The 6th Day

Infobox_Film
name = The 6th Day


director = Roger Spottiswoode
producer = Mike Medavoy
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Jon Davison
writer = Cormac Wibberley
Marianne Wibberley
starring = Arnold Schwarzenegger
Michael Rapaport
Tony Goldwyn
Michael Rooker
Sarah Wynter
Robert Duvall
distributor = Columbia TriStar
released = November 17, 2000
music = Trevor Rabin
runtime = 123 min.
awards =
language = English
budget = $82 million (estimated)
amg_id = 1:214080
imdb_id = 0216216

"The 6th Day" is a 2000 action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. He plays family man Adam Gibson who is secretly cloned and must fight for his own survival while stopping the organization behind the cloning. The film was directed by Roger Spottiswoode.

Plot

In the near future, Adam Gibson (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a happily married man who has a wife named Natalie (Wendy Crewson) and a daughter named Clara (Taylor Anne Reid). Adam is a pilot and partner of the Double X Charter Company, a futuristic helicopter service that transports clients to snowy environs so they can ski, snowboard, or whatever they plan to do. While Adam's partner and best friend Hank Morgan (Michael Rapaport) enjoys the company of a virtual girlfriend, Adam is old-fashioned when it comes to technology outside of work.

But the big thing going is cloning -- if you have a pet that is sick or has died, you can have a company called RePet make a healthy clone of your pet with all of your pet's memories and behavior, and you have your pet back. However, human cloning has been banned for years. Adam finds his stances on technology challenged when Clara wants a realistic looking and realistic behaving Sim-Pal doll.

There is a company called Replacement Technologies, which is a company designed to replenish the world's food supply through advanced cloning. Replacement Technologies is owned by multi-billionaire Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn), and his chief scientist is Griffin Weir (Robert Duvall).

Virtually unknown to anyone outside of the company, Replacement technologies has perfected the process of human cloning with the use of a system called syncording, where you have your eyes scanned and they get a disc copy of all of the information that's in your brain, and they use "blank" human bodies that they have stored. That way, it takes about 2 hours to completely clone a human. Such is the case of the XFL's top quarterback, who is killed during a game, but is then cloned and brought back for the 2nd half of the game without anyone knowing.

At fundraisers and conferences, Drucker is actively lobbying for anti-human cloning laws to be repealed, particularly playing on the emotions of a Strom Thurmond-esque US Senator whose child is terminally ill. At one conference several critics point out that Drucker owns RePet, and according to records is actually losing money on it. They make the (accurate) accusation that Drucker is operating RePet at a loss as a way to "soften up" public opinion about cloning.

Drucker hires Adam to take him up on the slopes, but requires that Adam and Hank first take a few tests for "insurance" reasons. They each give blood and do an eye test, but without knowing it, they are actually giving a DNA sample and a syncording of their brain.

It's Adam's birthday, so Hank poses as Adam and takes Drucker up so Adam can be at home with Natalie and Clara. Drucker is paranoid, out of fear of getting killed, and for a good reason. When they reach the summit, an anti-cloning activist is there waiting, and he kills everyone, unbeknownst to the viewer.

When the Gibson family dog dies, Adam goes to RePet and asks about getting the dog cloned for Clara. He decides instead to get her the Sim-Pal doll. When Adam gets home, he looks in the window and Adam's birthday party is going on, and in the middle is Adam blowing out his candles. This leads him to scream in angst the memorable line "There's someone in my house, eating my birthday cake, with my family, and it's not me!"

Drucker's right hand man Robert Marshall (Michael Rooker) and his cronies, Talia Elsworth (Sarah Wynter), Wiley (Rod Rowland) and Vincent (Terry Crews) show up and try to kill Adam, but he escapes and kills Marshall and his cronies.

It turns out that after Drucker was killed, he was cloned. Nor was this first time Drucker had died; the original Drucker had been killed some years before in a similar assassination and also cloned. As a clone, the current Drucker has no rights under the Constitution and is not considered a "person"; if information leaked out that he is actually a clone, he would lose everything, so he is willing to go to any lengths including murder to cover it up. He thought it was Adam that flew him and was also killed (due to Hank saying he was Adam), so to put everything back in its original place, he had Adam cloned so nobody would know that Replacement Technologies is cloning humans or that Drucker is himself a clone.

Adam can't tell his family that he has been cloned, or his family will be killed. Marshall, Talia, Wiley, Vincent have been cloned and sent after Adam, and every time Adam kills them, they are cloned and sent after Adam again.

