Blue-and-Orange Morality in Live-Action Films.
- The Firstborn, the aliens who built the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The way the books put it:And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
- The Addams Family: Played for (ironic) horror in the sequel, Addams Family Values, (the title says it all, doesn't it?), when Gomez and Morticia's infant son contracts a disease that turns him from pale-skinned and mustachioed into a stereotypically cute baby with a healthy complexion and curly blond hair. Granny tells the parents that the condition might be incurable.Granny: He could stay this way for years, perhaps forever...He could become a lawyer...An orthodontist...President.
[Gomez screams in anguish.] - AVP: Alien vs. Predator, if you take away the human point of view (which puts them as Evil Versus Evil). The Alien is a vicious non-sapient beast, and the Predator is a Proud Warrior Race Guy whose society revolves around hunting armed prey. Not much morality involved... but both are dangerous to man (after all the tagline is "Whoever wins, we lose").
- Although it's a bit subverted with Scar forming an alliance with a human character who helped him, meaning that the race does have a Code of Honour that puts them morally a little closer to us. They also normally hesitate in killing targets without weapons, and those that do it are considered "bad bloods" and these can form their own clans against the 'noble' hunters as seen in Predators.
- The Predators in general. They are a species focused on the hunt, and all of what we see of their culture and technology is obsessively focused towards hunting in all of its forms. The only time we see a Predator engaged in an activity other than hunting is in Requiem, which has a shaky place in the Aliens/Predator canon.
- Aunt Abby and Aunt Martha in Arsenic and Old Lace are two of the nicest, sweetest, most generous old biddies you could ever hope to meet. They've also murdered a dozen people with poisoned wine, convinced that because their victims were old gentlemen without any loved ones, that it's an act of charity on par with their donating old toys to orphans. The revelation that their nephew Johnathan is a murderer as well doesn't faze them, though they are horrified when he wants to put one of his victims in the same grave as one of theirs, because that's indecent. They also are completely forthcoming about what they've done.Mortimer: Aunt Abby, how can I believe you? There are twelve men down in the cellar and you admit you poisoned them.
Abby: Yes, I did. But you don't think I'd stoop to telling a fib. - Borat plays this for laughs with the titular Politically Incorrect Hero, who has an incredibly unusual sense of right and wrong due to Deliberate Values Dissonance. He strongly dislikes homosexuals but regularly engages in activities with other men that carry gay undertones (such as brawling buck naked and bathing in a ridiculous mankini) without realizing that it comes across as gay. He also has no problem with incest or eating cheese made from his wife's breast milk.
- Dust Devil: The Dust Devil claims to only kill those who are prepared to die, but it’s not above using loopholes to push people to want to die. It seems to have somewhat of a clear concept of simple human pleasures and love, but still chooses to commit gruesome acts of violence.
- Freaks of Nature has an alien invasion taking place in the peaceful monster-dwelling town of Dillford and abducting everyone on sight, human or otherwise. Turns out the reason they are doing this is because they are after the veggie riblets, the town's produced snacks which is integral for their meals, and they aren't actually out to harm the population: quite the opposite, they abduct them and keep them inside force-field prisons to prevent the monster half of the townsfolk from harming the human half, which really doesn't work out since their presence unwittingly causes the monsters to break out of control and slaughtering everyone they see. When the aliens finally explain the situation to the townsfolk, they are less than amused.
- The Cenobites in Hellraiser, as originally presented. They are extra-dimensional sense freaks of the highest order whose entire raison d'etre is the pursuit of stimulation. Whoever solves their puzzlebox is brought into their world and "gifted" with untold pleasure and pain, whether they actually want it or not.
- The titular game Jumanji. It’s a magical board game that unleashes various African creatures out in the real world. It will even send out things the players fear or mold Van Pelt after someone they love or fear. However, its actions are not outright malicious towards the players and seems to only do this to challenge the players and make the game more interesting. It also has warnings on the side panels informing potential players what they will encounter and promising to undo everything if someone wins. While its morality is ambiguous, it clearly hates cheating and will punish its players for it.
- In Jupiter Ascending, nobody outside of Jupiter is genuinely concerned with the harvesting of billions of innocents like the people of Earth and others in order to have the genetic material for Recodes, comparing it to animals being humanely slaughtered for their meat and it being perfectly legal within the system.
- Labyrinth: The Goblin King claims to be generous with Sarah by living up to her expectations: taking Toby away at her request, being frightening when Sarah expected him to be, reordering time, and setting up the entire adventure for her.
