This Schwarzennegger movie actually needs more violence
Ah, memories. I remember well, as a young 'un, the coming of a new Schwarzennegger movie was an Event, capital E! Whether he was duking it out with aliens, game show hosts, Latino dictators, the mob...even if the movie didn't turn out to be that good in the end, it was still a Schwarzennegger movie, and to us, a force to be reckoned with. Arnold was a real action star. He was THE action star - Stallone was an even worse actor and chose far worse scripts (which were then attached to far worse directors), new upstarts Seagal and Van Damme had some moves but just couldn't compete with the crushkilldestroy of Arnold. But then...something happened.
I'm not really sure what happened, to tell you the truth. It wasn't just Last Action Hero, though that certainly didn't help matters ("Magic ticket my ass, McBain!"). The concept of the action star in American cinema just died. Sure, Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson cranked out some hits for a while, but there have never been anything specifically action-y about those two, and the Hong Kong action stars had yet to make any widespread impression in North America. Moviegoers just started asking for something other than the assurance of a favorite action star to draw them into theaters. Too many of those stars let them down, I guess. Seagal descended into self-parody with a hilariously stupid self-directed movie with an environmental message. Stallone's movies just kept tanking, often deservedly, though I still contend that Demolition Man is the best damn action movie the guy's ever been involved in. Van Damme just...I dunno, did Van Damme ever have any movies that could be enjoyed for the right reasons? I'm drawing a blank here. And, of course, Last Action Hero.
So, replacing the action star in the 90's was more and more elaborate effects, taking a cue from the success of Arnold's biggest hit, Terminator 2. I suspect that The Matrix either put the kibosh on that trend by setting the bar so damn high that only masochist moviemakers will want to go near it, or will kick it into overdrive for the same reason. And it starred Keanu Reeves. What a sorry state the concept of the action star must be in.
So, re-enter Arnold Schwarzennegger, who never really went away for that long, but was stuck making movies that, ultimately, nobody cared about. Last Action Hero, of course, sucked mightily, and True Lies, while a hit, wasn't enough to make up for it. And then there was Eraser, which nobody noticed. Batman & Robin went on to become one of the most hated movies of our time, and End Of Days, thoroughly misguided from day one, can best hope to attain what's kindly referred to as cult status.
And now, there's The 6th Day, a fairly obvious attempt to return Arnold back to the forefront by playing on the strengths of his biggest hits, sci-fi actioners like Total Recall and the Terminator movies. And what we get is the first sci-fi actioner I can think of in recent years in which the sci-fi aspect is more satisfying than the action. It's still a fun movie overall, but the action itself is pedestrian (especially when compared to recent films like The Matrix) and, well, tame.
Set "sooner than you think", Arnold stars as Adam Gibson, a hotshot helicopter pilot (you've gotta see these helicopters) with a wife and daughter. Arnold actually looks like he's in better shape here than he has been in about ten years, but he's definitely not going for an action-hero vibe, emphasizing instead his role as husband and father. Such pains are taken to present Adam as an everyman instead of an action hero, even Arnold's trademark one-liner is given less resolve, changed to "I might be back!"
One day, Adam decides to go look into having his dead pet cloned at the wonderfully named RePet, so he goes off to do that while his flying partner (Michael Rappaport) flies the multi-bazillionaire Drucker (Tony Goldwyn) Adam was scheduled to fly around. When he gets home that evening, he finds that the dog's already been cloned - and so has he!
"You've cloned the wrong man," says Arnold in a widely-used clip for the ads, and it's hard to get enthused over a line like that, but the movie's better than that suggests. The concept of cloning is thankfully used as more than a mere gimmick to have two Arnolds on screen at once; we're presented with a world in which cloning is a new but commercially available service, illegal to perform on humans but with a lot of applications aside from that.
Many of the technologies presented in the film are probably not too far off, and are probably feasible today, barring prohibitive cost; sure, the cars are butt-ugly, but who could've predicted something like the Aztec? Science fiction isn't about predicting the future, but about cautioning about it, and in that regard, The 6th Day delivers by not going too far with its technological and sociological developments and making sure that they're well rooted in the society of today. This movie doesn't go straight out and tell us that virtual girlfriends, unbelievably creepy-looking robot dolls, or cloned pets (so you won't have to expose your kid to the idea of death too soon) are bad things we have to look forward to, it just lets us draw our own conclusions after showing us what is and isn't so great about these things. Nor are the central ethical concerns regarding cloning simplified into a hero who thinks it's bad and a villain who thinks it's good, though I would have appreciated a little more insight into the reasoning behind the "sixth day laws" which prohibit human cloning. The prologue would have us believe it's because the first cloned human was really ugly, and there seems to be some religious aspect to it as well (there are religious anti-cloning protestors throughout the film). Nobody mentions the effect these things would have on human reproduction (would it even be necessary?), or continuing human evolution (as in, there wouldn't be any more, though some have said it came to a stop when man started controlling his environment more than it controlled him). I think the best look into these conundrum comes in a subplot involving Robert Duvall and his dead (but alive, if you know what I mean) wife. Maybe it's for the best that these things aren't dug into too much; it's nice to see a sci-fi movie that actually gives you something to think about afterward, though of course The 6th Day, like all modern cinematic sci-fi, presents us with no ideas that haven't been around for decades in short stories and novels.
