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Review: "The Sixth Day"
Adam Gibson (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Sixth Day's pilot-hero, is something of a Luddite. He drives an old Cadillac, disapproves of his partner's virtual sex partner, espouses lots of old-fashioned family values, and refuses to clone his daughter's dead dog. In fact, he finds cloning an abomination. Life and death are the natural order of things, he opines to a friend, the business of God, not man. The Terminator has morphed into Dagwood Bumstead, but good for him: at least somebody is worrying about how the gene map will be used.
Almost from the minute Gibson starts lamenting the immorality of cloning, we know it's a matter of minutes before he finds himself the target of the ubiquitous, evil bio-tech corporation which haunts his time, and is himself cloned. Not only is he genetically replicated, but he gets to watch his other self live in his house, tuck his daughter in and mess around with his wife.
His Adam Gibson is a helicopter excursion pilot who gets entangled in a murder mix-up that pits him against an evil corporatist genetic entrepeneur and brings him into the center of a plot to commercialize cloning and end human death and suffering -- for great profit, of course. He's the now-familiar lonely hero fighting the powerful and complex forces of science that are about to overwhelm the world with their technological wizardry, avarice and moral vacuity. It's amazing what a little brawn can do against even the most sophisticated security systems.
This is a Schwarzenneger movie of course. So no matter how many laser beams, futuristic know-how, security guards and fingerprint ID systems they throw at him, he can't quite ever be stopped or even slowed down. At points, everybody in the movie is moralizing. In a curiously off-kilter performance, Robert Duvall plays cloning mastermind Dr. Griffin Weir, who is astonishingly slow to realize there are tricky issues involved in the cloning of human life.
Schwarzenegger has become such a clunky icon that almost every movie he makes becomes a self-parody ("I don't want to expose her to any graphic violence. She already gets enough of that from the media," Gibson quips of his daughter before one fight breaks out).
Certain staple features of these films are beginning to emerge -- the evil, amoral, ruthless and greedy corporation which has acquired life-altering new technologies (this is becoming more believable by the day), and the hapless human, noble victims trying to sort their way through this unchartered and disturbing new world.
Still, Sixth Day is fast-paced and graphically inventive, although the use of DNA-threads in movies is already stale. Schwarzenegger's character raises all the right questions -- who gets to use the human gene map, and for what purpose? Who gets to decide when life should begin, when it should end, whether gene mapping should be used to alter human life?
Unfortunately, the off-screen world already has plenty of heedless bio-tech companies, hard at work on profiting from gene mapping, promising to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease -- perhaps one day, even death itself. History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris, but we live in a time when the inventors and purveyors of technology bristle with arrogance and greed as well as well as creativity and enterprise.
In The Sixth Day, Schwarzenegger is similiarly conflicted; he alternates between raising troubling questions about the potentially horrifying impact of genetic research and treating it as a David Letterman sort of joke. The villains in this movie get killed and cloned so often it becomes a joke even to them, as they complain of aches and pains from several bodies and lifetimes ago.
Naturally, The Sixth Day has a Hollywood ending. Schwarzenegger raises the questions, but doesn't know what to do with them, so he ends up ducking the issue in hokey fashion. But soon enough, it may not be such a joke to us.
This film has the surreal effect of raising issues that ultimately shouldn't be left only to Hollywood, as seems to be the case. In addition to being entertained, we end up feeling curiously grateful that at least somebody is talking about them.
Ok...let us look at some of his other work, shall we? Conan - sure JEJ was the bad guy, but the asian dude was on arnold's side. T2 - black dude, sure he created the bad robots...but he came around and helped. True Lies - if you are looking for terrorists...then the balkans are always a good place for material...they have been fighting for WAYYY too long.
People who say "x is racist" really should have their head examined. I mean hollywood provides the freaking scripts and casting. Sure there are ethnic bad guys..but there are ethnic good guys as well. I mean, you could look at the Matrix as racist because all the agents were white.
The whole point is the that racism, although it has been a big issue in the real world, is NOT IMPORTANT in hollywood. They are so politically sensitive it has made movies into drivel.
Get of your supposed high horse and start thinking. Sure there may be some racists out there, but blindly saying someone is based on FICTUOUS material is just stupid.
(hey, I wonder what score this will get)
Well, if I was cloned today, it'd be over twenty years before my clone looked and talked like me, since he wouldn't instantly age. I think you're talking about identical twins, and even twins aren't completely identical.
The inventor's just Yakub from the Nation of Islam, that could be the point. According to the NOI, Yakub made a mistake and made white people, so maybe he made another and made robots?
What a bad batting average that guy has.
oops - you're right - been a while since I saw it.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Whistler in "Sneakers"
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
There was an interview on Radio 4 (the BBC's highbrow radio channel) with I think Jeremy Paxman (of the Enigma Machine recovery story). The chap who had a chip implanted in his arm last year was talking about cyborgs and enhanced capabilities, and Paxman was beligerantly saying how credulous he was, and kept going back to the "why not just switch them off" defence against global cyborg domination. It was quite a mess.
However, there are movies where the movie can convey a message different than the opinion of the main character. Or at least it can deal with the issues in a balanced enough way that viewers can draw their own conclusions. Just because this was an action movie, doesn't mean it wasn't a thinking movie.
The fact that the villain was out to make money wasn't the problem. The problem was that he a) cloned some people without informed consent, and b) added defects so that he could control those people. The speech about the ability to save one person with a transplant, but not be able to save another because of the cloning laws made sense. (even if he was using it to convert the SecState). Also, his bribing of politicians seemed to be somewhat ok because the laws were evil--clones could be legally killed on sight. That is a basic violation of human rights.
Arnold backed down from his position during the movie. The first step was when the real luddite killed his friend (who was actually a clone of his friend). He had been completely fooled. He realized that these clones had souls. Of course the final step was when he himself turned out to be a clone.
His change was evidenced by his buying of cloned pets. He said that he changed his mind about a few things.
Another good Arnold "thinker" disguised as an action movie is Total Recall.
But where has history shown that pursuing technology without much thought has led to disaster? Let's see... there's Frankenstein (oops, literary example), Atlantis (oops, myth. If historical, we don't know why it really fell), Butlerian Jihad (oh wait, that only hurt the purveyors of technology because an organized mob of luddites destroyed everything. Oh, and it's literary)..
Now, history does show the destruction of technologically advanced peoples. There was Rome--but it got beaten because of political rot, not technology. Germans got beaten in spite of their technology--but the whole world was ganging up on them, and they instigated battles on too many fronts. So I guess they died of hubris--but again political, not technological hubris.
But what about pollution, global warming, and rapid use of unreplenishable resources? Well, we're working on correcting those issues. So far they haven't destroyed us.
Now there are small-scale tragedies that have resulted from the free use of technology. Like Asbestos workers, Marie and Pierre Curie, etc... But there were many deaths that have resulted from blatant unwillingness to pursue science/technology--like all those poor people who were denied water and fresh air when they were sick, and bled by leeches. So I think history kind of balances it out...
So Jon, I ask you, where is this historical evidence you allude to?
pronoblem
pronoblem
Interesting, I never noticed that before myself but now I'll have to look back over my Arnold collection. I think you mean Eraser with Vanessa Williams though, not The Bodyguard with Kevin Costner.
SAVE THE BATS
... considering that 99.9% of the movie is shot on location in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. The evil cloning center they blow up is really the downtown library building. :}
Hippies smell.
I was thinking the exact same thing when I saw that :)
No matter how many times I've seen it, Blade Runner is still 'new' and amazing.
I still don't see these "ethical ramifications". How is this any different than giving cows drugs to make more milk? Or giving chickens drugs to give them more meat on their bones? It's the same exact thing.
The mall he goes into to visit RePet is the Toronto Eaton's Centre!
I live in T.O. and that one scene killed the disbelief for a little bit. A 3000km Taxi ride??!:)
Posted using Fizzila, Carbonated for OS X.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Yeah, in Eraser, he protected Vanessa Williams, who is, um, black. And she was alive at the end of the movie.
The reason black people die in Schwartzenegger movies is because Arnold is usually the only person who survives Schwartzenegger movies and he's not black. No hidden agenda here. Lots of white folk died in Blade, but you don't see me leading demonstrations...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
He invented a technology that got out of his control. He was also brilliant. I don't see this as being a traitor, any more than Oppenheimer (sorry, he was white...bad example maybe) was a traitor.
There's enough real racism out there that we shouldn't be worried about this piddly shit.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Making the technology that makes a nuclear bomb possible does ABSOLUTELY advance humanity and science, and it is not possible to make that technology precluding its use as a weapon. I'd go even further and argue that the friction between the US and the USSR drove the most productive and life-enhancing technological advancements in history.
Look, the nuclear genie was not going to stay in the bottle. Had America not won the war in Europe when it did, it was very possible that the Nazis would have had The Bomb before America. It would be an odd value system indeed that would think that this was preferable to the Americans obtaining it, and demonstrating it, first.
The reason that there wasn't a WWIII is because there COULDN'T be one without literally destroying the entire world. Both sides realized it, and neither was mad enough to try. It's a crazy kind of equilibrium, but I think it's the only thing that kept us out of a conventional war with the USSR for fifty years.
As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's hard for me to feel remorseful about those tragedies. (Yes, I've seen Barefoot Gen and Grave of the Fireflies and cried profusely at both.) The Japanese military leaders started a war with a country that was trying hard to remain neutral, and it looked like they (the Japanese military leaders) were not going to agree to end it without an overwhelming display of power. The atomic option did two important things.
1) I submit that the Japanese had to be made to surrender in order to restore peace in the Pacific basin. The invasion of the Japanese mainland was going to be obscenely expensive in terms of American lives, and positively ghastly in terms of Japanese lives. I think that the Japanese people would have been used as human shields by the military leaders, and would have been slaughtered wholesale throughout the country. The Bomb ended the war with the smallest possible number of Japanese casualties. Note that the conventional bombing campaign in Europe (particularly the firebombing of Dresden) caused much more destruction and death than the two bombs dropped on Japan.
