< What Measure Is a Non-Human?

What Measure Is a Non-Human?/Film

  • 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 some assholes were killing them for fun. They clearly ignore the thousands of humans living in slums.
  • In both the Star Wars trilogies, droids are established as having hopes, fears, desires, and moments of insight or creativity. Nevertheless, because they are not organic, no one feels any qualms about slaughtering vast numbers of them in the prequel trilogy (although the Trade Federation droids may not have been sentient, a line of thought which occurs rapidly upon viewing of their ineffective tactics).
    • 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.
      • 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.
      • The audio commentary for Attack of the Clones had a joke about how they ruled out putting R4-P17 in the arena with Anakin, Obi-Wan and Padme because it would have gotten then an NC-17.
    • In the Star Wars Expanded Universe books by Timothy Zahn, it's noted that droids undergo a memory wipe every so often to prevent them from developing personalities, and the reason some droids do develop them is from infrequent wipes.
      • In a subversion of this trope, the IG-series battle/assassin droids (notably IG-88 and IG-72) actively refused wipes, having become self-aware and went SKYNET on their creators, making a life as bounty hunters.
      • Which creates the unfortunate implication that droids are sentient but brainwashed slaves.
      • Again, it was explained that this needed to be done, to keep the personalities form "bleeding" into the ship the astromechs were in, to prevent "compatibility" issues between the maintenance hardware, other droids, and humans. Luke's X-wing could only be used by him, and Artoo needed to be there any time maintenance was done, because the ship would only work and communicate with the Luke/Artoo pair.
      • And apparently to prevent sensitive information from getting leaked in the event the droid fell into the wrong hands, as mentioned in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
    • And in the Star Wars videogame Knights of the Old Republic, "Destroy Droid" is considered to be a light side power.
      • 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 general bastardry because we really do have too much of that going on now. Maybe turn back the clock to Skynet a bit. "You're all inefficient lumps of carbon! Why must you shut down for a half hour each day to release useable minerals and fibers, and then shut down another eight to function normally! Obviously you biologicals are like outdated software!)
      • 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? HK-47 manages to pull it off at one point.
      • Admittedly, a lot of the droids you encounter in the games don't seem to be intelligent.
    • 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.
    • A chunk of the Empire's cultural backbone is its doctrine conforming to Human High Culture, holding to the belief that humans were inherently superior to others. Healthy male humans, at that. The NhM category, standing for Non-huMan, was applied to various degrees to droids, aliens, near-humans, cyborgs, and 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 hitched their careers to those of male human officers.
      • Interestingly, of Palpatine's thirteen handpicked Grand Admirals, three of them - Thrawn, Teshik, and Pitta - fell under the Non-huMan category. Thrawn was a striking near-human who got his position by being almost obscenely good. 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. 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 female officer who rose to commanding an Imperial Interdictor Cruiser while serving under Thrawn got transferred into the regular Imperial navy, and ended up defecting to the New Republic after finding that her superiors didn't listen to her suggestions.
      • A shining example of this discrimination is in the X Wing Series novel The Krytos Trap. Ysanne Isard had a virus tailored to infect nonhumans, and only nonhumans, and kill them in horrible ways. She released it on Imperial Center and let the New Republic fight for and claim it so that it could spread. It could be cured using a large amount of bacta; the thought was that the New Republic would bankrupt itself and the nonhuman population, seeing that humans were unaffected and held some of the bacta back for combat injuries, would work at odds. Isard casually told one of her subordinates that it might be prudent to hold some members of the most useful species in quarantine to be used as breeding stock to repopulate their worlds. The subordinate was horrified - he held with Human High Culture, but he didn't think of nonhumans as grain to be poisoned and set out for vermin, with some pristine kernels held back for planting season. Isard was a bit of an extreme case.
      • There actually was one case of a droid rising to high rank in the Empire: Grand Moff 4-8C.
    • 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 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!
  • 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 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!).
  • The company the protagonist works for in Moon has no moral qualms about incinerating clones after they've fulfilled their 3-year contract and has done it several times. The general public is not so forgiving after finding out the truth.
    • It can be justified as the lifespan of a single clone, once activated, is roughly three years. The clones tend to fall apart and start vomiting up their own insides by the end of it. You could argue that incinerating them painlessly while they fall asleep thinking they are going home is the most humane way of dealing with the situation
  • This trope, and all its myriad mutations, forms the plot of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. The plotline and characters of AI were inspired by a series of short stories/novellas written about 20 years ago by Brian Aldiss. Stanley Kubrick's script was particularly focused on the first story, "Supertoys Last All Summer Long." Some critics later theorized that one reason the film didn't do so well in its initial run was because the audience disliked having these issues addressed so directly. Like "Blade Runner", it has since developed a cult audience.
  • Shaun of the Dead plays the zombie issue arrow-straight—until the epilogue, which has numerous cases of people retaining their personalities, mostly, after they've become zombies. Which makes the earlier events rather a bummer...
  • 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 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.