- The Mothman PropheciesLeek: You're asking for an explanation for something that can't be explained rationally. You know the buildup of energy before something happens? The way your hair stands up before lightning strikes?
John: "Before something happens." Do you mean they cause disasters?
Leek: Why would they need to?
John: All right, then, are they trying to warn me?
Leek: Their motivations aren't human.
John: All right, then what do they want?
Leek: I have no idea. What you really want is to know: why you?
John: Yes.
Leek: You noticed them, and they noticed that you noticed them. - Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men. He seems to be following some kind of Übermensch ideal, or possibly some odd variant of fatalism, but it's never made fully clear what his philosophy is, only that we have no way of comprehending it. In one of the most famous scenes from the film, he forces a shopkeep into a lethal coin toss for making small talk.
- Prometheus.
- Engineers had a hand in creating humans and human culture, but also attempt to kill them whenever they come face to face. Trying to figure out their reasons is one of the mysteries of the film.
- David's morality is ambiguous. He seems to value knowledge above all else and will place human lives in jeopardy to satisfy his curiosity. If you read between the lines, David's using the Engineer goo on Holloway may have been, in his mind, sanctioned by Wayland, who did tell him to "try harder." Looked at in a certain way, he does even get a kind of informed consent, asking "what would you do for the answers you seek," and taking the reply of "anything" as permission to proceed. Still rather Blue and Orange when compared to regular human ethics, though.
- John Kramer (aka the Jigsaw Killer) in the Saw movies has a very rigid moral compass. Unfortunately said moral compass is so incomprehensible that it's foreign to pretty much everybody except himself. He kidnaps people who (in his mind) are not appreciative of the life they've been given, places them in either a life or death situation or a booby trap and see if they have the will to survive it. And if they don't survive it, then in Kramer's mind, they apparently didn't want to live badly enough. Never mind that the solutions to said booby traps often rely on extremely painful self-mutilation like cutting off a body part. And if someone is lucky enough to survive one of his tests (of which there are not many), he considers them rehabilitated… ignoring all the psychological trauma they now have that will very likely make the problem that Kramer was trying to "fix" even worse. Throughout all the films, Kramer keeps insisting that he's not a killer. That being said, he does seem to genuinely believe that everybody deserves a second chance, as even when he tests people that have wronged him personally, he still puts them in a scenario they (theoretically) could survive.
- The probe in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Completely prepared to destroy a world (possibly inadvertently) because it can't communicate with anyone within it. Whatever it's seeking is apparently satisfied once it converses with whales.
- The Hutts from Star Wars are viewed by most of the galaxy as untrustworthy crimelords and Corrupt Corporate Executives, and they honestly seem somewhat confused why this is a bad thing. Even the nicer ones are clearly only playing by the rules because it's convenient for them, and you can count down the seconds until they start taking minor 'shortcuts'. All the same they often end up allying with the good guys, both because they recognize the benefits of the kind of peaceful, free universes they tend to create, and because they genuinely fear and dislike the Axe-Crazy behavior of those like the Sith (which after all, often have no profit to them).
- The martians or whoever built the ancient reactor in Total Recall (1990). A scientist explains to the Big Bad that if activated, the reactor will most likely trigger a chain reaction that will cause a meltdown of planetary scale. Richter questions why the builders of the reactor didn't think of that, to which Cohaagen responds: "Who knows what the hell they thought? They weren't human."
- Jeff Bridges plays a very disturbing serial killer in a little known 1993 remake of a 1988 Dutch film called The Vanishing. In the film, he describes how he saved his daughter from drowning, believing that this act earned her adoration. He then decides that he is unworthy of his daughter's love unless he proves to be capable of performing an equal act of evil.
- The Mi-Go from the 2011 adaptation of The Whisperer in Darkness are a classic example, in line with what Lovecraft originally had in mind. After Wilmarth, the protagonist, thwarts their plan to open a mystical portal from Yuggoth (read: Pluto) to Earth, and then crashes a plane into the ritual site for good measure, they actually go out of their way to save his brain, place it into one of their cylinders and take him around the cosmos on incredible adventures. Even though he had foiled a plan that had likely been in the works for several centuries, and despite the fact that they said he was unworthy of being anything more that a sacrifice earlier in the film. Their minds work very differently, it seems. They're also repeatedly stated to be Consummate Liars. Another, earlier scene has Wilmarth stumble into one that was on its way to the ritual. The Mi-Go simply kicks Wilmarth out of its way and pays no more attention to him, nor does it inform its buddies of his presence. Had it done so, the ritual would not have been foiled in the first place.