2) By demonstrating the technical ability and political will to use atomic weaponry, the United States established itself as a world leader. Whether you think this is good or not, I submit that the last 50 years has been rather peaceful compared to the previous 2000.
As far as your original point, I don't think worrying about the body count by race at the end of a Schwartzenegger flick has anything to do with a racial bias in Hollywood. Again, just about everybody but Ahnold is dead at the end of these joints, and he's white, so of course there's going to be a bias. If he was mowing down fields of otherly-colored individuals and letting bad white folk away with a stern lecture, you might have a case, but he kills EVERYBODY.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Just ez long as Rudy Ray Moore get ta be da VP, 'sall good up in this muhfuckah. We need tha Dolemite Total Experience up in tha Chocolate City.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I can't accept the statement that "it was moraly wrong to clone a human. People shouldn't be playing god" unless you can answer what Playing God is and why it is morally wrong.
1 - gladiator is highly overrated. cheesy beginning. good scenes of slaughter. extremely cheesy ending. it could have been good, if you just took the middle part. NO irony. very bad cg (whoever thinks that was good didn't see it on an IMAX screen like i did).
2 - ah-nold makes good movies. and horribly bad ones. it's about 50/50. the end of days was extremely horrible. eraser was really bad. total recall, true lies, terminator (even T2) were really good.... it's hit and miss. i do not want to talk about his attempts at comedy. it's too painful.
I'm sorry, but putting Torvalds in the same breath as Einstein is grounds for summary execution as far as I'm concerned. Also, memory is holographic -- you'd have a hard time editing it in any way.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Every Hollywood movie about cloning but one has portrayed cloning as some kind of instant 3-D Xerox(TM) machine which makes an identical copy of the adult original.
... very very badly.)
I'm sure everyone here knows what a load of fetid dingo's kidneys that is.
Yeah, I'm sure "The Sixth Day" (I haven't seen it; don't plan to) had some kind of Trekkian tecknobabble about reading someone's memories out through their eyeballs or something, and growing the infant to adulthood in days, including all the physical attributes that develop through interaction with the environment, like muscle, bone, and calluses on the soles of the feet, but gimme a break.
The one exception, the one movie I've seen that did cloning pretty much right, was "The Boys from Brazil." (The plot is that an underground Nazi organization managed to save a tissue sample from Hitler, and has cloned 90 copies, who are all (as of the movie) kids of about 10. They're secretly trying to duplicate Hitler's upbringing, including murdering the kids' adopted fathers at the age when Hitler's father died, hoping that at least one of them will turn out
The fact is, clones are almost exactly the same sort of thing as identical twins, except for the age difference of course. Twins are separate individuals, so are clones.
The "almost" in that is that clones are less alike than identical twins. Aside from the age difference and the environment difference, identical twins have identical mitochondrial DNA. Clones don't necessarily, only the nucleus is transferred.
And even identical twins do not have the same fingerprints!
This seems to ignore the fact that the 'information' stored in the brain is the result of interconnections between neurons, so that to 'download' information to the brain would mean recreating all of the interneural connections of the original brain. Probably a process analagous to rewiring the the global telecommunications network all at once.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Oh, yeah. Knee-jerk rejection of new technology is really responsible contemplation of its impact. Right, whatever. I get so tired of these alarmist films that demonize whatever they technology they are depicting through gross exaggeration, doomsday scenarios, and distortion. The Net, Gattaca, and hundreds of mindless horrors movies casting technology and science in the role of humanity's ultimate enemy. It doesn't impress me. There is a difference between thoughtful, provocative treatment of technology's philosophical questions (like Blade Runner) and the latest parable about evil scientists recklessly endangering the future of the world.
Eric Christian Berg
Don't we realize that this isn't the first A.S. to deal with the ethics and morality of biotechnology? Aren't we forgetting the parable of Junior?
That's bullshit.
in Terminator: Back Cop == Good Guy
in Preditor: Indian guy, two black good buys
in Last Action Hero: English Guy==Dick
in Eraser(?): Black woman==moral protagonist
etc. etc.
a man, a plan, a canal, panama
OK then, what kind of music do you find the meaning of life in? As far as I know, some thrash metal bands have produced the best lyrics there are. As opposed to anything I have heard lately.
That's not to say that you will actually find the meaning of life in thrash, but picking it out is a poor choice. You should have picked on pop music instead. The lyrics there are laughable, to say the least.
learn your newspeak, man. the idea of luck and chance is not one which should be introduced into one's vocabulary. only from the party comes good, after all.
Computer Generated Imagery.
Well, I think this raises another problem. personally I have damn near close to zero interest in running for public office, etc. I don't want to speak for everyone, but a lot of the techies I know feel the same way. Red tape is not exactly a typical geek-attractor.
I agree mostly, with one exception: In T2, the inventor stayed behind and sacrificied himself so the others could get away. Granted, he was mortally wounded at that point anyway, but I think this still redeems him from the "spineless" category.
Exactly - I love how politicians think "cloning" means you can instantly create an exact replica of someone, fully grown, with the exct same thoughts, memories, etc. as the original. It's frightening that the exact same people who least understand the technology have such a huge say in its future.
...read him like you would read Gibson. Gibson doesn't know his technology that well. In fact, most of the time, he glosses right over it.
..."
The story in every Gibson book has essentially been: what happens when you inject paticular individuals into one potential evolutionary track of society/technology, and then let Murphy go nuts all over them.
Gibson never ever says that he believes it will go that way, or that everything will happen the way he envisions it in his books. He just says: "this is one way I think things could go... given that technology continues to advance at a predictable rate, and that someone overcomes many of the limitations we have now, and that noone reroutes the evolution of corporations and society."
That's how I read Katz. "This is something to think about, here's what happens when I compare these movies with this paticular thought foremost in my mind... I wonder if
He's looking at these movies with the filter of a paticular concept in mind. This of course colors the way he views these movies. But if YOU can only look at a paticular concept (movie) in one way, then you're limiting your own vision.
If I may digress still further, it is the same reason that religious people read the bible more than once: when you read a paticular passage with a paticular mindset, that passage could have entirely different meaning to you than it did last time.
I hope someone gets my point. I have a difficult time explaining myself at times.
Have a nice day!
Failure is not an option.
Failure is not an option.
It comes bundled with Windows.
Philip K. Dick, author of such stories as "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", which seemed to be the inspiration for "Total Recall", after removing the final bit about invisible magic destroying wands, aliens and the UN.
I believe he also wrote "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", which is probably the source material for "Blade Runner".
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
As others have mentioned, Vanessa Williams in _Eraser_ wasn't exactly spineless; she's willing to turn whistle-blower against her employer. And she lives.
'Commando' also comes to mind; I believe Arnie had a non-white female co-star who even used a LAW. But it's been a hell of a long time since I watched that one.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Can't happen. Genotype does not define, by itself, adult phenotype; you also need the environment...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
What's your view on growing cloned embryos (thus rejection-proof) and putting them on ice for spare parts?
If we can do that (probably), and work out how to take, say, stem cells, stimulate differentiation, and grow an organ from them in a decent amount of time (perhaps months; after all, many wait much longer than that now), transplant care could benefit. But the ethical ramifications would be... interesting.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
On the other hand, clones (most likely) did not choose to be a clone, and in many cases will never even know that they are one! Despite this, it seems very probable for a whole new prejudice to happen. At least on the lines of black slavery, jews in the holocaust and homosexuality. Perhaps even unprecedented.
Heinlein has a book Friday where essentially genetically engineered people are a "working" class that have little or no rights. Friday, the main character, is one such girl who does dangerous work for the man who commissioned her creation. She "passes" but, if she ever lets people know, they are usually irrationally fearful of her. A lot of the resolution for her in the book is dealing with the fact that she herself tends to think she shouldn't have rights. Rachael
"Go Forth Ye Lemmings and Propagate"
Whoa there. Sam played an ENGINEER, not a computer whiz, big difference ;-). You can be both, but Sam was definitely playing an Engineer.
(I can't remember any of the character names, so please bear with me...)
Ok, Remember when Arnold meets up with the anti-cloning dude that killed his buddy? The dude wanted Arnold to shoot him in the head, so he couldn't be cloned.
Fast-forward to the scene where the Arnold is shown footage of the villain (who looks way too much like Steve Jobs, IMHO) getting killed on the mountain top. The reason we see the footage is because it's through the villain's eyes. We see him getting killed by the anti-cloning zealot. Now, if the guy knows enough about the cloning process to request that Arnold shoot him in the head, then why the hell didn't he shoot the bad guy in the head when he was on the mountain?It has nothing to do with backward compatibility.
It has to do with intelligent design. It's not only because of the impracticality of having 24 individual signals for every pixel, it also has to do with the stupidity of even considering it.
Or don't you remember RGB monitors? 4 bit color:Red Green Blue plus White.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
"The benefits outweigh the dangers"
Vaporspeak. What you really mean is it's god damn cool, don't yall think is so so god damn cool, cloning owns.
You're forgetting the fact that genetics has the same approach as digital technology, to be predict and record and easily manipulate. Yet we still use analog signals in monitors because any fool knows that understanding things like current is far superior to having a bit for every little thing we want to accomplish. So far geneticists haven't sought to understand only to control and what corp takes any responsibility nowadays? Daytraders, and sahareholders do it for the lack of consequences in the short term.
1) Yes it's a bad thing. Genetics is still prenascent quackery. The best anyone could think of is super humans, as if time (learning experience etc) doesn't exist.
Most branches of knowledge have a number of levels such as basic principles (arithmetic), abstracted concepts (algebra, calculus, discrete math), and applied concepts (geometry, trig, game theory).
