With this past weekend’s release of Terminator: Dark Fate, the long-running action/sci-fi series now consists of a whopping six films, beginning all the way back in 1984 with the original The Terminator. In addition to launching the careers of star Arnold Schwarzenegger and writer/director James Cameron, the series has remained a more or less permanent fixture in pop culture, thanks to Schwarzenegger’s iconic look and performance as the T-800.

But six films is a whole lotta Terminator. That’s 13 hours of time-traveling hijinks, at minimum. So to help you navigate the franchise, I’ve gone ahead and ranked each film in the Terminator series using the infallible metric of my own personal taste. Read on to find out which Terminator movies you need to watch, which ones you can skip, and which ones you should toss into a machine press and/or hurl into a vat of molten steel.

6) Terminator Genisys

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Image via Paramount

2015’s Terminator Genisys, a title you will never spell correctly on the first try, was an attempt to completely reboot the series for a new generation of fans, and whoo boy does it fail spectacularly on every conceivable level. Imagine Tony Hawk gearing up to do the world’s most incredible skateboarding trick and then getting eaten by a pterodactyl on his way to the event. That’s the kind of failure Terminator Genisys is.

The movie begins with the events of the first Terminator, with a conspicuously swole Kyle Reese (Jai Courntey) getting sent back in time by John Connor (Jason Clarke) to protect Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) from getting roasted by the Terminator. But plot twist! Reese arrives to find that Sarah has somehow already mastered time travel, and has thwarted her own assassination with the help of an old reprogrammed T-800 she calls Pops (Schwarzenegger).

The movie completely blows up the first two Terminator movies (which you may recognize as the only two Terminator movies anyone *really* likes) by instantly destroying both the original T-800 and the T-1000 in comically ridiculous ways. As far as Terminator Genisys is concerned, those movies never happened, and now it’s time to join Sarah and Reese and Grandpa Terminator on a time-hopping sci-fi adventure, which will ultimately involve nanobots and a holographic Matt Smith.

I really can’t overstate how utterly batshit this movie is. It’s an idea someone would’ve pitched for a Terminator Saturday morning cartoon. It’s absolutely the worst film in the franchise, easily one of the worst films of Schwarzenegger’s long career, and definitely a movie you need to watch immediately just so you can experience it for yourself. No words of mine can do it justice.

5) Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

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Image via Warner Bros.

This may be a point of contention for Terminator fans, but I think Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is a laughably bad movie. Released in 2003 after nearly a decade of franchise dormancy, Terminator 3 is essentially the end result of a bunch of producers getting together and saying, “Let’s make Terminator 2 again!” It’s such a scene-by-scene imitation of T2 that you could probably get away with calling it a parody.

The movie’s most interesting idea is the T-X (Kristanna Loken), and it’s really only the bare minimum of interesting in that we’re seeing a female Terminator for the first time. Everything else about the upgraded Terminator is absurd, including her ability to morph her arms into Mega Man laser cannons and to inflate her bosom at will. It might’ve seemed edgy and crazy in a cool way back in 2003, but it is nothing short of embarrassing to watch today. Doubly embarrassing is watching those sequences with the knowledge that at the time of its release, Terminator 3 was the most expensive film ever made.

Terminator 3 was also the first to make the bold decision to completely undermine everything that happened in T2, which became something of a regular occurrence in the Terminator movies (to date, there are three Terminator movies that alter or reboot the events of the original two films). This is also the last Terminator movie that was able to apply sufficient makeup to avoid having to concoct an explanation for why Schwarzenegger’s T-800 character, an invincible cyborg, is aging.

4) Terminator Salvation

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Image via Warner Bros.

The much-maligned Terminator Salvation, directed by enthusiastic punching bag McG, deserves some credit for being the only one of the Terminator films to truly try something different. It breaks out of the “chase movie” template of the other films and instead focuses on the war between Skynet and the human race in the near future. The end result is a giant mixed bag of more bad than good,

The film’s best idea is the character of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a modern-day convict who suddenly wakes up in the post-apocalyptic future and gets enlisted by John Connor (Christian Bale). What Wright doesn’t realize is that he’s actually a cyborg, a reveal mostly ruined by a marketing campaign that decided to include this discovery in literally every single trailer.

Bale is uncharacteristically boring as resistance leader Connor, as is Bryce Dallas Howard as his wife Kate, a character introduced in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. This isn’t entirely their fault, because watching the film you get the sense that it was originally written to focus on Marcus, with Connor as a background character. For whatever reason (studio panic over casting an A-lister like Bale and not centering the film around him seems a likely culprit), the movie spends a bizarre amount of time building up Marcus’ character, and then abruptly abandons him in favor of Bale’s Connor in the third act.

The first PG-13 entry in the Terminator franchise, which up to this point had carried pretty hard R ratings, Salvation is dull and colorless. As we learned from the Transformers movies, there’s only so many shots of identical grey robots shooting at each other that you can sit through and still be asked to give a shit. I give it points for breaking the mold and trying something new, but the execution of virtually every one of its ideas falls too short for me to actually recommend watching it.

3) Terminator: Dark Fate

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Image via Skydance and Paramount

The recent release of Terminator: Dark Fate might prove to be too little too late. The movie had a disappointing opening weekend and is currently facing a projected loss of up to $100 million. And that’s a shame, because it’s actually kind of good. It’s definitely probably the third or fourth best Terminator film. Certainly the best Terminator film of the last ten years.

Dark Fate doesn’t deviate whatsoever from the “chase movie” template followed by all but one of the previous films. And the plot’s insistance that a different world-ending future AI totally unrelated to Skynet has targeted a new woman for assassination, and just so happened to develop the same time-traveling cyborg technology as Skynet to carry out that assassination, is exquisitely dumb.

