Starring:

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Duvall, Michael Rappaport, Tony Goldwyn, Sarah Wynter

Directed by: Roger Spottiswoode    Written by: Cormac & Marianne Wibberley

The Story:

Damn it, Arnie, You are DA BOMB. Not that this movie was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but Arnold is the man. Think about this....Arnold Schwarzenegger came to America when?..the late 70's, the early 80's. he didn't even speak English really. But he learned it. Then he starred in a string of blockbuster movies in the 80's....he became a big movie star! Yes, Arnie's movies have been kind of lacking of late....End of Days wasn't a big hit...but still the guy was a classic American Success Story. And to top it off, he's now Governor of California. No matter what you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, he's definitely not a loser.

In the not distant future there was this guy named Joel...I mean, Adam, Adam Gibson. There's also a fantastically rich guy named Michael Drucker. Adam and his partner  Hank run a charter helicopter business, an d just so we know its THE FUTURE, early on in the movie we

get to see Adam fly one of these souped up birds with a wrist mounted remote control while still piloting another the old fashioned way. The movie starts on a particularly busy day for Adam. Its his birthday, and he tricks Hank into spilling the beans about a surprise party his wife Natalie and young daughter Clara are planning for him. But as soon as Adam gets to work Natalie calls him to let him know that Clara's beloved dog, Oliver, had to put down, and Adam himself is slated to fly rich ass Drucker to a mountain ski place. Natalie however wants him to go to "RePet" and have Oliver cloned so that Clara won't have to know what happened to her dog. Adam has a big problem with cloning, claiming that clones don't have a soul, etc. Hank agrees to fly Drucker himself freeing up time for Adam to at least go to RePet and get some information. (Hank insists that Adam will clone the dog because he's a big softie).

Adam wakes up in the back of a cab with no memory of the past few hours, buys a really ugly SimPal doll for Clara (in lieu of the dog) and goes home. This is where he gets a surprise and its not a party! Well, it is a party. His party. And through a window he sees that he's at his party! (and the dog is there too!) All of a sudden strange people are trying to kill him and Adam discovers that he's been cloned and replaced.

Much like an earlier Arnold flick, Total Recall, this movie pits the Austrian strongman against a group of gun toting maniacs while he searchers for his own identity. But unlike Total Recall, The 6th Day is a little more than a straight action movie. There's lots of action in it, to be sure, but it tackles the morality of cloning in a way that's kind of refreshing for a Schwarzenegger movie. When I say it tackles the issue I'm not claiming that this movie is deep or anything. But compared to other movies with Arnold it is! Its legal to clone animals in this world, but illegal to clone human beings. Why? Because 10 years before an experiment in human cloning went horribly wrong. We're never told what exactly happened.....characters will mention the experiment was bizarre and awful....but no one will tell you the circumstances. Adam's pursuers meet death several times through the movie....shot in the neck, run over by cars, Adam even breaks one guys neck with his bare hands. But they keep coming back. ..as clones! The technology exists to "Syncord" a person's mind through the optic nerve and then download that mind into a new clone body. the movie never hits on this much but the implications are sort of chilling. Take Talia, one of the assassins....she says she's been killed and cloned four times. And apparently she just thinks of death as an annoyance. That at least made me think...is she really Talia? She's just a recording of Talia's memories...so does this clone really have a soul? You could download her mind into a hundred clones but they all can't "be" Talia. And because of this technology life is cheap to her. Maybe I'm getting too philosophical about it. But that's exactly what the movie's Anti-cloning Activists are protesting about. Drucker's company funds the cloning labs of Dr. Griffin Weir. Unbeknownst to anyone Weir has developed a way to clone human beings, but since its illegal no one but Drucker and a few of his goons know that. Drucker, himself a clone of the original....has been gaining support to have the 6th Day Anti human Cloning laws repealed. Clones aren't considered human so they have no rights whatsoever. Unfortunately, the Activists killed Drucker earlier in the day and they thought they'd killed Adam too. Weir cloned them both to keep that a secret, but when Drucker's men found that Adam was still alive one of them had to die to keep the secret safe. Hence the assassins chasing Adam all over town. (Its no surprise which Adam is the clone, really....think about the scene where we see Adam in the RePet store talking to the salesman. The salesman indicates that he's already talked to Adam earlier.)

This movie does have a few minor problems though. Lets face it, we all see Arnold Schwarzenegger movies because we want to see Arnold beat people up, kill a lot of nameless bad guys and crack one liners. Most Arnold movies are pretty short on characterization and drama. but in this movie they try to merge the two a little bit with the results being a little iffy. Yeah, its important to see that Dr. Weir only goes along with Drucker in his illegal clonings because he's been cloning his wife, who died years ago and is dying again. (In an evil twist we learn that Drucker has been building congenital defects into the clones so that they have limited life spans. That way he can control them....the clones don't do what he likes and BAM. He lets 'em die.) Robert Duvall does a good job as Weir but his scenes in contrast to Arnold's car chases and shooting people seemed out of place. And I wasn't really happy about the ending action sequence. It wasn't bad....heck, its just the kind of thing you'd expect in a Schwarzenegger movie....but as I said, the movie got so drama-like (Drucker seeing his own deformed clone trying to kill him, etc) that the high octane action  at the end seemed pasted on.

Still, the 6th Day is not a bad movie. I know it didn't do well at the theaters, but I don't think that's because the movie wasn't any good. Its just that it wasn't a typical Arnold movie, or at least what the expectation of an Arnold movie should be. Much as I hate to admit it, Arnold's no spring chicken. I'm hoping he has a few more action flicks left him (when he's done as Governor of California...Ye Gods, did I just say that?) because he's always got a place in The Inferno.

\Best Lines:  “You cloned the wrong man!” -Adam confronts Weir about the illegal cloning.