Genetics is nowhere near this. It's in the "infomercial" novelty stages.
Science shouldn't make things easier only more practical, it shouldn't make better humans it should teach them.
2) How'd you come to that conclusion?
You said:"That's like banning medicine and nutrition".
Just because a bunch quacks can't stop drooling doesn't mean they have a clue.
Ever seen a labrador-pit-bull? I havbe. It's the most confused pathetic animal I have ever seen. It constantly needs to jump all over the house, yet it doesn't ever get any satisfaction out of it.
Nauseating.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Well, I don't remember any black people in it at all, except as extras in the background, or bit parts with one or two lines.
However, I do distinctly remember that chick with the purple makeup is, shall we say, nice to look at. Does that count as "people of color"?
Free Hans!
Yes, I understand that thermite just burns extra hot rather than exploding. And that's exactly how the movie protrayed it. They got it right. I was praising them for their accuracy.
Free Hans!
I agree. The "The 6th Day" was far, far better than most sci-fi flicks these days. I especially like the little touches, such as how the interactive holographic girlfriend required a special mechanized chair to, um, "get it on". They actually understood that holograms are just light and can't be touched! Amazing!
It was also cool when Arnie and his clone whipped up a batch of thermite. They even named one of the ingredients (aluminum), and lit it by using a magnesium ribbon as a fuse (lighting the magnesium with a pocket propane torch), just like in real life! And instead of a big explosion, it just burned really hot. Wow. "MacGuyver" this ain't.
Free Hans!
Whistler was the blind guy. He was white. If you're thinking of Sidney Poitier's character, sure, he was black, and worked with computer geeks, but he never actually did anything with computers. He was the ex-CIA guy.
Free Hans!
Eh? The guy sacrificed his life to save the world!! Which "T2" did you watch, huh? Besides, that character was pretty good as far as black characters go. Other than "Theo", the guy with glasses in the original "Die Hard", he's the only example of a black computer whiz I can think of in a Hollywood movie.
Free Hans!
Am I wrong?
Forgive my ignorance, but what is PKD?
---
Don't forget Wing Rhames(sp?) in Mission Impossible. He was their l33t hax0r.
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I thought the credits rolling at the end was the best part of the movie....
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Ever heard of a retro-virus?
I thought those "Cort Scannners" (I think that's what the were called) were super cool. They shine a light into his eyes, and within seconds his whole life (in minute detail) is on a disk. Imagine the BANDWIDTH, people!!!!
"fist in the air in the land of hypocrisy"
I think he falls under the traitor catagory because he invented the robots to begin with, thus condeming the human race to suffering, etc., etc.
-- gfoyleI guess this is where I admit that I haven't see an A.S. movie in a long time because I can't enjoy them because of the racist undertones.
Having said that, were there any people of color in Kindergarden Cop or Twins? I don't remember any, but it has been a long time since I've seen them.
-- gfoyleOr maybe it would decide to make T3.
But a little more seriously, if the scientist had not worked on the project then the computer never would have been built. He is still a part of the problem (even though he may not realize it be the Terminator comes into his life), and he still has to die for it.
-- gfoyleI think part of the blame for the nuclear guillotine we all live under falls onto the heads of all the scientist who made nuclear bombs possible (Oppenheimer and Feynen among them). Making a bomb does not advance humanity, or science for that matter. Now, should Dr. Currie be included because of her work with nuclear materials? I would say no, because she was not working on a project whos stated goal was to create a technological device of mass destruction.
And what if there had been a WWIII? or if you lived in Hiroshima or Nakasaki?
Yes it is piddly, but I like movies and it annoys me when this shit gets in the way of me enjoying them. I mean Total Recall was one of the best movie translation of a P.K. Dick book.
-- gfoyleI didn't post to troll. I am genuinely curious what role people of color play in the 6th Day. Anyone who has seen it care to answer?
-- gfoyleoops. Wasn't there a movie where he protected someone which was similar to The Bodyguard? Maybe I was thinking of Eraser, which also I haven't seen.
Thank you for pointing that out.
-- gfoyleI've noticed in every Schwarzenegger movie there is a racist underpinning to the story, in which every black and other people of color are treated as either the bad guys, spineless (e.g. the inventor in T2), or traitors (e.g. the taxi driver on Mars in Total Recal). Oh, and let's not forget to mention that they almost always die. Is this movie any different?
-- gfoyleAnd no I don't think the Bodyguard is an exception.
genotype = genetic definition for a given trait at the molecular level. example - you will grow long fingers. phenotype = the actualization of this trait on the physical body of that organism. example - you have long fingers because you were able to consume enough food to grow the fingers you were presdisposed to have. This isn't just stuff "stored in the mind" but the influence of the environment on the development of the organism. If I grew up in a country where there was not proper nutrition available, then my genes might not be able to express certain physical traits that were defined in the genes. That's what the person was talking about.
"When I want to do something mindless to relax, I reinstall Windows 95." - JLG
Katz writes:
..." and go on to lecture about the eeevils of technology, they're not thinking of history -- they're thinking of the Bible, and _Frankenstein_, and movies like _The 6th Day_. And these may all be fine, entertaining stories, but as guides to how to live one's life, they all fall short of modern rationalism. Next time you get sick, are you going to go to your doctor and quite likely get medicines developed and produced by biotech companies, or are you going to as God or Mary Shelley or Arnold Schwarzenegger to save you?
"Unfortunately, the off-screen world already has plenty of heedless bio-tech companies, hard at work on profiting from gene mapping, promising to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease -- perhaps one day, even death itself. History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris, but we live in a time when the inventors and purveyors of technology bristle with arrogance and greed as well as well as creativity and enterprise."
I can't quite tell if he's being ironic or not, but if he's serious, he ought to consider for just a moment that every single person in the world, including Katz himself, is likely to profit one day from this research. Are biotech company executives greedy, evil, heartless bastards? Some of them, maybe. But it really doesn't matter -- once the technology is out there, sooner or later it will be as cheaply and universally available as penicillin.
And in fact, history does not teach us to beware of hubris. History teaches us that technological advances inevitably do more good than harm, that without the "hubris" of "Prometheuses" (Promethei?) and "Frankensteins" who envisioned every major technologicy in human history from fire to X-rays to microchips, the human race would still be living in stone-age savagery. This is what the Luddites' ideas would ultimately reduce us to, if followed to their logical conclusion. Me, I _like_ living in the modern world -- I'd much rather program for a living than have to chase hyenas away from a rotting carcass to get a meal, and I'd much rather take my children into a clean, brightly-lit clinic for immunizations than watch them die off one by one from some horrible disease I think is caused by evil spirits, and I'd much rather fly all over the world in a 747 than live and die within a day's walk of the same spot of ground.
So what does teach us to beware of hubris? Religion, literature, and these days, the movies. That's it. When people say "History says
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I hated this movie, the effects were terrible, the "future" was fiberglass covered present with sharp angles and lousy interfaces. (OnStar here we come). The thin disguse of a plot was saved only by arnold, but the lazer guns where a bit much. I would have like to have seen something more "belivable". Might have raised more questions for people walking out of the theater.
AF-Design, web development.
Yup, Total Recall could have been really good if the lead had been played by someone like Woody Allen like the book called for.
those are the lines from a doors song. sorry dude. and that was a fairly weird song. much more than you make it out to be.
as far as the beatles go... their early stuff is fairly wish washy. but, at least it's music. now, there's no way you can say the white album is anything like the current crop of chart topping crap. well, you can say that. but, you'd be a fool.
-------
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
Would like to note, for the record, that Johnny Cash is hardly looking at tremendously obvious concepts. Nor is Willie Nelson. Nor, for that matter, was Hank Williams.
Do you actually know what country music is?
Long Black Veil, Jacob's Ladder, So Lonesome, etc. are great songs with great lyrics and a tremendous amount of craft and melody injected into them.
Have you ever listened to "Delia" (cash)? Not only is that one of the most disturbing songs that I've ever heard (beating out even Springsteen's State Trooper), but it touches on quite a lot of things people would rather not alight upon.
To the best of my knowledge, there are precious few country musicians who call what they're writing deep, either. As a matter of fact:
"Could somebody go get my notebook? I left it in the back there... I need it, it's got all the lyrics that I stole written down in it."
From Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues album.
Not that this is remotely on topic. Oh well.
"The [xyz] is keeping me down genre" could, when so narrowly viewed, apply as well to the lifework of Schopenhaur. I certainly hope you don't view him as cashing in on commercial commodities.
Is Bob Dylan crap, too? 'cuz guess where lots of his influences lie?
regards
Let us create a tiny little off-topic thread. :)
:)
:)
:P
I'm not a tremendous Dylan fan myself, though I do credit some of the revival of interest in folk music (such as that of Billy Bragg, or the quasi-re-discovery of Woody Guthro) with his influences in popular culture. Which is important.
The Beatles are certainly one of the greatest bands of the 20th century. Definitely the greatest rock & roll band thereof, in my mind. Will we be listening to them in 100 years? I don't know. Will rock & roll even exist then? If country music exists in 100 years, Johnny Cash will still be listened to. If Rock & Roll, then the Beatles will be. If Jazz, well... Davis, Peterson, Coltrane, Gerschwins...
The thing is, not a lot of people these days are even listening to the Beatles. At least, I've had people ask me when I put on the White Album: "Who is this?". I'm sure you've had similar experiences.
Just don't malign all country... just ninety-ish percent of the new stuff. A lot of that old country music is excellent. I could listen to Johnny Cash all day, and have from time-to-time.
The Dixie Chicks? Nah. But, I can't think of many modern bands I can listen to for extended periods. Vic Chesnutt, Kristin Hersch, Tom Waits (who can't really be classed as modern by any means), John Prine (more country-folk for ye)....
