The 6th Day

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1. ›Film Review: The 6th Day (2000)@drax1151d

   

   Career of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1990s had hits and misses, with latter becoming more common as the decade was drawing to a close. New decade didn’t look more promising at the beginning. That impression was drawn based on commercial and critical failure of The 6th Day, 2000 science fiction action film directed by Roger Spotiswoode.

   The plot of the film is set in near future, when the cloning technology is so advanced that the owners can recreate dead house pet in matter of hours. Human cloning is, however, strictly forbidden. This is of little concern to the protagonist, family man and helicopter pilot Adam Gibson (played by Schwarzenegger) who is tasked to bring Michael Drucker (played by Tony Goldwyn), wealthy and influential owner of cloning corporation, to a mountain ski resort. Although the flight went in a routine way, Gibson suddenly realise that there is another version of himself in the world – person named Adam Gibson that drives his car, uses his credit card and makes love to his wife Natalie (played by Wendy Crewson). But, before he is to face his double, Gibson has to run from the vicious assassins led by Robert Marshall (played by Michael Rooker). Gibson’s main problem is that he is a cloned, and therefore, represents proof that someone broke the laws against human cloning. Since police doesn’t believe his tale, he has rely only on his muscles and best friend Hank Morgan (played by Michael Rappaport).

   Many critics dismissed The 6th Day as the watered down and uninspired copy of Schwarzenegger’s previous science fiction hit Total Recall. Certain similarities are hard to miss - in both films Schwarzenegger plays ordinary man who, due to malfunctioning future technology, has to fight not only for his life but also to deal with identity crisis. Inevitable comparisons between two films were inevitably at the expense of The 6th Day. Roger Spottiswoode clearly lacks talent, passion and vision of Paul Verhoeven, although his directing is adequate. His work, however, can’t hide the lack of more explicit violence, sex, nudity and black humour that characterised Schwarzengger’s films in 1980s. Spottiswoode, however, leaves enough space in pauses between action scenes to allow audience to thinks some important philosophical and ethical issues related to human cloning, mainly after characters played by Rappaport, Goldwyn or Robert Duvall (in the role of scientist Dr. Weir) give various answer on the dilemma whether cloning is Frankenstein-like technology that could destroy humanity or a small price to pay for peoples’ happier, healthier and longer lives. Script (which was allegedly doctored by renowned screenwriter John Sayles) takes the anti-cloning stance, but it isn’t consistent with it, allowing protagonist to use cloning for his benefit. The 6th Day, despite its flaws, provides more than enough entertainment for the audience and can be recommended even to those who aren’t big fans of Schwarzenegger.

   RATING: 5/10 (++)

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2. ›The 6th Day: Schwarzenegger at his not so finest@netflixr1870d

   This science fiction action movie has a very interesting plot and a relatively great script as well as pretty decent effects. However, the film was kind of ruined by bad acting, surprisingly a lot of which comes from Arnold himself.

   SPOILERS AHEAD

   Now I know that Arnie is kind of the same character in almost every movie that he is in and this sort of acting is a big part of the reason why he is so popular as well. As far as I know, this is the only time when someone had to act with Arnold that is even close to his level of acting: The actor I am referring to is Arnold Schwarzenegger himself when he acts with a clone of himself in the latter stages of the film. More on that later

   [src](https://reelmovieposters.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/DSC_3796-copy.jpg)

   The movie isn't terribly far in the future although it is never actually defined, but it is far enough that the ability to clone things is presented. Other than that the cars, the surroundings, everything other than the hybrid choppers seems like modern-day environments. This level of science fiction, I think, is easier for studios to replicate and also tend to appeal to me more because the entire experience isn't dominated by CGI and it shows that this was not a major focus of theirs because the little bit of CGI that is used doesn't look very good.

   [src](https://www.writeups.org/wp-content/uploads/Adam-Gibson-Sixth-Day-h1.jpg) _{for example: The animation of this non-existent helicopter/jet craft is pretty bad, even by 2000 standards}

   Arnie plays the role of Adam Gibson who is a freelance helicopter pilot for hire. One day he is hired by a company that clones animals and human organs to fly their billionaire owner for a ski trip. During the ski trip the owner's group is ambushed by someone unknown and the entire group, including Adam is shot.

   Adam however, does not die and when he eventually returns home he finds that there is already another Adam Gibson inside his house hanging out with his family. It is at this point in the film that we are introduced to the fact that while cloning human organs is allowed, the cloning of entire human beings is banned in the country's "Sixth Day" laws.

   Adam suddenly finds himself being hunted by thugs that work for the company and basically this fight or flight situation carries on for the next hour or so as Arnold's character does what Arnold's character always does: Piece together the clues and gradually make his way to the people responsible leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake.

   Despite the film's weak acting, the idea behind the story is still pretty compelling as is a lot of the scale model work that they do with the entire cloning procedure. Much of this appears to be done with full scale models rather than CGI, and this is something I always appreciate, probably because I am a child of the 80's when we had no choice but to do such things since a computer was the size of a bus and barely capable of doing more than spreadsheets.

   The film is still decent and reasonably entertaining until we reach the point where Arnold actually starts to interact with his own clone. This is where I see a side of Arnold's lacking acting ability on display like I have never seen it before.

   [src](https://s27589.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/The-6th-Day-2-Adams-624x352.jpg)

   I'm not suggesting that it is easy to act with something / someone that isn't actually there but I would have thought that someone as accomplished as Schwarzenegger would be a lot better at it than he is. The performance where he is talking to himself is beyond abysmal... it looks and feels amateurish in a way that I truly believe that I actually could do it better. It's just horrible and really takes away from the overall movie.

   Arnold got nominated for 3 Razzies (the awards for "worst" something) as both "worst leading actor" and "worst supporting actor." He and himself were also nominated for "worst on-screen couple." Fortunately for Arn, Battlefield Earth came out in the same year as The 6th Day and swept the Razzies, deservedly/

   Should I watch it?

   Despite the fact that I have said almost nothing good about this film I actually think you should watch it but not because it is good but because it is so bad that it is difficult to imagine that they dropped nearly $100 million on this film. After advertising it lost money and was one of the few Schwarzenegger films to do so.

   This is one of those plots that I think could be revisited with better actors and actually make it into a good production. As lazy as Hollywood has become it honestly wouldn't surprise me if they do exactly that.

   Some good news is that Terry Crews is in this film, presumable because they really struggle to find someone that looks as though they would be a physical match for Arnold in all of his films. I think this film, which is on Netflix in most regions right now, is at least worth turning on the background so you can get a laugh at how terrible the acting is. If anyone is expecting it to be a "good film," they are going to be disappointed because it definitely isn't that.

   

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