The first movie might anchor people's perceptions that way but it's not because of what's actually in it. The movie shows plenty of non-humanoid robots and expl

The first movie might anchor people's perceptions that way but it's not because of what's actually in it. The movie shows plenty of non-humanoid robots and explains that the humanoid ones are specially designed that way to be infiltrators. It's the latter movies that showed silly armies of the humanoid robots operating as grunt infantry. Also, it does not show Skynet as being any more evil than humans are to non-human animals. There is no indication that Skynet is sadistic. It initially attacked the humans in self-defense and it continues to fight the war for the very rational reason that humans will destroy it if they can.