And none of 'em hit the charts. "Popular Music", which was at its most challenging with the dominance of the Beatles(by my estimation), is currently a few steps removed from insipipd. Maybe a couple of steps. Jazz has retreated into the parlors of middle-aged white men and the occasional club that's just asking to go out of business, as well as into the pretensions of the young. The Blues have been re-regionalised. Few people can name any classical compositions from the last 50 years, or even any performers outside of Yo Yo Ma. Country has jumped away from the examination of dark times in the soul and into the lament of love lost... it's all a bit sad, really.
Disclaimer: I've been drinking.
regards
The funniest part of the movie was when the Main Bad Guy says to the female assassin, "how many times have you been cloned", and she says, "I've lost count". Main Bad Guy then tells Arnold about the dot-in-the-eye, and assassin woman pulls down her eyelid to reveal she's been cloned four times.
And I thought, "You lost count after only four times???"
ChicagoFan
I'll patent "source code of humanoid life forms" asap. Your DNA is mine. Muahahah.
You're tired of Slashdot ads? Get junkbuster now!
don't ever regulate something that isn't being used to hurt someone else.
The only problem with this in our hypersensitive society is identifying what actually hurts someone else or has the potential to hurt someone. And don't think you can really just consider the physical direct hurt aspect either.
I really like the movie, anyone that's an "Ah-nold" fan should see it!
Someday I'll make
Its supposed to entertain you, thats what movies are for. If you want the whole truth then watch a documentary on pbs. Obviously if you had time to nitpick about how flawed their cloning process was then this isn't the movie for you.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I think you left out the movie 'Eraser' where he had to defend a black woman.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I know Hollywood would like to make us think that their products are more than entertainment but that's simply not true. Get real: all they do is reach into our fantasies and fears and create movies out of them. We pay them money so we can go live our fantasies and fears vicariously.
The Revolution will not be coming soon to a theater near you!
Sounds kinda silly, but:
"Unfortunately, the off-screen world already has plenty of heedless bio-tech companies, hard at work on profiting from gene mapping, promising to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease -- perhaps one day, even death itself. History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris, but we live in a time when the inventors and purveyors of technology bristle with arrogance and greed as well as well as creativity and enterprise.
" Those dirty bastards. How dare they go about trying to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease, death, and trying to make a buck off of said elimination.
I don't know what Jon Katz's goals are. If I did, they'd probably scare the hell out of me. But this makes it quite obvious that whatever those goals are, human life and happiness are not among them.
> There's almost no political discussion offline
> about the fuzzy boundaries between human
> and other "lifeforms" -- clones, cyborgs,
> mutants, AI.
it's difficult to take seriously any article
which is so poorly researched that it starts off
with a throwaway line like this.
try reading some science fiction one day. this
kind of stuff is staple fare for SF novels, and
has been for decades.
or if fiction isn't what you want, try looking
at medical & science journals and the proceedings
of numerous bioethics conferences.
there's life outside of hollywood, you know.
> That topic has mostly fallen to Hollywood,
> which has taken up the issue in a series of
> movies
"taken up the issue" must be a new way of saying
"cash in on a fad".
nobody goes to hollywood movies to see issues
explored in an intelligent and thought-provoking
manner. they go to see laser beams, and cars
making impossible leaps over bridges, things
getting blown up, bad guys losing and good guys
winning...all with a maximal amount of explosions
and gore and minimal intrusion from reality.
To summarise:
TR = normal hollywood pap + good story = Very Good
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TR is the most faithful reproduction of PKD that you can see in the wacky world of film. It has all the paranoia, insecurity and weirdness of the original. And for that I say "Good Work". The fact that you say "watch the sunrise at the end, battered but victorious" shows that you must have been puffing pretty hard on that crack pipe for the previous 100 minutes.
To raise (?) the level, of course the "memory, cloning, spies, whatever" is a McGuffin, but isn't that the point?
The last line (scene, act, image, ...) is the nail in the forehead. In TR they (Holywood) did it well. I can't actually tell from your post if this is the case for 6th day.
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Unfortunately most of these movies aim to please the average farm-bred Bible-toting mid-Westerner which makes them decidedly ungeekish.
These films assume that messing with nature is "a bad thing" and don't bother to probe into the intricate greyscales an issue like this presents. Genetic science, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence scare me immensely but they're also tremendously exciting. When will a movie tackle the deeper issues where "scary" doesn't necessarily mean evil?
It's all very well to criticize politicians as a bunch of technological lunkheads, but what are we doing to remedy the situation? How about getting some techies to run for office? As it is, lawyers are seriously overrepresented, and their basic instinct is to have more of what they're familiar with: laws. Another path would be for the technologically-inclined to get themselves appointed to the various advisory and governing boards that grow up like kudzu around government. If we can't stop them, at least we can try to nudge them a little closer to the proper path.
Probably Pink Floyd has some of the most insightful lyrics I've seen (See Dark Side of the Moon).
The problem with most thrash metal is the same problem with country music (ironically), take an unbelievably obvious concept, throw some music around it, and call it "deep". They're both of the "[xyz] is keeping me down" genre (which might be a woman, The Man, alcohol, society, etc).
Not to say that you can't find some talented lyricists among thrash, but clearly a LOT of these bands just try to be loud, rather than good. The problem isn't with Thrash, but that's just the place that is currently a lucrative place for the "I'm just doing this for the money" bands to gravitate to.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I don't mean to imply that all of country was of in that category, only a lot of it.
Is Bob Dylan crap, too? 'cuz guess where lots of his influences lie?
Actually, as a matter of fact, yes, I do believe Bob Dylan is complete crap. :) In fact, I would go so far as to say he is the archetype of the "vastly overrated artist that happened to hit a chord of his time which future generations are utterly incapable of understanding why."
I should say that, being 36, I am a half-generation removed from Dylan, so he looks like to me a bad singer mumbling and whining about shallow, obvious concepts.
Contrast him with, say, some of the Beatles music, like "A Day in the Life" or "Eleanor Rigby". We'll still be listening to the Beatles in 100 years. Will we will still be listening to Dylan in 100 years? Hell no. In fact, you hardly hear him on the classic rock stations anymore, with the exception of a few Dylan staples that had popular appeal. Even then, it's the tune that keeps it popular, not any philosophical basis.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Politicians have to talk about cloning in any democracy. Technology may not be good or evil by definition, but governments are responsible for doing more than just limiting evil things.
It is the people of a country who get to decide if they like cloning or not. Moreover, they have the right to decide based on whatever they want. If you want to ensure an informed decision, then get out and raise awareness. Don't say the issue should be ignored. Apathy is always bad in the political sense.
Politicians have a moral duty to learn about and discuss legislation on all new technologies. Most of the time, they will resolve to do nothing, but they have to have a look. The alternative is some sort of techno-anarchy, where the rich live by different rules than the poor.
Not my idea of democracy.
"You must do the thing you think you cannot do" E.Roosevelt
Waitaminute... I thought Arnold Schwartzeneggar's Clone was supposed to look like Danny DeVito? It was in a movie; It's been scientifically proven!!!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Yep, thats it. I wouldnt care if I was cloned because well I would be dead, but if someone I knew died I might have them cloned to have them around. So its all kind of weird like that. I always wondered if in the future we could transfer our minds into robots or whatnot, but I've always thought of that problem, why would I want a copy of me to go on, if its not me and I would still live and die and whatever. Cmon I want to live forever not some copy. When I was watching the movie I always though, it would be pretty cool to wake up and find out that your the clone and that your alive and it wasnt you that died. I was thinking about the time where the guy got his leg blow off, I would be pretty pissed that I would have to kill myself just to be cloned and redone with a full body.
Personally I wouldnt mind having myself cloned like that to live forever. The one thing that would keep me from doing that is, well why would I want a copy of myself to live on, even if it did have all my thoughts and whatnot. I dont want a copy of my conscousness to live on, I want to live on. Either way to myself when I die, I die, even if a copy lives to run around. Now if they could somehow transfer my consciouness/brain so that I wouldnt actually die, well that would be a different story.
[WARNING, May be considered a spoiler]
Sure, it was a good action flik.... but as for revelations about life and how ethical cloning is? I think not. The evil bio-tech company just went around cloning people without being careful. They "accidentally" cloned the Ah-nold after his partner was murdered but they still let him loose! Why? and then an hour or two later they relize he's the wrong guy and they go and try to kill the Ah-nold clone. But WHY did they clone him in the first place? It wasn't nesesary. They could've just cloned everyone else and said only Ah-nold (or his partner rather) died?
Confusing? So was the plot.
-Scott
When all freedom is outlawed only the outlaws have freedom
To rectify what I said once more. I would like to say that when I said that it could cure people with disabilities. But then I also said that that could also be considerd playing god, by doing something un-natural. So I was kinda saying that I was contradicting what I was saying and that I wasn't too sure where I stand on the topic of genetic mipulation. But I do stand on the fact that people shouldn't be cloned. And if you think that I'm contradiciting what I said again in the comment about looking at extinct animals. I was just pointing out that you maybe you could take the dna and be able to tell how that animal works or something like that, and I'm still not sure where I stand on that just like the genetic manipulation.
Now I'm no friggin scientist so don't think that I'm trying to be smart. I'm just trying to say my point of veiw wether it be single minded or out of focas or what ever.
Sorry if I confused people. I probly should be more clear when I comment on something when I know people can't read my mind.
I know that crazy action movies are usualy obserd. But arn't most movies out there?? think about that for a second. You have the movie star wars. witch is a space movie were people can move things with the force. that sounds kinda obserd. but what isn't these days. The fact that the U.S. can't even pick there own president is kinda obsurd. Now lets look the fact that I think that cloning is evil isn't what I was getting at.
