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
** 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).
** 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.
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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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