What Measure Is a Non-Human?/Film: Difference between revisions
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* In the original ''Day of The Dead'', there's "Bub", Doctor Logan's star pupil. He becomes a zombie, but he actually knows how to control his hunger and can carry out basic human actions. Also, he is visibly anguished when Logan is killed.
** The point of that was Zombies ''slowly'' regain their former selves, so by the time of ''Land of the Dead'', Zombies for the most part are peaceful and only attack the human city because [[Karmic Death|some assholes were killing them for fun]]. They clearly ignore the thousands of humans living in slums.
* ''[[Star Wars]]'', so many examples:
** In both
** In ''A New Hope'', when the bartender of the Mos Eisley cantina says "We don't serve droids here.", [[The Book]] has Luke decide that it's not the time to fight for "droid rights" before telling C-3PO and R2-D2 to stay outside. This suggests that good guys ''do'' care about droid rights, but the issue is never followed up on (at least not in that book). One [[Expanded Universe]] source claims that the reason the bartender doesn't like droids is because they can't drink and quickly become loiterers in such a place, something that might be seen as a valid point.
** Oddly, in ''Return of the Jedi'', one scene involves the [[Cold-Blooded Torture]] and maiming of droids. Evidently, it's suddenly okay to show violence inflicted on droids that you'd never get away with if they were living creatures.
*** Arguably, it could be to show the intense cruelty of Jabba the Hutt and his underlings, with a bit of [[Klingon Promotion]] as well. It's true that such torture on organic creatures would never fly, but that's mostly because such violence would jack up the rating unnecessarily.
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*** This seems to be the main viewpoint on droids pre-Luke's time. R2-D2 is one of the few droids who is treated as an equal (ie ''never'' had a memory wipe). Obi-wan treats all droids as a dime a dozen. In those words.
*** Nobody except a few select people can understand what Artoo is saying.
*** Likely, in a universe that lasted this long, there have been previous attempts by droids like IG-88 to squash all fleshies. It probably came about after stopping one of these attempts, we just haven't gotten the story yet. (We would hope it doesn't start as a rebellion over [[Humans Are
*** The EU does indeed show that there have been past attempts by rogue droids to eliminate "organics". Some of them, like HK-01's rebellion over 4000 years prior to the movies, were ''much'' bloodier and more public than IG-88's attempt.
*** The EU features an incident in which a childcare droid's brain is downloaded into a new body, indicating that droids sometimes get this kind of treatment because they can be rebuilt. How big a problem is this? ''[[Chaotic Evil|HK-47]]'' manages to pull it off at one point.
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** To be fair, the audience gets a rather skewed perception of droid intelligence from watching Artoo and Threepio- because protocol droids have to interact with organics a lot in relatively sophisticated ways and astromechs need to be versatile, their models are a lot more intelligent than the average droid. Also both have gone much longer than normal without memory wipes, meaning that they develop personalities in ways other droids seldom do. Most droids are more like the battle droids seen in the prequel movies- to say they're barely sentient is being generous. Whether or not its right to treat the approx 1% of droids that ''are'' sapient as mere machines is actually an important issue in some parts of the EU, notably the ''Coruscant Nights'' trilogy.
** The Battle Droids of the prequel trilogy are treated as nonhuman, and their "deaths" at the hands of the heroes are even played for laughs. But they still react in a very lifelike way, even acting scared when someone comes at them brandishing a lightsaber!
*** In [[The Phantom Menace]], their brains were not in their skulls, but they were remote controlled from the Droid Control Ship in the orbit, so their program survived the body being gleefully chopped to pieces. Until young Anakin murdered them all. In ''[[Attack of the Clones]]'', however, one droid displays some individuality when it seems confused and concerned because its legs are not functioning properly - because [[Crowning Moment of Funny|its head has been attached to C3PO's body! (And vice versa!)]]
** A chunk of the Empire's cultural backbone is its doctrine conforming to [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Human_High_Culture Human High Culture], holding to the belief that humans were inherently superior to others. Healthy male humans, at that. The [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/NhM NhM category], standing for Non-huMan, was applied to various degrees to droids, [https://web.archive.org/web/20130801030343/http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Imperial_non-Humans aliens, near-humans, cyborgs], and [https://web.archive.org/web/20120105153837/http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Imperial_women women]. Some from each category except the droids, if they were devoted and forceful enough, rose to power anyway, but it was an uphill battle, and in several cases was only possible at all because they [[Never a Self-Made Woman|hitched their careers to those of male human officers]].