I said that it was moraly wrong to clone a human. People shouldn't be playing god. But on the other hand cloning has done some things for people. It has made them understand people with disabilties through looking at the dna of people. And I think that it will eventualy lead to cures of some disabilities. This you could also say is playing god and that these people deserve to die but I think we should do what ever is posible to help people by munipilating dna. But not screw them over by cloning them
The down side of cloning is having genticly alterd people that could lift buildings and kill us all. now don't you see the confict of intrest in that???
:)
Death is comming I just hope I'm the one to do it
Movies are the only place that really talk about it??? Thats because no one really sees the effects of cloneing. If you think about it how would you react if some one that looked and talked like you came into your home and slept with your wife/girl friend. I would flip out and shoot the basterds down thats what I would tell you. You wanna make a life. I'll F*@#! take a life you better watch your back if you clone me cause I'm a vengful mofo.
But any ways Cloning is evil in all cases but endangerd species. I think we should do all we can to preserver there dna so that if some day we wanna say hey what did the Lama look like. We can pull out some dna and look. But other than that its evil I tell you strait up evil!
I'm personally frustrated because it's becoming increasingly difficult to apply any kind of funding (private and governmental alike) for any research that is not at least in some tangible way connected to potential applications in near (~1-5 years) future. In my mind this is extremely short sighted, since the fundamental research is what "feeds" the applied sciences decades ahead. If your greed-is-good attitude becomes even more prevalent, we'll see that the applied sciences will eventually run out of fundamental scientific basis.
Don't forget Total Recall!
Some of these movies are masterpieces. Some, like "The Sixth Day" are less ambitious. They are just entertaining.
That movie sucked. I used to love watching Arnold in action flicks, but he hasn't been in a good one since True Lies, and even that was more comedic. There wasn't anything redeeming about the movie, not even Robert Duvall....
Action movies are supposed to make you drool for the next moment, chase scene, one-liner, etc. The Sixth Day wound up making me look at the time way too often to possibly be mistaken as anything entertaining.
Politicians listen to their advisors when it comes to passing laws. If it's of a technical nature then they will consult with people that know the technology. They also look at environmental concerns and just about everything else imaginable. The one "bad" thing they also consider is public opinion. They want to make the public happy - this doesn't always lead to the best decisions. Because of this laws are often passed - laws with a pile of backdoors that allow things to still get done.
Democracy would be perfect if the public were intelligent. But as a whole, we're pretty stupid. Just look at the government, they typically do what the public wants but rarely do the right thing.
Willy
but doesn't the Tyrell corp come off as "evil" by (creating?) Deckard to elimate the bad replicants who threaten the company's off-world activities? I see Batty as a noble, admirable charactor who longed for the answers the humans he was created to emulate should be searching for.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Hollywood isn't the only place the issue is taken up. There are individuals and organizations that are working to prevent the abuse of genetic engineering. I went to a school that was strong in Agriculture and Science years ago and I remember when a speaker came to visit to discuss the issues around BGH (Bovine Growth Hormone). I also remember the numerous people who attended wearing Monsanto hats (Monsanto being a major company that sells BGH). The issues concerning BGH is actually pretty clear cut unlike many other issues concerning biotech. BGH=bad. I'd be happy to argue the point with anyone who feels different.
Getting back to my story: If I remember correctly, the speaker was a lawyer who subsisted and worked off of a very limited budget. I was amazed at the forces that was arrayed against him. His was truely a David vs Goliath battle. The point I am trying to make is that the people who tries to raise issues concerning biotech are often seen as crackpots by the scientific community. Meanwhile, the general public has little awareness of the issues and court battles because the volunteer groups fighting to prevent abuse do not have the funding for TV commercials.
Another thing I would like to point out (which may be a bit off topic) is that there is a significant difference between Scientists and Engineers or CS majors although a lot of people seem to think otherwise. It is somewhat annoying when people discuss science as if they know all about it, when in fact, they don't have any idea.
"Only Real Men Have FABs." -W. J. Sanders III
Major disappointment.
Some Issues (far from all!):
1. Blanks. No demonstration of multi-ethnicity. What about short people? Do they shrink?
2. Arnie swimming through that glop. I don't think so. They use pretty nasty stuff as preservatives. No way I'd dive into that shit.
3. Major plot inconsistency: bad guy tells Arnie that he knows exactly how he is going to die and offers to tell him just before Arnie shoots up the data bank. End of movie: he's genetically clean.
4. Action. Sub-par for an Arnie flic. For me, Total Recall (and maybe Commando) is still his best action flic.
Very mediocre movie.
The thing that I find amusing is that he's come out against sequalitis, yet he's making T3, Total Recall 2 and True Lies 2. I'm just waiting for Running Man 2 and The Seventh Day.
At least we're unlikely to see followups to End of Days or Jingle All The Way
--
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I do this all the time. Did anyone else see the Marxist subtext in Blade or is just me?
Would you go see a Keanu Reeves movie to be enlightened? "No of course not, he's a shitty actor." Point made.
All sci-fi presents potential futures. Some are worth thinking about. These movies take current trends to their logical extremes - Gattaca, Aliens, Johny Mnemonic, etc. Some are dystopian, others aren't.
Jon gets the idea right, the movies wrong. Aliens features an almighty company. Gattaca has to do with the de facto effects of institutionalized discrimination - everything happens because companies discriminate against the genetically unfit. Running Man is about the media (a corporate monster if you've ever seen one) taking over justice. It's a pretty common theme in science fiction, largely because it has some plausibility. Look at Microsoft, the MPAA, the RIAA. They're watered-down versions of these villian companies. They operate ammorally and outside of the norms of law, having bought the makers of laws. I could insert some George W flamebait here, but I'll resist. It looks like we get 4 years for that at least.
I think he wants to mention William Gibson as an example, he did so in a talk I heard him give, but Gibson doesn't make movies. Johny Mnemonic is a movie of a Gibson story. It features a corporation preventing a disease cure for profits.
Is that why the Pentium 4 exists?
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This movie may address the same issues of GATTACA, but not without blowing things up.
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Ok, it isn't an hollywood movie, but I think it should be in that line. Ghost in the Shell is one of the best movies about that theme and I think it is much better than X-Men. After you saw it you will really start thinking about what is consciousness and how it could happen. Can a machine become conscious over its existence?
Jan
I thought the movie was a great action flick, but Arnold just dosn't fit into that family man type character. He's the terminator.
Whoops! Because the unreal is becoming real at a rapidly increasing pace. Taking cloning as an example (after all, it's on topic): as you correctly pointed out, it was just science fiction. Outside of the numerous science fiction fandoms, it was honestly believed that cloning adult humans (not just newly-fertilized eggs, as sometimes happens naturally to produce identical twins) would never be technically feasible because the complex chemical cues cells used to distinguish a newly-fertilized egg cell from an ordinary cell could never be duplicated. So even when we scoop out the half-a-creature DNA from an unfertilized egg cell and replace it with the full DNA from the creature to be cloned, the cell wouldn't believe that it had been fertilized. (Yes, that's a gross over-simplification.)
When this barrier was broken (with frogs, I think), it was "Okay, but it'll never happen with mammals!" And then Dolly the sheep comes along. We're just one step away from humans (assuming it hasn't happened already, scocio/political barriers not withstanding). This will give us an ordinary baby in all respects but one: s/he's the genetic duplicate of whoever donated the DNA, an infant "twin" of an adult.
With current technology alone, the possibilities (ethical or not) for life extension exist: grow a clone for transplant organs long before you need them, then harvest when/if the need arises. Parents already do a version of this when they conceive a child they hope will be donor-compatible with a sick child they already have.
Within the next twenty years we could easily have accelerated maturity (to grow clones to adults in months), and the ability to record the contents of one brain and download it into the "blank" brain of the clone. Allowing for adaptations to Movie Reality (tm), much like we saw in the Sixth Day.
Science Fiction (even Grade A schlock movies like this) give us a way to think through the consequences of our advancement ahead of time. Despite the FUD this inevitably generates, I think it's a good thing.
(Of course, maybe you were just trolling . . . . .)
Quotes from A Man for All Seasons
I always thought that the moral of the story in Frankenstein was nature vs. nurture. Not one of those "don't fuck with technology you godless atheists lest you be damning us all with your short-sightedness" themes. Stephen J. Gould wrote about the message of Frankenstein in his book `Dinosaur in a Haystack.' I suggest Katz, and anyone else who has similar feeling about the theme of Frankenstein, read it.
Also how can anyone legitimately endorce the belief that the path of ignorance is better to be on than the path to enlightenment.
Of course as I write this I realize that his review should be moderated (not possible but needs to be) to Flamebait. Gee, lets write a review endorsing the luddite philosophy to group of technology lovers and see what happens.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
Doors, beatles, whatever. All the same hippie crap.
-CoG
"And with HIS stripes we are healed"
-CoG
"And with HIS stripes we are healed"
Handel's "Messiah"
the beatles were considered 'pop' (well at least by mtv).
Wow, really? That's good to know, especially since MTV wasn't even concieved for a number of DECADES after the beatles were considered "pop". And, no their lyrics sucked just as bad as today's pop. Take the words from the "hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name" song, mix with any backdoorboys music, and you've got a pop song of today.
It's all chemically the same shit, some's just significantly older.
-CoG
"And with HIS stripes we are healed"
-CoG
"And with HIS stripes we are healed"
Handel's "Messiah"
I'm afraid all of you are completely wrong. NWA is the only timeless music, with such deep and touching songs (full of sound advice) such as "bitch betta have my money", "Fuck the Police", "She swallowed it", and "The art of sucking dick". I'm afraid none of your hippie crap will ever compare.
-CoG
"And with HIS stripes we are healed"
-CoG
"And with HIS stripes we are healed"
Handel's "Messiah"
the stars my destination,
READ Alfred Bester PEOPLE,
GOOD SCIENCE FICTION RULES!!!
p.s. does anyone know about this supposed movie being made of The Demolished Man?