As for the clones, what has long made the concept of clones appealing to SF writers is the theoretical rapidity of their development; clones in SF stories take hours, days, weeks to develop, not the decades of a real person. Dolly the sheep didn't work that way, she had to grow up in the normal amount of time, and so too will clones (of whatever species) for the forseeable future. This movie skirts over that with the idea of "blanks", genetically generic, fully-grown fetus-looking people who just hang their in their tanks, waiting to get a personality downloaded and have that 0.1% (or whatever) of DNA imprinted on them that differentiates one human from the next.
The sci-fi aspect of the film is successful, but not without its holes. Much is made of how a sort of imprint of people thoughts, memories, and personality, called a syncording, can be rapidly down- and up-loaded "via the optic nerve", which means it's basically zapped in and out of your eyes. Anyway, that's how a clone is the same "person" as its original. In order to download a syncording after you're dead, you need an intact brain, but when Drucker announces his plan to clone an unwilling participant for his future plans after he murders him, why does he proceed to shoot him in the head? Maybe there was a previously taken syncording, but that doesn't explain how a syncording was taken of one character who was assassinated by the very person who tells us that you can't take a syncording from someone with a destroyed head, and who shoots himself in the head to avoid having an post-mortal syncording taken of himself! You'd think he would've taken care to shoot the guy in the head. Or maybe there was an earlier syncording of him too. Dammit, the more plot holes I think of in this movie, the more they get patched up. I guess that's the mark of a fairly good plot (despite a "limited lifespan" subplot which, while smacking nicely of Goldwyn's sleazy greed, is lifted wholesale from Blade Runner's four-year-lifespan idea, even matching the post-climactic happy-ending revelation that, for no apparent reason, this particular clone has no such defect).
And of course, there's the problem that what emerges at the end of a cloning procedure is identical to me in every respect except, well, it's not me. I'm me, I'm right here, and if I die, I'm gone. Clone me all you want, none of them are going to have any continuance of consciousness from me; it'll seem like it to them, but I'm out of the picture and that's all I care about. This does not concern a few of the villains, who die and get cloned several times just as part of their jobs. (and wake up, annoyed that they have to get their hair re-colored, ears re-pierced, and sometimes have phantom pain from the injuries that previously killed them, a drawback of taking a post-mortal syncording) Goldwyn gets a great scene late in the film where he has to deal with that.
As an action movie, The 6th Day is less successful, and is more impressive in concept than execution. Those are some REALLY cool-looking helicopters, and there are a bunch of fun villains (who, as I said, react interestingly to their own deaths and clonings). I particularly liked Goldwyn, who displays the right mix of snakiness and charm, getting his most enjoyably evil moment when he kills one of his goons (who fully expects to be cloned back each time he dies) and tells another goon not to bring him back this time. You see a lot of villains kill their goons in these movies, but none of the other goons expected to come back. But the action itself just doesn't get the adrenaline going.
The problem with director Roger Spottiswoode's handling of the action sequences is apparent from the first scene, a terribly obvious bit of product placement which features a game in the upcoming XFL. To be fair, I can't think of ANY director capable of making this sport look even the slightest bit interesting or exciting to me, even when it's called "extreme", yeah, whatever. Still, this scene is a crashing bore, taking what should be at the very least a nice heaping plate of bone-crunching and making it about as enjoyable as, well, a real game of football. Similarly lifeless is the two-helicopter flight through the Rockies, which treats us to a lot of gorgeous scenery but no real thrills.
Additionally problematic are the "gun"-fights. Rumors abound of Schwarzennegger being pressured by the NRA to make more "firearm-friendly" movies, which...I really don't know what the hell that's supposed to mean, but the NRA has long quietly decried action movies for irresponsible portrayal of gun use, while of course making no real waves about it (these movies are the best advertisements the gun companies, and thus the NRA, can ask for, and they're free!), and Charlton Heston was in True Lies, and...don't ask me, guys. Anyway, what we get in the end here is something the NRA shouldn't feel too much pressure to take a stand on one way or another: laser guns. Rare is the cinematic laser fight that's half as exciting as a cinematic gunfight, and The 6th Day is no exception. However, it is nice to see that these weapons are blasting people's feet and fingers off, making for a much more violent film than one might expect from its PG-13 rating. There's even a little nudity, God bless 'em!
I dunno; like pretty much any sci-fi/action movie, this is nowhere near the movie it could have been, though it's refreshing to see, for once, a variation from the standard trend that the sci-fi aspect is sacrificed to the kinetics and explosions. Arnold himself is still, well, Arnold, but he's easily as good here as you'll ever see him, and far more comically assured than he is even in his (intended) comedies. In the scenes with his family, he feels like a husband and father, not like a guy who's about to Make Somebody Pay for whatever they're gonna do to that family. He's likeable, and not necessarily just because he's Arnold. That's a big step forward for him.
I guess in the end, The 6th Day is kind of like one step forward and one step back, maybe two steps, since it didn't do particularly well at the box office. If Arnold really wants to make a comeback, he's going to have to forget this PC shit and just kill a lot of people, but there's lots to see in The 6th Day that gives one reason to believe he's getting it at least half right. It's been a while since I was a teenager, so I doubt there'll ever be another Schwarzennegger movie I'll look forward to as an Event (crusty, cynical old bastard that I've become - aw, look, Bun just nibbled at by sock!) but I'd like a return to the days when his movies could be warmly anticipated.
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