The 6th Day is a 2000 action film directed by Roger Spottiswoode and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The action hero plays family man Adam Gibson, who is cloned against his will in the future of 2015. Schwarzenegger received a salary of $25 million for his role in the film.[1]
Plot
The film opens in the year 2015 at a XFL game in which one of the players, Johnny Phoenix, is seriously injured. As he is taken away in an ambulance, a Millenium Security agent, Robert Marshall, kills him by turning the life support machines off. However, the news the next day announces that he will return for the next games, including an interview with the healthy Phoenix stating that the injury was only minor. It is later made clear that he has been illegally and secretly cloned by his team managers. (While animal cloning is now perfectly normal, human cloning has been banned for years.)
Adam Gibson, a Double-X Charter pilot, faces his own problems with cloning: it is his birthday, and the family dog has just been euthanized by law due to a serious dog disease, and Adam, who distrusts cloning, refuses to have the dog cloned, causing a row with his wife. While at work, his best friend, Hank Morgan, convinces him to at least check out RePet, the cloning company. He switches places with him as pilot for Michael Drucker. Adam visits RePet, and is almost tempted to clone his dog, but his eyes fall on a SimPal (life-sized animated dolls), which he gets for his daughter instead. When he arrives home, however, he sees that he and the dog have been cloned. A group of assassins (Marshall, Talia, Wiley and Vincent) attempt to kill Adam, but Adam manages to escape in his Cadillac, killing Wiley and Talia in the process. He goes to the police, who think he is filing a bogus report due to his double previously reporting the "theft" of the Cadillac. Marshall updates the police database showing Adam as a psychiatric patient. Adam manages to evade them, and kills a cloned Wiley by fatally breaking his neck.
Adam seeks refuge in Hank's apartment, and tells him everything. The two go to Adam's house, where Adam very nearly kills his double from behind, but relents, and they leave without alerting the double or his family. In Hank's apartment, however, an anti-cloning fundamentalist, Tripp, arrives and kills Hank. In the ensuing fight, Tripp escapes with a gunshot wound to the stomach, but is unable to escape from the car park. Adam finds him on the verge of death, and Tripp reveals that Hank was in fact a clone, since he killed the real Hank that same afternoon so he could kill Drucker, who was also a clone, and the man behind the cloning is Dr. Griffin Weir. Tripp kills himself to avoid capture and Adam again manages to escape from Talia and Marshall, killing Talia and wounding Marshall, taking Talia's thumb in the process to use to activate her car.
Adam decides to take matters into his own hands and stop the cloning. Weir, meanwhile, loses his wife, who he had cloned five years before, to Cystic Fibrosis. Weir runs a check on the DNA of all the people he has cloned, and finds that they all have congenital defects: they will die and not be re-cloned unless they perform favors for Drucker, the mastermind behind the whole thing. Adam, with a smuggled gun and hostage guard, corners Weir in his lab and demands answers. Weir reveals that the cloning of Adam was in fact an accident: the day Tripp killed Drucker and Hank, Hank and Adam had switched places, leading them to believe that Adam had been killed and not Hank. Weir also tells him that one Adam has to die to cover the cloning up: if word gets out that Drucker is a clone, he loses everything, because human clones have no rights. Acting on Weir's advice, Adam rushes to his daughter's school to save his family in case the assassins target his double, but arrives too late: Talia and Vincent take them hostage. Adam confronts his double, and the two agree to work together to rescue them.
Weir, realizing Drucker's deception, confronts him in his office. Drucker offers to clone Weir's wife again, but Weir refuses, as his wife had requested not to be cloned again. Weir resigns, but Drucker shoots him in the head, planning to clone both Weir and his wife with no memories of the past incident. Adam contacts Drucker and makes a deal with him to recover his family in exchange for Drucker's syncording, the only proof of Drucker's cloning. The assassins go back on the deal, and capture Adam, while his double is left at the Double-X Charter base with the syncording. In Drucker's office, Drucker reveals to Adam that it is in fact he, and not the other Adam, who is the clone. He offers a heartbroken Adam to give up the original and resume his life, but he refuses. They knock him out and take his syncording. In the ensuing fray, Drucker is shot by Wiley in the stomach, and Drucker shoots Wiley back, giving instructions not to revive him. Drucker attempts to clone himself while Adam kills the assassins off one by one. Adam confronts the new Drucker who is imperfect and ugly, and knocks him out while the original dies of his wounds.
