This time last year we got Arnold Schwarzenegger’s apocalyptic action picture End of Days, in which he had to battle the devil himself to save the world from … well, from the devil himself. This Christmas his big-budget offering is The Sixth Day, in which he has to battle evil would-be world-dominators who have mastered the science of cloning people. Note the religious echoes in both titles; Arnie is not afraid to see himself on a biblical scale. His character in this film, by the way, is called Adam.
The title of The Sixth Day refers to a law passed, sometime in the future, banning the cloning of people. You will recall, especially if you are one of those believers who filled our letters pages last week testifying to the enduring value of Christianity, that God created man on the sixth day. He got around to woman a little later, but the opposition is between divine creation and human gene-meddling, which enables reproduction via cloning. We are told soon after the movie’s impressive credits that the disasters attendant upon the first human clones (this is the future, remember) led to the “sixth day law”, making such reproduction illegal.
It is, however, perfectly legal to clone animals – witness the success of RePet, an agency which offers to replace your beloved dog or cat on the very day of his or her demise. Schwarzenegger plays a charter helicopter pilot who has a problem with the idea of cloning, even if it is only a pet. He resists the idea of his darling daughter getting her late dog back, good as new, because this flouts the natural order of things. (He has qualms about clones, but not about killing people, as you will see.)
But this ghost of a moral argument is simply an excuse for rollercoaster action, though eventually it gets resolved with that special ambiguity of which only Hollywood is capable. As the movie progresses Arnie will learn that, despite the wicked clone-mongers he is soon up against, a clone isn’t necessarily all bad. Of course, his moral dilemma is eased by the fact that the clone in question is a clone of him.
One would have thought one Arnie was enough. In any case, two Arnies do not an actor make. His cartoon-Neanderthal features render one of the movie’s early scenes quite risible. It is meant to depict domestic bliss, with Arnie, that is, Adam, getting a bit frisky with his wife, but Arnie can’t do facial expressions very well. Perhaps the director could have considered some computer-generated imagery to enable Arnie to perform a fond sigh.
The references to ageing don’t work, either. Unlike Clint Eastwood, who has made getting older a major theme in the later part of his oeuvre, Schwarzenegger barely seems human enough to get old, and the coy joke he makes on this subject is not helped by his Miami tan or his unnaturally brown hair.
But you can ignore that part of the movie; it doesn’t last long, anyway. Finding himself cornered, Arnie or Adam has to go up against the Bill Gates of cloning and his formidable (and rather amusing) henchpeople. The action in The Sixth Day is good, from the canyon rides in Arnie’s helluva helicopter – one reaches instinctively for a seatbelt – to the climactic final struggle with the forces of evil. Lone or doubled, good or bad, Arnie certainly knows how to give great destruction.