the pump island of a tiny gas station. All of its signs are in hand-lettered Spanish. Beyond lies an expanse of scrub desert. The sky scowls with an impending storm. Sarah speaks quietly into a hand microphone as a dark-complected attendant laconically fills her tank.

She cradles the cassette recorder in her lap, in the lee of her swollen belly. She looks to be about six months along. Under her down vest she wears a leather shoulder holster and the butt of a .357 Revolver presses against her breast. She tugs the vest closed as the attendant glances her way. A German Shepherd sits in the back among taped boxes and suitcases.


SARAH (continuing): Should I tell you about your father? That's a tough one. Will it change your decision to send him here...knowing? But if you don't send Kyle, you could never be. God, you can go crazy thinking about all this...I suppose I'll tell you...I owe him that. And maybe it'll be enough if you know that in the few hours we had together we loved a lifetime's worth...


Click. Whir. Sarah jumps at a sound nearby, breaking her reverie. A small Mexican boy has snapped her picture with a beat-up Polaroid camera. He holds it out to her, speaking rapid Spanish.

ATTENDANT: He says you are very beautiful, Senora, and he is ashamed to ask five American dollars for this picture, but if he does not, his father will beat him.

SARAH: That's a pretty good hustle, kid. Four. Quatro.

The boy takes her four dollars and she watches the snapshot develop. It is a good photograph of her, the wind lightly ruffling her hair, expression thoughtful, slightly sad. We recognize it as the one Reese carried in 2029. She slips it into her short pocket.

ATTENDANT: Mil trescientos...fifteen dollars American.

As she pays him, distant thunder rolls. The boy yells something in Spanish as he runs off.

SARAH: What did he say?

ATTENDANT (accented): There is a storm coming in.

Sarah gazes at the thunderheads building up out over the desert. Heat lightning pulses in their depths.

SARAH (quietly): I know.


She pulls away, driving across the flat desert on a ribbon of highway. A brilliant flash crescendos from horizon to horizon out at the rim of the world.


THE END




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