*** Interestingly, of Palpatine's thirteen handpicked Grand Admirals, three of them - Thrawn, [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Osvald_Teshik Teshik], and Pitta - fell under the Non-huMan category. Thrawn was a striking near-human who got his position by being almost obscenely good. [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Osvald_Teshik Teshik] was the most compassionate and non-evil Grand Admiral, but after suffering serious injuries and being forced to replace 75% of his body with cybernetics, was widely derided and dismissed, though he kept his rank. [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Danetta_Pitta Pitta], interestingly, a human with near-human blood, was the one most obsessed with Imperial racial purity, "purging" anyone who was revealed to have an impure ancestry.
*** A [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Uwlla_Iillor female officer] who rose to commanding an Imperial Interdictor Cruiser while serving under Thrawn got transferred into the regular Imperial navy, and ended up [[Defector From Decadence|defecting]] to the New Republic after finding that her superiors didn't listen to her suggestions.
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** And then there's the Tusken Raiders; Anakin returns to Tatooine and meets his stepdad, who opines that they are mere beasts that stand and walk like humans, implicitly justifying their eventual slaughter by Anakin. (Although Anakin's troubled mind after the fact, combined with the oddly human character of the droids and the concept of clone armies, suggest that Lucas intended to [[Playing with a Trope|blur the lines.]])
** This is related to [[No Endor Holocaust]]. As brought up in the movie ''Clerks,'' the second Death Star was still under construction, and all those construction workers got blown up along with the Death Star. George Lucas, in his commentary for ''Attack of the Clones,'' mentions that he figures the Geonosians were probably the ones building it and that it's okay for them to be blown up along with it, because they're "just large termites." They're still sentients, George!
** The Sith; in ''[[The Phantom Menace]]'', both Yoda and Mace Windu seem to regard them as abominations, referring to Darth Maul as "it" rather than "he", suggesting Sith are soulless monsters (and to be fair, most of them are). Even in the - chronologically - later ''[[Return of the Jedi]]'', Ben seems to doubt there is anything human left in Darth Vader, saying he is ""more machine now than man, twisted and evil." Fortunately, this assumption proved wrong.
* Johnny 5 in the ''[[Short Circuit]]'' movies subverts this trope to a degree; although he is a thinking, feeling machine, he's hard-pressed to convince anyone else of the "thinking, feeling" part, and is often treated in a way that would be considered abuse if performed on a person, as a result. Once he ''does'' convince someone of his sentience, they react to any harm that befalls him with appropriate shock and horror. The producers have specifically stated that they wanted to avoid the standard "treat 'em as if they're human" response most robot movies portray, and use the movies to look at it from a [[Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism|more realistic]] approach.
** The bigwigs at Pixar admit that Johnny 5 served as inspiration for the character of Wall-E; and how many years Wall-E spent alone on an abandoned Earth to develop a personality (with NO brain wipes!).
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** Likewise ''[[Blade Runner]]'', though this earlier film was much more subtle in its approach.
** For a kid-friendly ([[What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?|but not really]]) take, see the book and film ''[[The Mouse and His Child]]'', which gets downright philosophical about it.
* ''[[Shaun of the Dead]]'' plays the zombie issue arrow-
* Fairly blatantly played in the [[B-Movie]] titled ''[[Attack of the The Eye Creatures]]''. No, that extra 'the' in there is not an accident. The hero and his [[Neutral Female]] girlfriend actually have to prove that they didn't run over a person while driving dangerously, but a ''thing'', so that's okay. Nobody wonders if the the Eye Creatures have families at home.
* In the movie adaptation of ''[[Lost in Space]]'', treacherous backstabber Dr. Smith is kept alive, despite having sold them out and tried to have everyone killed, is allowed to live because he's human (though he likes to brag that he saved their daughter's life, the fact that he endangered it in the first place is ignored by everyone). When he becomes a mutant half-human hybrid, the family have far less qualms killing him, or {{spoiler|injuring him so his mutant alien spider spawn will eat him}}. They admit the only reason they wouldn't kill him was because he's human.