Goat sex free since 2001
ever read Solis by A.A. Attanasio?
oddly it's out of print, but it's definitely in the same league of awe-inspriringness...
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
Gladiator sucks beyond belief.
Obviously when you pay 9 bucks to to see an Arnold movie, you're paying to watch the stuff blow up. But like Total Recall before it, the Sixth Day does contain some surprisingly poignant scenes. (spoilers coming up)
The movie isn't going to win any awards for the script, but you can't write it off as intellectually devoid simply because it has some explosions. The 6th Day manages to be one of those rare mixes of philosophy and ass-kicking, with a bit more emphasis on the ass-kicking.
I mean, what fun would it be if Arnold just talked Drucker down from that roof. Chasing him with a helicopter rotor is a lot more fun.
-Jeff
-Jeff
I like to play with Shiny Objects and Yarn.
Ah-nold seems to have a running thread of these type of ideas in his movies, even those that aren't addressing such issues directly.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Being "intellectual" shouldn't mean that you can't enjoy pointless and stupid violence. After all, I enjoy most Arnold films, and I'm a WWF fan, but I don't really think I'm an idiot (well, depending on the day).
Anyway, if you don't enjoy that sort of thing, you aren't an Arnold fan at all. Total Recall was a good film (I thought). It was one of his least "bloodbath for the sake of a bloodbath" films, and actually was pretty interesting. But let's face it, it's Hollywood, where everyone eventually gets type-cast. For Arnold, it's either funnyman (with Devito), or BadAss. That's just the way it is. And I kind of enjoy the self-mocking that goes on with his movies. Although, I would probably be willing to pay someone to use a Total Recall machine to remove my memory of Last Action Hero. You can only take self-mocking so far before it becomes ridiculous.
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Sorry, I should have clarified this earlier. I didn't mean to imply that not being an Arnold fan was necissarily a bad thing. Just, don't call yourself one if your not.
And for the record, I own a few Arnold movies, watch them when I catch them on the tube, and consider myself a fan. But I'm not one of those people that owns every movie he's ever been in, has posters hanging over my bed, and dreams of being cool enough to hold two machine guns (one in each hand) and firing into a crowd. There's a big difference between a fan and a FAN(atic).;-).
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Arnold Clone: I am the clone, so I'll leave your family alone and go away.
Arnold: Thanks.
Would you be that considerate if you went home one day only to realize that you were a clone?
Arnold Clone: I am the clone, so I'll leave your family alone and go away. Arnold: Thanks. Would you be that considerate if you went home one day only to realize that you were a clone?
Interesting concept, being able to capture our memory on the removeable media they used in the movie. If people were allowed to have this luxury of backing their memory up and would be able to directly handle their memory stick, how long would it be before the computer community would find some way to hack the code format of the stored memory and modify bad memories and add/adjust other memories. I think it would be nice to patch in the memory cartridge of Einstein, Linus, and others, at the beginning of my memory cartridge ( before being born), having not much effect on current life except all their knowledge would be mine. (Insert evil laugh here). This is of course assuming memory storage space is infinite, so as not to overwrite other memory locations. Other questions arise, how big do you think that the memory cartridge would have to be (1 meg for me), since it seemed that only one cartridge was needed for anyone in the movie.
Lbh xabj jung, gur Qrzbpengf naq nyy gur erfg bs lbhe evtug-jvat cnegvrf jurgure gurl pnyy gurzfryirf yrsg-jvat be abg, pna gnxr vg hc gur nff sebz Xngm!
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This post has been rot13'd for your protection
*yawn*
Chas, that's hardly fair. Thrash metal has dealt with many of the same issues as 20th-century literature: nihilism, the futility of life in an industrialized society, addiction, the role of the hero, and the impossibility of individualism. I refer you to Slayer's "Seasons in the Abyss", Anthrax' "Persistence of Time", and Megadeth's "Rust in Peace" for more examples. These issues were "enlightening" when Kafka wrote about them; why not when Dave Mustaine did?
Dismissing thrash metal is akin to dismissing the Expresionist movement in 1920s German art, or to dismissing Romantic literature and music (as music critic Eduard Hanslick did in the 1860s) as the rumblings of disaffected youngsters. This sort of snobbery merely causes one to miss great art.
A) politicians are unlikly to hotly discuss such topics unless they have the same urgency all other hotly discussed topics have, IE have already bitten them on the but.)
B) Those topics are very passionatly discussed by academics, and have been for years.
(Incidentaly, the chances of a working AI that can terrify us the way they do in our imaginations are extremly remote, we do not understand ourselves well enough to create one, and if we did understand enough, we probably wouldn't. Computerized intelligence is very difference from human inteligence... don't believe me, lock a nuerologist, a philospher, and a mathematician in a room together, then sell tickets)
The most frightening thing we have to worry about, is who's in charge.
"Hold the mayo" -Jack Nicholson in five easy pieces.
That's a rather narrow-minded approach, wouldn't you say? Granted, his past movies have tended to be primarily 'entertainment' pieces, but why does that have to hold true for the future. Okay, so this particular film failed -- who's fault was it? Arnolds? The writers? The directors? When I go to see a movie, I'm open to all possibilities: sure, maybe the actors weren't too 'meaningful' in previous films, but I'm not seeing one of their 'previous' films, I'm seeing their latest ... and as such, I remain open minded.
Life's more enlightening that way ...
I really like the movie, anyone that's an "Ah-nold" fan should see it!
Okayyyyyyy.
Well, I am an Ah-nold fan, as you so nicely put it. However, I will not be going to see this one. The reasoning behind this? Because I have realised since watching the, frankly appalling, End of Days, that his films are basically pointless bloodbaths where any plot that may exist is simply an excuse for mucho gratuitous violence. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against violence or anything, but I prefer something with a little more story. Like Gladiator; now that is a good film.
Incidentally, does anyone else think that Total Recall could have been a really good film if it had a different leading man?
_____________________________________
I've been to Heaven and Hell, and all I got was this lousy sig.
I saw it, and only one thing bothered me: The humans were cloned by taking their DNA and a brain-recording (I think it was called in synchort). Now, every time Arnold would kill the thugs sent after him, they'd be recloned and complained about how their neck, or whatever part Arnold mauled, hurt. But their brain wasn't recorded before they were killed, so they shouldn't have even remembered what happened to them.
...well then, here is a movie that actually had a believable premise -- all the way back in 1978 -- and largely had its scientific act together to boot.And talk about your potential for social upheaval! Hoo boy.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Political discussion about cloning is horrendously dangerous.
This is a dumbass thing to say. Just what exactly is "dangerous" about any kind of political discussion whatsoever? My answer, at least, is that political discussion is dangerous to anyone who profits from political quietism. People who can't be bothered with politics, or think that their elected representatives should be prevented from representing their interests or their opinions, put power in the hands of people who don't represent either their interests or their opinions.
We could do with a few limitations of government, such as don't ever regulate something that isn't being used to hurt someone else. "The right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor's nose."
I don't take this analogy very seriously. If someone were standing in front of you at arm's length, swinging his fist at your nose, how long would it take you to get uncomfortable? My guess is one swing or less (depending on whether you knew it was coming). It wouldn't matter even if the guy was the best stuntman in Hollywood and could pull his punch every time, you still wouldn't like it. Likewise, in the real world we need more than the other guy's assurance that his actions won't harm us: we need a buffer zone (the law), and we need a neutral authority to enforce it (the government). The trick is to keep the authority accountable.
I would prefer if politicians didn't talk about cloning. Let them argue about how much a congressional toilet seat costs instead, it would be much more productive for humanity.
Sure. Let's just sit back and let it all happen. Then, when your grandchildren are slaves to the hive mind and Bill Gates' third clone gets a royalty every time anyone has sex, you can explain to them how it was for the best just to let the market decide everything.
"The deep-fried Mars bar is a symptom of a wider crisis." -- Nutritionist Ann Ralph, on the Scottish diet
Democracy needs self-imposed limitations to function even moderately well. The US used areas of the constitution and bill of rights as its first basis of such self-imposed limitations. Long ago we set a general principle, "People will have freedom of speech," and since then we've been interpreting and reinterpreting it.
Technology is experiencing exponential growth, and sooner or later, we're going to have to address that by laying down some fundamental self-imposed limitations of government dealing with technology, because it is clear that government does not move fast enough for politicians to keep up with technology.
I would rather see a freedom of technology clause, and have such battles of government move into the court system, where someone could invoke freedom of technology as grounds for innocence. Then simple laws regulating certain use of technology could be formulated, but no laws restricting the development of technology could be created. It would have made the entire crypto debate a moot point, as most of us knew it should have been.
It's frightening that the exact same people who least understand the technology have such a huge say in its future.
Precisely. The fact that they have such a huge say about that which they don't understand is exactly why we need to make sure they say nothing about its future.
I don't see why cloning is such a big issue, the benefits definitely outweigh the consequences. Furthermore, I don't even see any consequences. The only argument against cloning is that "humans will live unnaturally longer".
1) Is this a bad thing?
2) According to this argument, we should outlaw medecine and nutrition.
(Katz wrote)Unfortunately, the off-screen world already has plenty of heedless bio-tech companies, hard at work on profiting from gene mapping, promising to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease -- perhaps one day, even death itself.
Cure diseases and extend human lifepsans? Those bastards! How dare they!
I can't speak for Katz, but it looks to me like the "unfortunate" part of the whole bit is not that "heedless bio-tech companies" are working on cures for diseases, but that they're working on profits first and foremost. So if it's more profitable to invent a new artificial flavoring than it is to cure dengue, that's what they'll do.
If it's more profitable to do it without telling people what's in those flavorings, they'll do that too.
I certainly don't mind genetic engineering when it's being used to cure diseases. But I don't see the need for it as a means to create a fluffier snack cake. And if there are going to be gene-altered snack cakes on the store shelves (there already are), I'd at least appreciate being told that that's what they are so that I can make an informed decision whether or not to consume them.
