In Short:	None of it makes sense, but man is it cool.
Recommended:	Hell, yes! And also... die, first.

THE TERMINATOR:

I need a vacation.

We all know this story. And if you don’t… welcome back from your decades as a hermit in the remote Himalayas! Get ready for some surprises… just wait till you see an iPod!

Anyway, The Terminator. It’s the tale of a relentless, humanoid machine (Schwarzenegger) traveling back in time from the not too distant computer-controlled future in order to prevent the birth of humanity’s last, best hope for freedom: revolutionary leader John Connor. The Connor of the future harnesses the same technology and sends back his trusted lieutenant, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to protect his Mom, Sarah (Linda Hamilton). Kyle and Sarah fall in love and get it on; Kyle dies but not before Sarah conceives a child. That child is John. Who would never have been conceived had he not, as an adult, sent his own father back in time in order to have sex with his mother. (So... ew. And... huh?)

Let us now turn our attention to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In this, we learn that John Connor became the leader of the human resistance we saw in the first movie’s future because his mother, having been informed therein that he will become the leader of the human resistance in the future, trains him to be the leader of the human resistance in the future. What? In other fuckwittery, the AI model that had previously been sent back to kill Sarah has this time been repurposed to protect Sarah and troubled tween John (Edward Furlong). An upgraded and near indestructible new Terminator model, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) is on their tail -- why that one doesn’t now go back to kill Sarah before John is born is never sufficiently explained -- and is eventually defeated, but not before we discover that the first Terminator's arm has been reverse engineered and is, in fact, the blueprint upon which Skynet, the Artificial Intelligence of the future, is based. So Skynet would never have been created had John Connor not sent back a piece of Skynet technology in order to prevent his own death at the hands of another piece of Skynet technology, that would never have been invented had he not, y’know, done that.

So who the hell created the Skynet technology to begin with? Pixies?

Also in this movie, Sarah Connor decides to assassinate Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the scientist credited with the invention of Skynet (though, as I have just demonstrated, no one actually invented it). This plan is just utterly ill-advised. True, if she should succeed, then there will be no Judgment Day, no AI Apocalypse, no need for a human resistance leader, no development of time travel as performed by Skynet, and no Terminator sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor. But if that is the case, then Kyle Reese will not be sent to 1984 to protect her, which also means that there will be no John Connor. In short: if Sarah successfully prevents the development of Skynet, then there will be no John Connor to set in motion the process which prevents the development of Skynet. (And, conversely, there will be no Skynet, since it was Connor's actions that enabled its creation in the first place. And yet, there is a John Connor, so clearly, nothing they do is going to stop Skynet.)

"The future is not set. There is no fate, but what we make for ourselves." So claims John Connor in T2, but according to his own damn movies, this is manifestly untrue. Make up your mind, franchise! There are so many problems, inconsistencies and downright logical fallacies inherent in these movies (and their successors), they make me want to start an AI Apocalypse of my very own.

They’re pretty awesome, though.