Rated on a 4-star scale
Screening venue: Warner Village (Birkenhead Conway Park)
Released in the UK by Columbia TriStar on December 15, 2000; certificate
15; 123 minutes; country of origin USA; aspect ratio 2.35:1
Directed by Roger Spottiswoode; produced
by Jon Davison, Mike Medavoy, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Written by Cormac Wibberley, Marianne Wibberley.
Photographed by Pierre Mignot; edited by Michael Arcand, Mark
Conte, Dominique Fortin.
CAST.....
Arnold Schwarzenegger..... Adam Gibson
Michael Rappaport..... Hank Morgan
Tony Goldwyn..... Michael Drucker
Michael Rooker..... Robert Marshall
Sarah Wynter..... Talia Elsworth
Wendy Crewson..... Natalie Gibson
Robert Duvall..... Dr. Griffin Weir
There is a store in "The 6th Day" called Re-Pet, to which you can bring a dead pet, and using a bit of DNA, and a 'sync-chording' from the animal's brain, the shop experts will deliver a clone to you, healthy as new, with all its original memories. The hero of the movie doesn't approve -- it's not natural, he says… there's something creepy about it.
Anti-cloning demonstrators agree. The shop is picketed by such protestors, who feel that the president of Re-Pet is not only violating moral law, but using the company to soften the public on the idea of human replication. His name is Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn), a billionaire scientist with his foot in political doors. Suspicions abound that he might be trying to get the 6th Day Act reversed -- a law that prevents human cloning because of a hideously botched attempt at such a thing in the early 21st Century, named after the passage in Genesis where God created life.
The plot of "The 6th Day" involves Adam Gibson (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a muscular charter pilot who finds that he has been cloned and Drucker's company is trying to kill him. The reasons for this are made clear eventually, after a lot of entertainingly violent chase sequences, but what's impressive about the picture is how thoroughly and sincerely it deals with its issues. Like all the best science fiction, it creates a convincing world and uses it as a showcase for terrifying possibilities. What if human cloning was a prospect? And corporations were trying to mass-market it? Science is nothing to be afraid of, but we should be scared of human error when man interferes with the basic make-up of life. We've already had Dolly the Sheep, and detailed propositions of organ cloning for medical purposes. We're on the slippery slope -- something "The 6th Day" knows and has a great deal of fun with.
The imagination of the movie is as good as that of "The Truman Show" -- its world, which is of course 'the not so distant future', gives us our own technological age with just a little more sophistication. Aside from the Re-Pet stores and Drucker's human clones, there are Virtual Girlfriends and remote-control helicopters, beautifully realised by the expert production design that one would expect from a big-budget movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
If there's a weak link, it's Schwarzenegger himself. The guy is a larger than life presence, and when this is recognised, as in "The Terminator" and even "Kindergarten Cop", he's a wonderful performer, but this is one of those movies where he's supposed to be a witty American everyman. It's embarrassing. He doesn't look natural. Also, the material here is so good that the last thing it needs is Schwarzenegger's baggage from his masses of shoot-'em-up flicks; if another actor stepped into the lead role, more people would be able to see that "The 6th Day" is a powerful sci-fi thriller first, and action movie second.
COPYRIGHT© 2000 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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