| Overall Grade: |
B |
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| Story: |
B |
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| Acting: |
B |
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| Direction: |
A |
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| Visuals: |
A- |
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Cloning is wrong is the mood, who could disagree?
by Yahoo! Movies User (movies profile)
Sep 7, 2006
5
of
9 people found this review helpful
That is the message through The Sixth Day. Cloning is seriously wrong. And before and after watching the movie I agree wholeheartedly with that opinion.
The movie is about Adam Gibson (Arnold Schwarznegger, a man who goes back round to his house one evening and finds he's already there. Except he isn't him. He has been replaced with a clone, and is promptly chased by assassins who claim there has been a 'Sixth Day violation'.
The title refers to the opening statements in the Book of Genesis.
'And on the sixth day, God created man...'
And yet God plays a very little part in this movie. Only in one conversation between the evil bad guy Michael Drucker and Arnie do they even mention him. Drucker argues that if god created man in his own image, then they also gave the right to edit the genetic code. Which is essentially true, possibly. Arnie's response is for Drucker to clone himself while he is still alive with the words "So you can **** yourself."
Drucker is exploiting the basic ethics of a human being being a human being. He has secretly been giving the clones defects like liver cancer etc. so that the clones have to rely on them and cannot go to the press. Which is strange, because the Doctor who pioneered human cloning (Robert Duvall) stresses that if anyone found out that Drucker was a clone, he would be literally destroyed and so would anyone else identified.
Arnie's wife and daughter are eventually captured by the evil corporation which causes the two Arnie's to team up and on the way we have the two weakest scenes in the movie.
Arnie's unsurvivable fall into the sea a couple of hundred feet below breaks up the action, and what was believable, or 'that could happen to me' about Arnie slowly disappears.
The second has to be when the two Arnie's are making explosives for the big climatic confrontation with the bad guys. Both of them should really hate each other, or at least have a muted silence between them... but they simply laugh and joke and it's disappointing.
Arnie is generally good. He is brilliant in the family scenes. He has a great physical presence in the film and although admittedly, the script doesn't allow for the difficult paranoia-related problems of man against the system, Arnie copes admirably with what he has to do.
The confrontation with Drucker is typical action movie spectacle. Drucker meets his own clone after being fatally wounded by a bullet to the gut, and has his clothes removed from him even when he is still alive and sees how evil he really is. Apart from that, we learn that our Arnie is the clone, which was required for the movie to have any progression. And all the good guys escape happily.
The ending is uncertain and bang on. The clone has to leave. That has to be. In a way Arnie's own policy on wanting to kill who he thought was the clone backfires a bit. Maybe it's for his daughter having a normal upbringing. Maybe it's because he has a defect built into him, and he doesn't have long left. Any way, Arnie leaves and flies off in a helicopter.
The helicopters look computer-generated, which is either me being able to notice or me seeing that there is no puppet is so advanced. Either way, they look brilliant.
The vision of the future is slightly muted, which is understandable because the time it is set in is called 'the near future... sooner than you think'. A few more planes in the sky would have been welcome, but The Sixth Day is more of a film for our times.
All in all, a few things let it down, but Roger Spottiswode handles everything that has to be done pretty faultlessly.
Good work Arn, good work as Governer. |
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