** In defense, the first time he had already been contained; killing a prisoner is always kind of iffy. Once he mutated into the big monster thingie, he was a real threat to everyone, and carrying a [[Weapon of Mass Destruction]] in his gut.
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* Explored ''hardcore'' in ''[[District 9]]''. In theory, the aliens are legal residents of South Africa, with all the standard rights to life, liberty and property that that entails. In ''practice'', they're confined to an uninhabitable trash-heap, exploited as sub-minimum wage labor, forced to subsist off of offal and cat food, left to fend for themselves against crime syndicates that the police have no interest in dealing with, and are generally treated little better than animals. When an "unlicensed" nest of alien eggs is discovered by the military, they proceed to "abort" the unborn aliens. ''With a flamethrower.''
** Christopher is easily the most compassionate, humane and kind character in the film, to both humans ''and'' aliens. Christopher is ''one of the aliens.''
** Contrast with Wikus, the film's protagonist who ''orders'' the flamethrower's use on the alien nest. It was a ballsy move to take a character that started out displaying [[Complete Monster|far less humanity]] than the aliens and make him sympathetic in the end.
* Utilised in ''[[28 Days Later]]''. When Frank, a loveable survivor and middle-aged single father, becomes infected, Jim and Selena hesitate for a split
* The film titled ''[[I, Robot (film)|I Robot]]'', though only loosely based on Asimov's works (or Eando Binder for that matter), also deals with this issue. Sonny is practically identical to the rest of the robots he is based on, but because he was built with the ability to ignore the Three Laws of Robotics and therefore act more human, he is seen with much more sympathy by the characters. However, they have no qualms about mowing down countless robots in order to save the day. Even ''Sonny himself'' doesn't seem bothered by brutally destroying his own kin. It's only after the [[Big Bad]] is defeated that Sonny genuinely begins to worry about them. Although considering the fact that they were trying to kill them, and that only destructive force would suffice, it might be considered justified.
** Kind of a case of being infected by [[The Virus]]: As long as [[Master Computer|VIKI]] controlled them, they were an endless army of [[Mooks]].
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* Inverted in ''[[The 13th Warrior]]'', wherein the protagonist learns that the barbaric antagonists are humans wearing bearskins rather then demonic trolls, and is ''more'' willing to kill them as he is distraught that human beings could commit such violence and barbarism.
* Seemingly subverted in George Miller's ''[[Happy Feet]]'', though Your Mileage May Vary, depending on your interpretation.
* [[Arthur C. Clarke]]'s novels and their film adaptations ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey]]'' and ''[[2010: The Year We Make Contact]]'' explore this subject with H.A.L. 9000, the [[
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* Uncomfortably invoked by the "boarding the Arks" scene in ''[[2012|Two Thousand Twelve]]''. Let's see, based on the onscreen action, they've saved about 1,000 humans... and two giraffes. And ''no'' [[That Poor Plant|plants]]. Good [[Homestar Runner|jarb]]. (Yeah, yeah, we know it's an obvious Noah's Ark parallel, but...)
* [[Godzilla]] himself invokes this trope quite often. On the one hand, there are those who wish to destroy him simply because he's a giant monster (also, there is that tiny problem of him smashing major cities.). On the other, there are those who wish to keep him alive so they can study him. And that's not even including all the times he's saved Japan from even ''worse'' monsters.
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* ''[[And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird]]'' plays with this. The villain knows that the robot Newman has been [[Haunted Technology|possessed]] by human intelligence Matt, and yet dismantles him. Matt's family regards this with appropriate horror. On the other hand, Matt's son hitting him in an argument isn't treated seriously at all.
* In a rare example of What Measure Is A Non-Living Object, the male and female leads in ''[[National Treasure]]'' both opt to risk the latter's [[Disney Villain Death]] rather than [["Friend or Idol?" Decision|allow an item they're carrying to fall into a pit and be lost forever]]. Justified because they're both die-hard historians, and it's the freakin' ''Declaration of Independence''.
* In the silent movie ''[[The Golem]]'', the
* In ''Starchaser: The Legend of Orin'', if you are a robot, '''RUN'''. You have a 90% chance of being killed, regardless of how much personality or plot importance you have. If you're a fembot, you're the character who gets kidnapped, mind raped, sold into slavery, and killed. This movie seriously hates robots.
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