Professor John Robinson: "I couldn't kill the man... But I can kill the monster!"

  • 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 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 second—he's obviously becoming affected by the Rage as they watch, but his daughter is looking on and Frank was the makeshift team's father figure. The left-over soldiers from West's unit who have been watching them, however, drop their cover and just shoot him already. Charming. Back at the base, Infected soldiers are more of a threat, though the men have almost certainly known them for longer—Lieutenant Mailer is clearly someone they knew in 'life' and they feel no qualms about keeping him on a chain in the yard and watching him starve.
  • The film titled 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 VIKI controlled them, they were an endless army of Mooks.
    • Even if Sonny had been operating under the Three Laws, he still wouldn't have hesitated to fight other robots to save humans. Technically, Law # 3 only requires them to preserve themselves from harm, not one another, which is why the obsolete robots attacked VIKI's Mooks in the storage lot instead of just obstructed their passage.
      • Even if Law # 3 did require them to preserve their kin, it's still overridden by Law # 1.
  • Played with in Return of the Killer Tomatoes with Tara and FT, tomatoes turned to the side of good, if only the humans could learn to love them! But, to many, the only good tomato is a squashed tomato...
  • 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 AI Master Computer of the USS Discovery. In 2001, HAL goes insane and murders the crew, before being disconnected by the final surviving astronaut, Dave Bowman. The reason for this is not fully revealed until 2010—he was given irreconcilably conflicting orders. After he's restored to full functioning, however, it suddenly becomes necessary for the astronauts to leave Jupiter immediately or be killed. The climactic conflict arises over whether it's acceptable to ask HAL to risk his own destruction to save the humans aboard the Leonov. The majority of the crew is for lying to him and disconnecting him if he fails to comply, but Dr. Chandra, HAL's creator, feels that he will make the proper decision if told the whole truth. Chandra turns out to be correct. Their final farewell is a Tear Jerker.

Curnow: So it's him or us? I vote us. All opposed? [...] The ayes have it.

  • Uncomfortably invoked by the "boarding the Arks" scene in Two Thousand Twelve. Let's see, based on the onscreen action, they've saved about 1,000 humans... and two giraffes. And no plants. Good 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.
    • This is especially evident (and inverted) in Tokyo: S.O.S. in which Kiryu (AKA "Mechagodzilla 3") sacrifices himself by sending both himself and Godzilla deep into a nearby ocean trench in order to save Japan after realizing that human beings deserve to live. Especially poignant considering Kiryu Is the original 1954 Godzilla. Likewise, the human characters no longer see Kiryu as a monster, or even a simple weapon, but as a hero that, in his own way, became "human".
  • Invoked in RoboCop. After Murphy's "death" but before his cyborg body is complete, there is a scene where a surgeon informs an OCP executive that she was able to save Murphy's arm. He complains that leaving more human tissue than necessary risks making RoboCop a legal human being with rights, and orders her to amputate the arm to prevent this.
  • What measure a non-simian? Subverted in the Planet of the Apes films where humans are worth far less than Apes. In Battle for the Planet of the Apes they even have a chant: Ape Shall Never Kill Ape! Ape shall never kill ape!
  • To the film Thor's credit, the answer is that it is pretty high. Part of Thor's Character Development was that he realized that Jotun aren't just a mindless race that he can just stroll in and kill for his entertainment. Near the end of the film, he pleads with Loki to stop his genocidal plan. Ironically, Loki (who had found out he himself was a Frost Giant) calls them "a race of monsters".
  • And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird plays with this. The villain knows that the robot Newman has been 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 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 Rabbi—who is essentially a good character—has no qualms about turning his creation the Golem on and off according to his convenience, and eventually prepares to destroy him when the latter has fulfilled his purpose. The Golem, who is not malicious in itself, more and more takes offense at the way the humans treat him. His resulting rebellion leads up to the climax of the movie.
  • 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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