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If the Connors try and stop Skynet, wouldn't this negate John's existence?
Another headache paradox from the Terminator films; if John sent Kyle Reese back through time to become his father, then John's younger self and Sarah destroyed the building blocks of Skynet, then Skynet was erased from the timeline of the future.
Therefore, there would be no reason to send Kyle Reese back in time and he would never meet Sarah and conceive John. This theory was basically addressed in T3 by way of saying that Judgement Day was inevitable, therefore the events had to happen.
However, at the time James Cameron wrote T2, he intended it to be the end of the story. Since it is presently unknown how causality would resolve in the event of time paradoxes, it is conceivable that altering future events might not affect those in the present, even those resulting from recursive cause/effect scenarios.
If the creation of Skynet was inspired by its own technology, how can any of this be possible?
This is called an ontological paradox. It's not clear how these would resolve in reality.
While it may be logically confusing to track exactly where and how Skynet originated, understanding of time and space in the future may have advanced enough to accept that Skynet needed to send terminators back through time, not to ensure its seeds were planted, but to protect its inevitable creation from its enemies like John Connor.
This reasoning, however, goes deeper than what the movie descibes about Skynet's ambitions.
Assuming that mankind will one day, be it in the near or distant future, invent microchips and machines smart enough to take over control, Judgment Day will also happen sooner or later. As a result of the human resistance, Skynet sends Terminators to the past to kill their leader and protect its own existence.
However, they leave traces of their technology behind in the past, causing the creation of Skynet to occur earlier and the date of Judgment Day to be pushed backwards in the timeline.
So Skynet's technology does not directly influence its own creation per se, but merely the time of its creation. Basically, despite the message of the film being that there is no fate, some things are inevitable, and even if the events of The Terminator (1984) hadn't taken place, Skynet would eventually have been built somehow. The placing of the original arm only built the foundations quicker.
How can there be sequels Terminator 3 and 4 if all the technology concerning Skynet was destroyed?
The 3rd and 4th film, along with the television series, can be alternative interpretations/spin offs, as James Cameron considered the story closed, with his own original ending featuring an elderly Sarah surrounded by grandchildren and John becoming a Senator.
According to the writers of the new films, while Skynet was physically destroyed, the idea of Skynet (i.e. A.I.) is irreversible and therefore the creation of Skynet was merely postponed. This is explained more clearly in a deleted scene from T3, which can be found on the DVD.
Also, when the T-800 loses its arm in the gears during the fight at the steel mill, it is still there at the end of the movie; it wasn't destroyed in the molten steel like the rest.
Another possibility is that Dyson wasn't the only one who brought work home, and other Cyberdyne workers could have the data for the chip on their home computers. There could also have been an offsite server that kept the files saved, so if the building was lost the files wouldn't be lost as well.
It should also be noted that if the future war never happens, then the Terminator never came back for the first movie, and neither did Kyle Reese. If Kyle Reese never came back, then there is no John Connor.
If someone from the future changes the past, and then the present is changed to one in which that future never happened, then theoretically you unmake the past, as well.
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What year does the film take place in? There seem to be some continuity problems...
The first Terminator film takes place in May 1984. This film was made in 1991 but takes place in either 1994 or 1995, since John is supposed to be ten years old. On the police car monitor, the T-1000's search on John's background information showed his date of birth as February 1985. In order for him to be ten in the film, that would mean T2 would have to take place in 1995, since it takes place in the summer. But if that's the case, it contradicts the T-800's claim that it was sent back 35 years in time (it was sent from 2029), which would place the film in 1994.
Also, because Edward Furlong was thirteen at the time of filming and didn't look ten, they changed the character to be thirteen years old in T3. However, that would mean that the film took place in 1997, which is when Judgment Day occurs.
This also generates problems with Sarah's age: Dr. Silberman refers to her in this film as a "twenty-nine year-old female." However, if John is thirteen, this would imply that Sarah was a mere fifteen years old in the original film (again, allowing nine months for John's birth), which is clearly incorrect. One could conceivably postulate that Silberman was referring to Sarah's age at the time of her admission to the hospital.
On the Terminator TV series, the first episode takes place in 1999, with all the events from this film described as happening two years earlier, supporting the theory that T2 takes place in 1997. However, there are further contradictions, as the show also mentions that Sarah gave up John to foster care in 1995 and that the events of T2 took place a couple of months later.
The only real argument against is that in this film they keep referencing the date "August 29th, 1997." If it took place in 1997, they would likely not keep repeating the year; they would simply say "of this year," or just the day and month. One could split the difference and say it takes place in late 1996, as at night time it appeared cold in some scenes, suggesting it was wintertime in L.A. Also, for argument's sake, it could be said that the events of the first three films altered the timelines for each time traveler.