 Are you kidding me?

1.) When Adam is flying the second jet/copter by remote (both craft are in are in "jet mode") he flies really close to the one he's in. when I say close I mean he passes it by a space of maybe 10 feet. Now I don't know anything about flying or aerodynamics but I thought that the backwash would be a problem. Remember in Top Gun when that happened? Maybe someone out there with some aviation knowledge can help me out with this.

2.) Adam is going through the various ways he can explain to Clara that her dog has died. What is it about movie parents that can't tell their children that their pet has died? Remember Pet sematary? Its stupid. We pamper kids too much these days. Listen, I've got some bad news for you guys....if you're under 12 and reading this now HEAR THIS: YOU ARE GOING TO DIE ONE DAY! Your pets will die! Its life! That's the way it is! I don't wanna die, but I know I will one day. Its the one talent we all share. My grandfather had a unique way of telling me when one of my pets died. He just came in to my room and told me "Hey, boy...your dog died.". Yeah, I cried, but I got over it. INFERNALLY FOND MEMORY: Only once did my grandpa hesitate to tell me about a dead pet. A baby squirrel had fallen out of a tree and I took it to a vet. (I was about 12 or 13) The vet told me I could nurse it back to health and I tried. For about ten days I kept the critter in a large cage and fed him the best I knew how ...hamster food, milk, nuts, etc. He would climb up my arm and all over my chest so he wasn't afraid of me. But sadly he got sick one night and died in the morning. I heard my grandpa telling my grandma outside of my room at 7AM "the boy's squirrel is dead.". My grandma told him to bury it before I woke up and then tell me he ran off into the woods, but the jig was up. I came out of my room crying. My grandma being a realist was comforting but then told me "Listen, its not like you haven't had a pet die before. Stop crying. He's better off now.". And that's the way this movie should treat it. If Jet Jaguar drops dead right now and cloning was available I'd still get another cat.

3.) Droogs, here's a classic example of why "Bigger is not always better". Ducker's Goons want to kill Adam before he can go into his house. Adam escapes them and they fire at him. Now I don't know what kind of guns they have but they fire big blue bolts of light and pretty much demolish anything they hit. The thing is the killers don't want to attract attention from the big group of partiers in the house or the neighborhood for that matter. Why not just use an old fashioned pistol with a silencer?

4.) HEY! How did Talia remember being accidentally shot by Wiley? you can't tell me that they "syncorded" her mind from her old corpse. That would be pushing it too far! I can understand if she had herself "backed up" before she went on the mission to kill Adam. as a matter of fact that would have been more interesting. Having Talia wake up remembering that happened after she left to get Adam and having to have it explained to her.

5.) The interface for calling 911 on the video phones in this movie....well, they're stupid. By the time you got to a point to request help you'd be dead. I'm sure it looks cool on paper but in the execution it looks damned silly.

6.) If they can get a syncording of a person's mind even after death, then murder must not exist anymore! Weir plays back Drucker's syncording like it was a movie....that's how they can see how the Activists killed him earlier. If that kind of tech is around the police could find out who killed any murder victim unless the murderer chopped the victim's head off or shot 'em in the head!

Nudity and Sex: Talia is seen nude briefly. Hanks virtual girlfriend makes sexual innuendo.

Huh?:

Adam's reservations about RePet make sense. Think about it....yes, its a shame when a pet dies. If Jet Jaguar, my cat (at least ONE of my cats) kicked it right now I'd be heartbroken. But hell, I'll get another cat. What happens to Pet Adoptions when you can just get the same cat or dog cloned over and over and over?

In this movie the future world has cloning technology. There are people afraid of it, and we see them protesting against it. Makes sense...until you get to the Sim Pals! And no, I'm not talking about the game from Maxis "The Sims". Adam buys a Sim Pal for Clara and this is the butt ugliest doll I've seen in a long time! Is it a doll or some kind of clone or a robot? Either way its fantastic technology. Look at it this way...if Sim Pal Cindy is a robot and she's used a child's toy, then robotic technology must be 100 times greater for industrial or government use. Cindy looks almost human...(kind of like that ugly girl you made fun of in 5th grade that grew up to be a gorgeous chick, but now you have no shot because of your cruel taunts back in the day) . But then that would mean that lifelike androids exist or are on the brink of existing in this world. If Cindy's some kind of DNA created clone thing, wouldn't the anti-clone people be protesting against her too? Technically she'd be alive! Either way, Cindy and the Sim Pals are a revolution in technology, one that I can't believe the people that are protesting cloning wouldn't be protesting about. The movie would have been better off without including the Sim Pal thing at all.

Why would Drucker infect Weir's cloned wife with cystic fibrosis if its a childhood disease. It would make it WAAAAY to easy for Weir to discover the truth. There's probably a list ten miles long of other maladies he could have infected the clone with that might have been considered normal.

Adam shoots Marshall's foot off. But later we see Marshall has both feet. The shooting didn't kill Marshall though. Did Weir somehow regrow his foot or is he another clone?

The one part of this movie that actually gave me a shiver was when Drucker's malformed clone begins taking the clothes off of the "original" clone who is bleeding to death. Drucker even says "You're not even going to wait until I die?" to his clone. The clone matter of factedly replies "Would you?". Man, that's kind of creepy. If I were dying and my clone just nonchalantly started taking my stuff I'd be thinking "Man, I'm a real dickhead! I can't believe that I'm such an asshole!".

The Final Judgment: I'm betting that many people probably pass this movie up when they see it on a shelf. That's the thing with Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Most people either like them or just can't stand them. The Inferno grants this movie 4 devil heads. If nothing else, the futuristic world it portrayed was well done without overdoing it. I just wish I had a clone of myself. Then I could let him go to work so I could watch more movies!