Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The 6th Day!

TWO Ahnolds? I'm seein' double ova heah!

In the 90s, cyberpunk-inflected scifi action was a doggedly persistant genre that produced hits and flops in equal measure. From the strangely Bergmanesque meditations of Ghost in the Shell to the lolsorandumb antics of Johnny Mnemonic, existential angst about technology, transhumanism, corporations and dorky scenester attire was low-key omnipresent. 1984's Terminator and 1990's Total Recall were hits for Arnold Schwarzenegger that dipped toes into the cyberpunk aesthetic and thematic paddling pool, but it was only in 2000's overlooked The 6th Day that he fully committed to the bit. Schwarzenegger plays the on-the-nosely named Adam Gibson, a 2000-vintage CGI-futuristic-helicopter pilot in the vague near-future of 2000 that has doubtless since passed and been wildly different from the movie.

The most obviously dated aspect is the film's unshakeable conviction that 90s X-TREME sports culture would endure into the realm of science fiction, instead of immediately being forgotten.

But Gibson's idyllic life is about to change, for he runs into trouble with an Evil Corporation scheming to lobby the government to make human cloning legal, with the inevitable tweest that they wind up cloning our hero. While the tone of the movie is broadly tongue-in-cheek, it does explore some pretty interesting questions about individuality, memory, transhumanism, scientific ethics, consequentialism, and what-doth-lifery in general. Perhaps this odd mix was unmarketable - too smart for Commando fans, too much fun for monocle-adjusting critics - as it flopped and was instantly forgotten, but if there's no market for a movie that's half-smart, half-fun, then what good are the mass of midwits in the middle of the bell curve?

The lone Gothic spire standing tall amid the sterile modernistic skyline is as wordlessly eloquent an image as you'll find in many a more boring and pretentious vehicle.

Comparable movies telegraph their intentions way too hard: as soon as you hear that there are rebels against the government in the main part of Total Recall, you know they're the Good Guys. But The 6th Day is savvy enough to judo-flip the Pavlovesque conditioning of audience expectations in a more interesting direction, as its Evil Religious Fundamentalists wind up largely vindicated, while the slick, virtue-cloaked CEO lobbyist acts like the real villains of this world, name-dropping Martin Luther King as an example of the sort who should be cloned to push his malign transhuman agenda. He could be Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and more rolled into one, and the actor (Tony Goldwyn, son of Samuel Goldwyn, Jr.) plays it all off with a well-observed unctuous earnestness and never falls into melodramatics even when declaring himself God.

Imagine being Arnold in that scene and having to be all like "damn, Joe Biden, you fuckin' fine, all presidential with your malformed clone body and horrific Karloff mummy face. I would totally vote for you, both my character and the real me." when all he really wants to do is fuck another 16 year old in his dressing room. Like seriously imagine having to be Arnold and not only sit in that chair while Joe Biden flaunts his late stage dementia in front of you, the favorable lighting barely concealing his drool cup and crackhead son, and just sit there, take after take, hour after hour, while he perfected that speech. Not only having to tolerate his monstrous fucking visage but his haughty attitude as everyone on set tells him he's STILL GOT IT and DAMN, JOE BIDEN LOOKS LIKE THAT?? because they're not the ones who have to sit there and watch his blank fucking cryptkeeper face contort into looks of confusion you didn't even know existed before that day. You've been fucking nothing but a healthy diet of blondes and supermodels and later alleged rape victims for your ENTIRE CAREER coming straight out of the boonies in Austria. You've never even seen anything this fucking embarrassing before, and now you swear you can taste the drool that's hanging from his jaw as he rotates it wordlessly, smugly assured that you are enjoying the opportunity to get paid to sit there and revel in his "lucid (for that is what he calls himself)" oratory, the oratory he worked so hard for with personal trainers in the previous months. And then the director calls for another take, and you know you could kill every single person in this room before the studio security could put you down, but you sit there and endure, because you're fucking Arnold. You're not going to lose your future political career over this. Just bear it. Hide your face and bear it.

It's rare for a movie to capture convincingly how evil actually functions with good PR - the vast majority of people in this world see Drucker's corporation as good; he affects sympathetic goals and motives, uses connections to get his way and can disappear threats with the help of his goon cadres led by perfectly-typecast Michael Rooker like a still-much-less-evil Clinton, while the fundamentalists who oppose him are seen as cranks, but join the ranks of vindicated reactionaries going back to the Luddites. Tell 'em, Greta:

"How DARE you?" - oh come on now.

Contrary to my contrarian principles (and therefore in keeping with them), I don't hate all social commentary. I hate when it's wrong, and sucks, and serves to bolster the axioms that undergird our loathsome and retarded zeitgeist. The 6th Day injects some thoughtfulness into, of all things, a Schwarzenegger action caper, and has aged beautifully, while its contemporaries (like The Matrix) have further beclowned themselves with sequels. While its aesthetic style is more 2000 than anything more "futuristic" (accurately or otherwise), it does have a neat line in laser guns that, rather than puncture or burn, surgically sever enemies' appendages:

*Turns to camera* "something's afoot."