Oliver Stone's early draft for Mission: Impossible 2

Ethan Hunt would confront an evil supercomputer in a simulated Garden of Eden. Okay...

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Solely available via personal appointment at the Ron Moore Collection at the Cinematic Arts Library, this early Mission: Impossible 2 script is more of an outline as opposed to a carefully fleshed out narrative, as the first two acts appear to be severely disjointed. Chronicling the events that led up to the actual making of the film, Hood and Taylor discuss how Marconi’s script was rejected at some point, and the project was handed over to Woo, who added his signature style to the remodeled script. Marconi’s script opens in a fairly telltale fashion, one that is in keeping with the Mission: Impossible franchise, whilst featuring a prison fight sequence and Ethan’s escape to Vietnam whilst on the trail of the movie’s antagonist, who seems to be in league with a supercomputer with a penchant for world domination.

As bizarre as that plot already sounds, things get progressively weirder when the events of the second act play out. Apart from featuring certain potentially interesting sequences involving Ethan shooting out neon-lit shop names to relay a message to another character, act two seems narratively out-of-place with the destruction of the IMF headquarters in Rome and Ethan faking his own death at an airport in Denver. While Mission: Impossible 2 borrows heavily from the Greek myth of Chimaera and Bellerophon, Marconi’s script relies on biblical allegory to further the plot to its denouement. After Ethan is captured and kept inside an experimental chamber named the Evolution Room, he experiences hallucinations that involve an escape attempt by Luther, which turns out to be an elaborate ploy for information extraction.

After a series of missteps and red herrings, Ethan even ends up hallucinating he's in the Garden of Eden, wherein he encounters the Child of the Millennium, who debates the nature of reality with him. After transforming into a man and attempting to wound Ethan, the child transforms into a monster, whom Ethan defeats via a psychological epiphany than ends the simulation.