With the Terminator series, there are two key plot 'holes' (they're not exactly plot holes, but just concepts that don't fully make sense), but they are pretty general things and in no way unique to just the Terminator films.
First, however, I'll explain the proposed plot holes.
18. In the Terminator Movies, why doesnít Skynet just send back an army of bad Terminator?
In the first film, an assassination machine was sent back to kill John Conner's mother before she gave birth to John Conner. We're not told how the time travel actually works, other than how they cannot take any items with them when they travel, so perhaps the machine takes a long time to 'recharge' and can only transport one person at a time? Either way, the Terminator is built for assassination, not warfare.
19. Or, if itís all about time travel, why didnít Skynet just send the T-X back first?
Because time would continue both in the present AND in the future, and so Skynet would not have had the technology at the time they sent back the T1 to develop the TX. Although the 'present' time between each film only spans several years, the 'future' time could very well span decades or centuries. Skynet could have sent the T2 or the TX back to the same time as the T1, so it would appear that they had been sent back at the same time, but they could have been sent back hundreds of years afterwards. But as the T1 failed, the machines probably realised that it would make more sense to try and assassinate John Conner at some other period in the past.
20. Forget the morphing powers of the Terminatrix-how the hell did those meddling kids walk right into a secret military complex?
Dude, meddling kids can get into ANYWHERE. Didn't you learn anything from Scooby Doo?
21. If Skynet is roundly defeated in the future, how can it build better Terminators?
You don't know that it is. All we know from the future is that John Conner leads an army against the machines, we're not told that he wins. The odds are greatly against him.
22. just what were the women in the strip bar staring at in Arnieís Crotch area Ė are these robots anatomically perfect?
But anyway, for the two big illogicalities. The first regards really any movie regarding 'evil machines'. Machines can't be 'evil'. A machine is exactly that, a machine, with no 'wants' or 'desires'. Why would any machine 'want' to take over the world? What would a machine do then? A machine simply follows instructions to perform a function. Your toaster doesn't refuse to toast your bread because it doesn't 'want' to. It will keep toasting until you tell it to stop, or until it breaks. Lots of films focus on the 'evil of AI' without actually realising that AI is totally under the control and under the limits of a human. An AI will only kill someone if it is programmed to.
(The example that springs to mind is 'Dream House', a film about a house that's totally controlled by a computer with a complicated AI, which somehow suddenly goes evil and kills people for some reason, and everyone blames this evil house for 'having no soul' (at which point the house starts to play soul music, which I thought was sort of funny). only at the end of the film do we find out that the programmer actually programmed the house to kill people for some reason, yet no-one starts to blame him for it at all...)
If you want some great fiction regarding AI read I,Robot by Asimov, where all the stories revolve around the Three Laws of Robotics and the interpretations of them.
Of course, it could be argued that humans are also just machines, though the human brain is far more complicated than any computer.
But anyway, the second great illogicality is something that is touched upon in almost every film regarding time travel.
John Conner sends his father-to-be back in time to impregnate his mother-to-be. So, if John hadn't sent his father back, John would never even exist.
and also, if John didn't know about the future, would he still lead that rebellion?
Would the acts of the future still happen if the present wasn't affected by the future?
The whole 'affecting the future by travelling to the past' thing is a very complicated and very confusing area of philosophy, and something that the Terminator series ran right into.
Blah, this has pretty much turned into a huge rant. I hate reading huge rants, so I congratulate anyone that's bothered reading this. I'll do the Matrix when I can be bothered.
(oh, and for the thing about the powercell.. The cell is in his head, and I don't think his head was actually damaged by the door? I don't remember, but I do seem to remember the last scene being Arnie's head, and the red light slowly turning off, HAL-style)
Signatures are for fools.