Making the viral waves this Friday evening is an alternate/unused epilogue from James Cameron’s masterful Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But, as proof by the following, a movie doesn’t become a masterpiece overnight. In fact, it takes months and months of post work that begins with the editing process.
Thankfully, Cameron had the common sense to remove this god-awful epilogue that plays like a spoof. Before I read the accompanying article, I thought it was a joke. No joke.
In this scene set three decades after the main events in the movie, an aged Linda Hamilton explains in voiceover that the promised robot apocalypse in 1997 never happened after all.
“There was no judgment day,” Hamilton’s Sarah Connor says in the scene, narrating into a 2027 dictaphone. “People went to work, as they always do, laughed, complained, watched TV, made love. I wanted to run through the street yelling, ‘Every day from this day on is a gift. Use it well.’ Instead, I got drunk.”
She goes on to say that “the dark future that never came still exists for me, and it always will, like the traces of a dream.” John Connor, it’s revealed, grew up to become a U.S. Senator, with a daughter of his own.
This is why filmmakers don’t like to share all of their deleted footage – because a lot of it was trimmed directly into the trash bin…