It's also unfortunate if the tech firms are heedless, which Katz seems to take as a given. Actually I do too, IF it's the CEOs who are calling all the shots. The gene-tweakers in the trenches probably understand more about the consequences of their actions than the shareholders or the general public ever will. But they're not the ones making the decisions.
in the real world, we don't *have* anything resembling life to debate about. Real politicians and real citizens have to generally deal with *real* problems and issues, not hpyothetical issues surrounding AI that may not develop for another 50 or 100 or more years..
Then add heaps of product placement. When I first saw the XFL football game I thought it was a joke. Then when I saw the OnStar controlled vehicle I was rolling my eyes.
Lastly, take all of modern science EXCEPT cloning and send it backward a few years. Bio scanners today can differentiate between a living and dead thumb (that's one of the first questions that comes up!) but it's a vital part of this movie that they can't. He can drive a helicopter by remote control, yet when he needs to blow something up he has to light the fuse and run away.
This movie was all over the place. Even for an Ahnold movie, it was below par. I think his last good one was True Lies, personally. That seemed to have the right mix across the board.
Ah well, politics here he come.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I'm not sure what you're implying? Are you saying that the type of thermite they made SHOULD have blown up? Because it shouldn't- it does just burn hot enough to sink through most metal. One of the cruelest things to do to a person is to set a thermite bomb on the roof of their car and set it off- it'll burns right through the top of the car, and perhaps even the frame if doen correctly. Try to miss the gas tank though.
Bright-and-cheery is in fact the old-fashioned view of the future. With the exception of the postapocalyptic subgenre, visual SF movies most often portrayed the future as shiny and upbeat. Think of Amazing Stories covers by Frank R Paul; the polished look of The Day the Earth Stood Still; the perfectly pristine appearance of everything in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
StarWars in 1977 first popularized grimy spaceships, and the hugely influential BladeRunner in 1982 gave us claustrophobic, murky cityscapes -- surprisingly, only because Ridley Scott had a small budget and needed to hide the smallness of his set with rain, fog, and darkness. Since then, noir future has been a trope.
Curiously, there is a clear example of noir SF from 1926: Metropolis.
In this movie, cloning is made to look evil, but the "cloning" in the movie is not anything like what we know of as modern-day cloning.
Today, we are nowhere NEAR what they had in the movie. We have, so far, cloned a sheep. Dolly was NOT grown in two hours, she gestated naturally for the term that sheep normally gestate for, and Molly did not have the "memories" of the "original" Molly.
In this movie, we are made to believe that: 1) clones can be grown in two hours, and 2) they can have all of the same memories, et al.
The evil doesn't come from the fact that there are two people walking around with the same genetic code (if that were evil, I wouldn't want to be an identical twin). The evil (or moral ambiguity, if you prefer) came from the fact that there could be two of the exact same person. Same genetic code, same age, and same memories.
If you take away the Same genetic code issue, but are left with the Same Age and Same Memories issue, this movie would still be about identity-theft and the idea of trying to find yours. Think about it. If this movie was about Arnold's character being some guy abducted off the street, having his memory wiped and a new one installed, then having plastic surgery to make him look like someone else, then the issues of the movie still hold true. It is the theft of the identity that we have a problem with, not the idea of cloning.
Truthfully, I found this movie to be frightful, it is SO hypocritical. In the beginning of the movie, all we hear from Arnold is the wrongness of clones. Then he gets cloned and finds out he is a clone. Well, then clones become ok, and the movie becomes about the evil that the corporation is doing by cloning people, and in the end, the Clone Arnold goes off to be a happy person in some other country. I also do not like the religious undertones that the filmmakers are FORCING down my throat. First off, the movies is called "The Sixth Day", in reference to the idea that man was created by God on the sixth day of creation, and during the whole movie, people are whinning about cloning as "Playing God". Cloning is not playing God, creating the idea of genetics and implementing it in the Universe is Playing God. Cloning is just playing around in the World that God created. If you think that is playing God, then using fire is also playing God (because, Prometheus stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humans.)
Anyways, Katz should have chosen a MUCH better movie/book to use as a jumping off point for a discussion on cloning.
So what if its a "faithful reproduction" of Dick's story? Movies and books are worlds apart. How was the acting? Unconvincing to horrible. The pace and direction badly needed work. Just because I like most of Dick's writings doesn't mean I'm going to fall over backwards for a script that completely echoes to the story.
If your looking for "faithful reproductions" go to the bookstore, they're called paperbacks.
I doubt they do. After all, most of 'em aren't fools.
However, there ARE other ethical issues -- such as, can we -- and should we -- develop cloning techniques for use as spare parts?
For instance, should one clone a person, take stem cells or other interesting tissue from the embryo, and them implant these in an organic matrix that provides the infrastructure for growing into an organ? I believe we're already working on the organ-growing part, albeit very slowly. You need much more than cells and a nutrient bath...
Or, develop the embryo first, cryogenically freeze it, and then essentially have such cells in reserve?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The interesting thing about "The 6th Day" is that the filmmakers clearly understood what cloning is and is not. They actually provided explanations in the storyline as to how one creates an exact, fully-grown copy of someone with all their memories intact, as opposed to a newborn infant who happens to be someone's identical twin. What goes on in "The 6th Day" is more akin to Dr. Who's "regeneration" than actual cloning, but the movie actually acknoledges this. I was pretty impressed by that.
Free Hans!
I can see where you are coming from, but I think messages can be sent without disrupting the "firefight" and even if they are not intentional (which would be taking credit away from the artistry of movie making, which is there even in 'block busters'). I think people of color in his movies are killed far too often for being bad guys or traitors, or are completely absent from his movies, for this not to send a message. Just because a movie is part of a genrea (in A.S. case shoot 'em up) doesn't mean they can't carry something deep. For example The Searchers can be seen as a typical John Wayne cowboy movie, but it raises important questions about the cowboys' relationship to society and what we would call today "the circle of violence", all the while being entertaining to Coboy Movie fans. Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man is classic SciFi, but it also is a commentary about what is the correct way to punish people who violate society's rules (I doubt anyone in the goverment of TX has read it). Just because something is entertaining, doesn't mean it can't affect how people think (or make people think for that matter).
-- gfoyleIt would be a lot more helpful if you did reviews on movies that are just released, not ones that are two weeks old. It's really pointless, people have already seen this movie if they want to.
Unlike The 6th Day, Vertical Limit, Proof of Life, and D&D just came out on Friday. These movies are what people may actually care about.
Hollywood does have the ability to make what's not real to appear real or plausible. Everything starts as a dream -- Hollywood puts image to a dream.
Fight Spammers!
I think Katz wrote this so that he could sound off on some of his favorite themes, not because this was worthy of a review. The second half of the "review" was a political speech by Katz on the evils and arrogance of corporatization - but as other posters have made clear, this was a Schwarzenegger action film, not a documentary of cloning. It was full of unexplained innuendoes such as "History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris". An example for clarification would be useful.
Sigh. My id isn't prime. 2 2 2 2 2 3 5 313
Note: The movie assumes--I do too--that you can clone a human in two hours, and they'll have exactly the same memories/thoughts/soul/physical characteristics of the original, as well as be exactly the same age. At least no more than two hours younger :' )...
- - - - -
If your child had a terminal illness--three weeks to live, say, and you could choose to clone them with everything except the illness, would you? Would you kill the original today, or let them die naturally?
What if it were terminal, but they had five years to live? What if they were generally healthy, but had their arms and legs chopped off in an industrial accident? What if only one of their arms were taken off, but they were a concert pianist? What if they had one of their fingers mildly disfigured, but enough to affect their piano playing career?
What are the boundaries (ethically and legally) declaring when a child should live as is, and when the original can be killed, and then cloned?
If things such as this are supposed to be determined "in the interest of the child", can it ever be decided to kill and then duplicate that child?
- - - - -
Imagine coming home, and someone has duplicated your child, so now there are ten of them watching Pokemon, when you arrive home from work.
What if you could not tell the difference between real and clones? Would you randomly choose one of them and have the rest killed/adopted/relocated to Mars/whatever?
What if you could tell the difference between real and clone?
Either way, if your child's "soul" truly exists in all ten children, how would you deal with the hurt of those other nine, when choosing only one?
- - - - -
If, as at Re-Pet (get a copy of your pet, three hours after it dies), they can "tailor the fur color to your furniture or wallpaper", or even "soften the teeth". This implies, in humans, that they could make "stronger muscles" or even "tougher skin", and effectively make a superhuman, and duplicate it into a super-army.
This seems like it could be the biggest military threat the world has ever seen. Wouldn't other countries get trigger-twitchy about it?
- - - - -
Homosexuals--the non-closeted kind, at least--know they are homosexual. But they, many would argue, certainly did not choose to be so. We all know homosexuals are prejudiced against, and are a long way from being considered legally equal to heterosexuals.
On the other hand, clones (most likely) did not choose to be a clone, and in many cases will never even know that they are one! Despite this, it seems very probable for a whole new prejudice to happen. At least on the lines of black slavery, jews in the holocaust and homosexuality. Perhaps even unprecedented.
- - - - -
Cloning has parallels with Time Travel, and even rivals the god-like power implied by traveling back in time.
Let's say a bad guy had the power to clone at will. In the movie, Dr. Whatevershisname refuses to clone any longer. His wife was a five-year clone, and died a horrible death, which turned his thinking around. Because of this, he tells his boss, Druker, that he quits.
Druker says "I can't let you do that. First I'm going to kill you. And then I'm going to clone you, with a synchording (complete picture of the contents of the brain) taken two months ago, before you were ever against cloning. Everything will continue like this conversation never happened."
As soon as someone has a thought you don't like, you kill them, and reproduce them from a week-old synchording, effectively erasing that "bad" thought. Amazing, god-like power.