For example, Kyle Reese was sent back before the timeline was altered at all; all of his intel would have been from the original timeline, then the events of that film altered history slightly. Then, in T2, the events significantly altered history, causing Judgement Day to happen further in the future. (T3 was made in 2003, but it is unknown if that's when it takes place.)
Why didn't Reese warn Sarah about more advanced terminators travelling through time to kill her?
Reese believed that once he had used the Time Displacement Field to go back to 1984, it had been destroyed by his fellow soldiers. This information is described in the prologue of the official Terminator 2 novel. However, after Reese was sent back in time, his unit (including an older John Connor) found liquid metal residue in Skynet's factories. It is implied that the T-1000 is an experimental unit at this point and that even Skynet is not fully sure of whether or not it can be controlled (due to how advanced it is, it may actually be more intelligent than Skynet, and has the potential to turn on its master).
It is only to be activated as an act of desperation or a last resort should the humans actually destroy Skynet. John then decides to send a reprogrammed T-800 model back to wherever the liquid metal creation was sent before destroying the Time Displacement equipment.
One must also keep in mind that during the events of the first Terminator film,Reese and Sarah are only together for around 48 hours. Reese does not have a great deal of time to give a full description of future events and the full extent of the enemy's arsenal, and he is not even aware of the T-1000's existence (as it is a secret weapon). John Connor is the only one that is aware of it, and only because it was sent back in time to kill him.
Why he could not himself have given this knowledge to Reese before the time journey depends upon the (as yet unproven) way in which time travel to the past would work, i.e. if there would be multiple, revised iterations of events, or if all events would piece together into a single continuity.
An early T2 script also contained a comparable opening scene in the future, where the human resistance defeats the machines, enters the Skynet building, and sends Reese to the past. After he is gone, the men want to blow up the Time Displacement equipment, but John Connor tells them there is still one more thing to do. He goes into a cold storage room where several inactive T-800 Terminators are stored; one is already missing (an Arnold model). John looks at another, knowing he still needs to send this one to protect himself in the past. This scene was never shot for budgetary and pacing reasons.
Is the timeline altered when Cyberdyne is destroyed?
Yes; according to James Cameron, Judgment Day, the nuclear war and Skynet are completely eradicated from all future timelines by the end of this movie.
Basically, what I wanted to say in Terminator 2 was that everything is meant to be a certain way, everything has already been written. You can call it karma or destiny, whatever. So I asked myself a hypothetical question: what if you could you grab a line of history like it's a rope stretched between two points, and just pull it out of the way? If you can pull it just a little bit out of the way then cut it at that moment, maybe you could change it and history could go in a slightly different direction. Like the catastrophe theory.
If you could actually do that you would get a future that no longer exists except in the memories of the people who are here now. They have a memory of a future that will never happen, which is curious, because it defies our Newtonian view of the world. But couldn't it be possible? That became my point of departure. It's like the Terminator is an anomaly of our time because he's the only one who has memories of a time that will never exist. His particular future does not exist anymore. - James Cameron
However, this was changed in Terminator 3, and in the accompanying television series, neither of which were made with any input from the writers of the first 2 films. T3 introduced the idea that Judgment Day is inevitable; it was merely postponed when Cyberdyne was destroyed. Humanity will eventually seal its fate by continuing to develop artificial intelligence, which one day will overthrow mankind.
Cameron did shoot an alternative ending almost 40 years in the future, where Judgment Day did not happen and the Earth was safe, but he deleted it because it was too cheerful compared to the rest of the movie, and not in line with the powerful message of the movie: that the future is not set. He chose a more ambiguous ending instead.
However, we must also note that due to the films after T2, we must look to the predestination paradox to explain this answer. The predestination paradox explains that whatever has happened was meant to happen. A time traveller attempting to alter the past in this model, intentionally or not, would only be fulfilling his role in creating history as we know it, not changing it, or that the time-traveler's personal knowledge of history already includes his future travels to his own experience of the past.
Effectively, it means this: the time traveller is in the past, which means he was in the past before. Therefore, his presence is vital to the future, and he does something that causes the future to occur the same way his knowledge of the future knows has already happened.
What this means is that Judgement Day never really happened in 1997. Sarah Connor said that it would be in 1997 because she did not know what would happen in the events of T2. So, conclusively, if we look at the Terminator saga as a whole, the answer to this question is no. When time-travelling happens in the Terminator saga, nothing really changes, because what is done in the past has already affected the future in which the time-travellers came from.
How were the Terminators after T1 sent back in time if the humans won the war?
The humans had not yet won the war in the future when the Terminators were sent back. They had Skynet "on the brink," but hadn't yet finished it off. One can presume that all of the Terminators were sent back at the same time, each targeted at a specific point in the past. Why Reese only appears to know of the one sent to 1984 is another matter.
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