But Dark Fate makes some thoroughly appealing offers. Linda Hamilton gamely returns to the series in a major role as a grizzled older Sarah Connor, and Mackenzie Davis throws the movie in her trunk and drives off with it as a future super soldier named Grace. Gabriel Luna’s performance as the villainous Rev-9 echoes the relentless menace of the T-1000 in all the right ways. It was refreshing to actually be scared of a Terminator again. And the movie’s numerous action sequences are exciting and well-executed (for the most part), including a particularly memorable opening car chase that escalates in some interesting ways.

That said, the scenes featuring Schwarzenegger as an aged T-800 living a quiet home life are some of the most bizarre minutes I’ve ever seen in a film. It’s like the premise of a YouTube sketch from the mid-2000s somehow made its way into this $200 million action movie. They’re weirdly charming and also completely absurd, with little explanation as to how or why a time-striding murder robot would suddenly decide to raise a family as a small business owner.

2) Terminator 2: Judgment Day

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Image via Carolco Pictures

Simply put, Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one of the best action movies ever made. Maybe even the best. It has everything. Naked Arnold getting into a fight at a biker bar. A Gun N Roses tie in music video wherein the Terminator hunts Axl Rose. Delinquent children ripping off ATMs. Ubiquitous “call me when you need an asshole” character actor Xander Berkely getting stabbed in the mouth with a broadsword. See? Everything!

In the sequel, set 13 years after the events of the original, a reprogrammed T-800 (Schwarzenegger) is sent back in time to protect an adolescent John Connor (Edward Furlong) from another cybernetic assassin, the hyper-advanced T-1000 (Robert Patrick). The T-1000 is made of “memetic polyalloy,” a liquid metal allowing it to change its shape at will to mimic any human it comes into contact with and turn its limbs into bodacious bladed weaponry. Two car chases, a helicopter crash, a shootout involving roughly 100 police officers and a chaingun, and a chemical truck collision at a late night steel mill follow as the T-1000 does everything it goddamn can to smoke John Connor, and it is 100% nonstop awesome.

Terminator 2 (or T2, as it was styled in its inescapable marketing campaign) was a bonafide phenomenon when it was released in the summer of 1991. It seemed like everyone in the world was talking about this movie, and it went on to become the biggest movie of the year, the biggest of both Schwarzenegger and Cameron’s respective careers at the time, and the biggest R-rated movie ever made (again, at the time). And a huge part of that film's zeitgest-capturing buzz were its much-touted visual effects, specifically how they were used to create the liquid metal look of the film’s villain, the T-1000.

T2 was the first time mainstream audiences had seen CGI visual effects on this level, based on technology Cameron had experimented with on his previous film The Abyss. T2’s effects were mind-blowing at the time, and earned Cameron his reputation for being on the bleeding edge of new filmmaking technology. And it’s hard to overstate how game-changing the T-1000 was, in terms of both concept and execution (quite honestly, the series has never been able to top the T-1000). The only Cameron-helmed Terminator sequel gets some deserved criticism for essentially being the same movie as the first, but the action set pieces are some of the best ever filmed, and the upgraded liquid metal Terminator is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime idea that redefines genres and makes other filmmakers burn with jealous rage.

1) The Terminator

I know, I know. Some of you are definitely howling rage sounds over the fact that I gave the original Terminator the top spot over the transcendent blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But let me explain.

Director James Cameron’s breakout 1984 film is a gritty cyberpunk slasher movie about an insane robot from the future. It’s also one of the most original films ever made (claims of plagiarism from Harlan Ellison notwithstanding), and easily the most unique of the Terminator franchise in that it’s actually kind of scary.

This movie introduces us to Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), who has been targeted for termination by Skynet, an AI created in the near future to control America’s defense network that went all Ultron on everyone and decided that the world would only be free from war once all the humans were dead. (Honestly, neither Skynet or Ultron were 100% wrong about that.) Right before it gets destroyed by a squad of resistance fighters led by John Connor, Skynet sends the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a cyborg designed for infiltration and assassination, back through time to kill Sarah before she can give birth to John. The resistance fighters send one of their own, a decidedly not-swole Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), after the T-800 to try and protect Sarah from it.

It’s hard to stress what a wild idea this movie was at the time, considering The Terminator has gone on to become one of the world’s most recognizable franchises. Cameron had very little support for his film, both in terms of budget and enthusiasm from studio executives at Orion (or at least that’s how a clearly somewhat bitter Cameron has told the story). The result is a surprising amount of guerrilla filmmaking with an especially game cast - everyone, from Arnold’s T-800 to Hamilton’s exhausted Connor, gets put through the ringer. There’s even one shot in which Schwarzenegger may have punched his actual hand through an actual car window, although due to the amount of self-mythologizing surrounding the cast and crew of The Terminator, it’s hard to know for certain.

Allegedly inspired by a fever-induced nightmare, Cameron based the look and feel of the movie off of a sketch he made immediately upon waking, of a leering metal skeleton crawling across the floor wielding a butcher knife. Less of an action movie than a grimy sci-fi horror film (although there is plenty of action), The Terminator also sets the template that all but one of the subsequent films in the franchise follows (T2 included). They’re all essentially chase movies, but The Terminator elicits some of the most genuine “Oh COME ON” moments of the series when that big metal asshole just keeps refusing to die.

The Terminator wins even more points with me for its grindhouse nature, which is in stark contrast to every other installment in the franchise. It’s more at home at a midnight VHS double feature alongside C.H.U.D. than it is with the glossy action spectacles that every one of its sequels has aspired to. So for me, the best Terminator movie will always be the first one. No matter how much my T2-loving 8-year-old self would hate me for saying so.