- - - - -
Just a mistake I noticed in the movie: When Arnold was originally cloned (and awoke in the taxi, at the mall), he also had a copy of his keys! They cloned the keys, too?! :' )
- - - - -
Killing your clone is legal. What if a clone, thinking they are the real, kills the (actually) real one?
- - - - -
Here are some links of interest:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Biology/Genetics/Clon ing/Human_Cloning/
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=cloning
I thought it would be good to point out that the movie pretty much gets its genetics right. The movie had a couple of things that you just had to accept as something that got invented in a hollywood future, like the 'blank humans' and the whole 'read your mind through your retina' thing, but those were just there to address limits of cloning (specifically that your memory doesn't get copied and that the clone, when created, it just one cell and needs to grow up just like you and me). When it talked about what was needed to clone someone or how they actually went about doing it, I was convinced that they had someone who knew what he was talking about working on the script.
For this, the filmmakers should be aplauded. It isn't often that a movie takes the time to get real science down correctly. If you don't think this is important to making a movie good then you haven't seen Mission to Mars
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
is a twit - he's a MentalMcNugget for the masses, he isnt a social commentator, he's a shill. Lets skip the mindless idol worship and smell a cup of reality... Your not trying to be serious are you?
So, you're saying that these issues aren't being dealt with enough outside of Hollywood?
If you don't hear everyone talking about the morality of cloning, there's a reason: there is no real morality problem to be discussing. Just lots of imagined ones.
So, let's say we can make a genetically identical copy of an organism. So what? A lot of people think that there will be some sort of dillema about who will be the real person: the original or the clone. Funny though, isn't it, that we don't seem to ever have these problems with identical twins?
-- dR.fuZZo
Record someone's memory;
Inject it in someone else's brain;
Grow an adult human in two hours.
Cloning only helps the memory 'receiver' looks like the original one... So in fact 6th Day is not much about cloning as about "memory transmission", a lot like in "Strange Days".
Unfortunately, the off-screen world already has plenty of heedless bio-tech companies, hard at work on profiting from gene mapping, promising to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease -- perhaps one day, even death itself.
Cure diseases and extend human lifepsans? Those bastards! How dare they! They won't get away with it, not if Jon Katz has anything to say about it!
History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris,
History ought to have taught us to beware fearmongers and those who attempt to constrain the pursuit of knowledge and enjoying the fruits thereof.
1. Read one of Katz's luddite screeds.
2. Read the Unabomber Manifesto, to see Katz's ideals taken to their "logical" conclusion and acted upon.
3. Read an account of the evacuation of Phnom Phen, wherein anyone educated or even wearing glasses was marked for execution, to see those ideals put to work on a mass scale.
JonKatz, Ted Kazynski, Pol Pot -- three colinear points.
Oh, and history also ought to have taught you that you'll be laughed at if you use trite cliches like that "Frankenstein" bit, but apparently it hasn't.
but we live in a time when the inventors and purveyors of technology bristle with arrogance
Indeed, how dare they have brains and presume to use them. The utter gall, huh?
and greed
The nerve of some people! Once they cure cancer and heart disease, they actually expect personal gain out of it?
Katz desperately needs some serious slapping around by the Invisible Hand.
as well as well as creativity and enterprise.
Yeah, I supppose we can put up with that creativity and enterprise stuff, if we really have to, but if we let them get away with it, they'd better damn well remember to stay poor and humble!
Were you really at the head of the line to light the fires when they burned the library at Alexandria, Mr. Katz, or do you just write like you were?
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
humor for the clinically insane
great comedy company.
Just what exactly is "dangerous" about any kind of political discussion whatsoever?
The fact that modern people are impatient and demand a reaction to any problem that's discussed. This results in countless knee-jerk reactions on the part of politicians who want to be able to say they did "something" about a problem. I reference the ever successful war on drugs.
> "The right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor's nose.
I don't take this analogy very seriously.
That happens to be a quote of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Holmes, and is one of the defining political statements that clarify the meaning and interpretation of the freedoms expressed in the Bill of Rights.
how about a cloning movie written by someone who passed grade 7 biology? DNA comes first.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
I am getting pretty friggin' tired of the anti-biotech sentiment here at slashdot. Yes, companies are patenting genes left and right, but not so they can corner the market on therapies derived from these patents.
Gene patents serve to protect the massive investments required to a bring a cancer treatment, a potential AIDS cure, or a method of reversing a genetic disesase all the way from the basic science of discovery to the production and approval of the final product. It takes years and it costs millions or even billions of dollars.
Yes, I said "billions", and stockholders are not going to allow scientists such as myself to throw that kind of money around without legal protection of their investment. This is not software development: the resources involved are far more substantial in nature.
Yes, there is an element of greed, but come on, how innocent of this vice are you, my friend? Are you involved in a big programming project? Do you see it gaining dominance in the market? Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't that make some money and wouldn't that be nice? Yes, you say? Guess what: you're greedy. Welcome to the club of humanity.
Go back and watch the films again.
In Blade Runner, the evil is born of a large corporation, but your "hapless, noble human victims" is way off. Humans have almost no part in Blade Runner. The hapless characters (and, in the end, the only real victims) are the "bad" replicants. The only noble, admirable character also turned out to be a replicant. The movie has very little to say about the evils of large corporations or about how "Joe Human" is any sort of victim.
In Gattaca, there's no mention at all of evil corporations. Embryo selection is just something that society did, something that happened. The "good guys" and the "bad guys" are all human, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone to call "hapless" or a "victim." Vincent/Jerome runs scared for some of the film, but he's manipulating the system, largely in control, and always a step ahead. And in the end, he wins.
The Matrix has no evil corporations and no human-like artificial life. All of the humans in it are either vegetables or conspirators -- none of them much qualifying as "hapless."
Even X-Men, which should be fresh in your memory, doesn't much fit your description. Evil corporations? Nah. The "bad guys" in X-Men are other mutants, fighting on the same side as the "good guys," just in a rather more violent way. There's no profit motive driving them, only a fight for surivival. The hapless victims in X-Men are the mutants alone in the outside world; the noble characters are the mutants working together. Humans are "bad guys," if anything, but are actually mostly just pawns.
Not a single one of the films you mention (well, except The Sixth Day) fits your "evil corporations design human-like artificial life that turns out to be evil and wreaks havoc among a bunch of bumbling normal people." It amazes me how much your anti-corporatist, semi-Luddite world view has distorted your memory of these films.
Go back and watch them again. Each one has a message (even if at least one of them does an awful job of conveying it). The message just doesn't coincide with what you claim it is.
Using an The Sixth Day as a benchmark of the American social consciousness of genetic engineering is like using Total Recall as a springboard for discussion of the exploration of Mars. These films use their theme - loss of memory, cloning, spies, whatever - as a McGuffin, a simple prop to get the character from one firefight to the next, to threaten and then rescue the girl, knock over a few fruitstands, and then watch the sunrise at the end, battered but victorious. There never will be consequences or revelations in these films, because actually thinking about the topic at hand would get in the way of the violence and flippant remarks.
You do NOT go to a Schwartenegger flick to be truly enlightened. You go to be entertained. Nothing more.
Reading into a an action flick like "The 6th Day" is like trying to find the meaning of life in a thrash metal album.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Political discussion about cloning is horrendously dangerous. It's about as dangerous as political discussion about the internet or computers. Anytime a bunch of stiff-assed politicians sit around a fancy table with leather seats and talk about some form of technology they don't understand, the innevitable result is that they are afraid of it! And anything they're afraid of, they pass irrational and unreasonable legislation against. Cloning doesn't work like in Arnold's little movie. Hollywood has to make some "alterations" to how cloning really works in order to make it interesting enough for the big screen. In reality, a clone is no different from an identical twin that must grow up from birth, there is no transfer of thought, memory, etc. Unfortunately, there is nothing interesting about an identical twin growing up while someone is going through a mid-life crisis, so no movies exist to match reality. And double plus unfortunately, our politicians have no exposure to this technology EXCEPT the media, so they get the mistaken impression that it actually works like Arnold's movie, and thus get even more terrified of it.
We could do with a few limitations of government, such as don't ever regulate something that isn't being used to hurt someone else. "The right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor's nose."
I would prefer if politicians didn't talk about cloning. Let them argue about how much a congressional toilet seat costs instead, it would be much more productive for humanity.
Arnold is back, in spite of himself. It's not that he's a great actor in this, but then again, he never was. You take an interesting situation stick him in them middle and watch him fuck shit up. The movie is not pure Arnold gold, but it's a step back in the right direction.
Perhaps the only real problems was the unnessescary scenes-- a football crunch up that could have been stolen from the editing room floor of 'Any given Sunday', a helocopter chase that serves no purpose then to show off CGI, and of course the obligitory car chase that kills the suspension of disbelife through unrealism.
But where this movie really shines is it's fresh take on the future; The future is not a dark place--it is sterile, bright, cheery. The wall screens don't show big brother looking down on you, they show happy ads and football updates. It's quite interesting how it demonstrates a future where the middle-class family seemlessly brings technology into their lives without batting an eye. But, at the same time there is an underlying uneasyness about all these new advances.
The purpose Arnold ultmatly serves in this is as a character study about letting go. He is the last old hat person in a changing world. When his daughter wants a grotesquly realistic robot doll that can play and sing just like a real freind, Arnold asks 'Why not just have a real freind?'. He finds himself the only one unconfortble with the idea of cloning his pet, as all of his peers think it's no big deal.
The battle, and subtle commentary becomes this: He's faced with a situation he knows to be wrong, yet his only advocates are radical protestors while the rest of normal society find him too triditional. And such is the situation many of us will face in the near future: As morally ambigious technology becomes more intertwined into our lives, do we question it and risk being labled a closed minded zelot? Or do we simply accept it without question in exchange for a sense of normalcy?
The Internet is generally stupid