The original Adam, meanwhile, locates his family, rescues them, kills Vincent in the process, and returns to aid Adam against Drucker's men. Drucker joins the fray, and the two Adams try to kill the new Drucker with the original exchanging fire with him while the clone remote pilots a Double X chopper at him to try to kill him with the blades. Drucker dodges the blades, landing of a glass celling, but the glass breaks and sends Drucker falling several stories to the lobby of the building, killing him. A bomb planted in the building starts to go off, the two Adams manage to escape just before the explosion by flying away in the chopper, while the bomb kills all of Drucker's men and destroys the human cloning facility. The next day, the two Adams prepare to send the cloned Adam to Argentina to start a satellite Double X Charter business. With the real Adam's permission, the clone Adam goes home and says goodbye to "his" wife and daughter, knowing he will never see them again. A DNA scan reveals no abnormalities, for whatever reason when Adam was cloned, no fatal conditions were put into him like the other clones. He gives them Hank's cat Sadie (who is a RePet) as a gift and they never realize the truth about him thinking he's the original. The real Adam waves goodbye as the Adam clone heads to Argentina to start the new branch office and his new life.
Cast
- Arnold Schwarzenegger as Adam Gibson's clone, the main protagonist of the movie. Schwarzenegger also plays the original Gibson (at times simultaneously via computer animation).
- Michael Rapaport as Hank Morgan, Adam's best friend who wears glasses.
- Tony Goldwyn as Michael Drucker, the mastermind behind the cloning.
- Michael Rooker as Robert Marshall, a Millennium Security agent on Drucker's payroll.
- Sarah Wynter as Talia Elsworth, an assassin working for Drucker.
- Wendy Crewson as Natalie Gibson, Adam's wife.
- Rodney Rowland as P. Wiley, an assassin working for Drucker.
- Terry Crews as Vincent Bansworth, an assassin working for Drucker.
- Ken Pogue as Speaker Day
- Colin Cunningham as Tripp, a religious fundamentalist strongly against cloning.
- Robert Duvall as Dr. Griffin Weir, Drucker's scientist in charge of the cloning until he reforms, losing his life in the process.
- Wanda Cannon as Katherine Weir, Griffin's wife. Actually a clone of Katherine, who died five years before the movie's events.
- Taylor Anne Reid as Clara Gibson, Adam's daughter.
- Jennifer Gareis as Hank's Virtual Girlfriend
- Don McManus as the RePet Salesman
- Martin Fellez as the Darkness
Cultural references
- When the virtual psychiatrist comes up in the police station, he asks Gibson about a turtle in the desert and about his mother, references to Leon's Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner (1982).
- One skier near the beginning mentions he has a cloned snake, another reference to Blade Runner (1982).
- As Adam is leaving the pet cloning store at the mall, he tells the clerk "I might be back" which is a play on his famous "I'll be back" line from the Terminator movies.
- The name was changed from The Sixth Day to The 6th Day to avoid confusion with The Sixth Sense (1999).
- The Sim-Pal slogan is "A Sim-Pal that's fun to be with!", a derivation from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. There, the corporation that created robots with "Genuine People Personalities" had the slogan "Your plastic pal that's fun to be with!"
- The henchman Wiley who dies repeatedly in freak accidents seems to be a spoof of Wile E. Coyote. Drucker also owns a sport team called the Roadrunners.
Notes
- According to Arnold Schwarzenegger in the DVD featurette The Future is Coming, the film is set in the year 2015.
- Kevin Costner turned down the lead role in this film due to scheduling conflicts with another film.
- Christopher Lawford, who plays a police officer in the film, is Arnold Schwarzenegger's cousin by marriage.
- The Colosseum-like building that houses the genetic lab and is blown up at the end is actually the Vancouver Public Library, which is an inside joke for citizens of British Columbia. Incidentally, this building was also featured in the science fiction series Battlestar Galatica which was also filmed in British Columbia.
- The professional football league that Johnny Phoenix plays for, the XFL, was created in 2000 by WWE owner Vince McMahon. It only lasted one season, thus creating an anachronism.
- When Adam is locked in the room at the police station, the name of the webcaster appears on the screen as Marianne Wibberley. Wibberley co-wrote the movie with her husband Cormac Wibberley.
Production
Locations
Home video releases
The 6th Day was released on video on the following dates:
| Release Date |
Territory |
Format |
Notes |
| March 27, 2001 |
U.S. and Canada |
DVD |
Discontinued |
| May 27, 2001 |
U.S. and Canada |
VHS |
| June 3, 2003 |
U.S. and Canada |
DVD |
Special Edition |
| December 15, 2003 |
U.S. and Canada |
DVD |
Schwarzenegger Action Pack: The 6th Day and Last Action Hero |
A Blu-ray version was released in the United States and Canada on April 8, 2008.
References
External links