Griffin, Drucker's head scientist, is upset that his wife Katherine (Wanda Cannon) is dying of cystic fibrosis. Katherine, as it turns out, is actually a clone of Griffin's original wife who tragically died of a separate fatal illness. Griffin is confused because Katherine's family had no prior history of cystic fibrosis, so he is spurred to investigate the cloning lab's files. Griffin makes a shocking discovery: Drucker has implanted the DNA of every human his labs have cloned with imperfections that will make each of them develop a genetic disease that will kill each clone within 1-5 years. Drucker explains that he did this as a "security measure" so the clones would not try to expose or destroy Drucker, giving the rationalization that the cloned humans will have to rely on Drucker for a steady supply of clones every 1-5 years in order to stay "alive". Griffin points out the absurdity of this that each new clone is not a direct continuation of the person they've been cloned from: they're a new person that looks the same and with the same memories, but in no way does the cloning process transfer consciousnesses form one body to the next. Drucker doesn't seem to grasp this and considers repeated cloning to be no different from immortality.

Because of what Drucker is doing, Griffin resigns from Replacement technologies, and decides that he doesn't want Katherine to be cloned again, and Katherine dies. Drucker, knowing that he needs Griffin, says fine, and he kills Griffin and says he will just clone Griffin and Katherine again so Replacement Technologies will be back to normal.

Drucker comes to believe that the only way to get Adam is to kidnap his Natalie and Clara, which is exactly what Drucker's henchmen do. The kidnapping takes place at the school that Clara goes to, and the two Adams finally meet each other. They team up, and they come up with a plan to rescue Natalie and Clara from Drucker.

Adam contacts Drucker and sets up a meeting at Drucker's headquarters. At the headquarters, Drucker explains to Adam that Adam is the clone and that the clone is actually the real Adam.

A shootout takes place and Drucker is mortally wounded, and realizing that he has at best a few hours to live he starts creating another clone of himself. During the cloning process, the cloned Adam disrupts everything and destroys the machine, making Drucker's clone incomplete. Drucker's clone is alive, just not fully formed yet. Ironically, having two Drucker-clones alive at the same time points out the flaws in Drucker's earlier assertion that a clone is a direct continuation of the original; the new Drucker clone is clearly a separate person and he coldly takes the wounded Drucker's clothes to change into, not even waiting for Drucker to die.

Drucker's clone has a shootout with the two Adams, but during the battle he ends up jumping onto some ceiling windows when the real Adam tries to kill him with the Double X Charter helicopter's rotors, Drucker's clone falls though the glass, falling hundreds of stories to his death, then after Natalie and Clara are out of the building (the real Adam rescues them then comes back for his clone, arriving in time to help him fight off Drucker and escape), the two Adams blow up the building, killing the rest of Drucker's henchmen and the cloning facility is destroyed.

Later, the cloned Adam says goodbye to the real Adam and his family, because the cloned Adam is using one of the Double X Charter Company helicopters to start his own business in Argentina.

Cast & crew

*Arnold Schwarzenegger as Adam Gibson
*Michael Rapaport as Hank Morgan
*Tony Goldwyn as Michael Drucker
*Michael Rooker as Robert Marshall
*Sarah Wynter as Talia Elsworth
*Wendy Crewson as Natalie Gibson
*Rodney Rowland as P. Wiley
*Terry Crews as Vincent Bansworth
*Ken Pogue as Speaker Day
*Colin Cunningham as Tripp
*Robert Duvall as Dr. Griffin Weir
*Wanda Cannon as Katherine Weir
*Taylor Anne Reid as Clara Gibson
*Jennifer Gareis as Hank's Virtual Girlfriend
*Don McManus as RePet Salesman
*Martin Fellez as the Darkness

Additional information

*The title refers to the Biblical story of creation in Genesis, where on the sixth day, God created mankind, male and female, in His own image.
*The metallic device seen in the movie poster is used to archive the mental state of a person, such as memories, habits etc. and subsequently transfer it to his or her clone. The recording is called the "cerebral syncording process".

Production

Locations

* Vancouver, Canada
* Vancouver Library Square, Vancouver, Canada
* Richmond, British Columbia, Canada
* The Darkness House, United States
* McMath Secondary School
* Simon Fraser University

Home video releases

"The 6th Day" was released on video on the following dates:

References

External links

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