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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.
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