The 6th Day

THE 6TH DAY combines bad filmmaking with bad science fiction to make the worst film I’ve seen in months.

In THE 6TH DAY, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a charter jetcopter pilot who gets in the crosshairs of an evil corporate mastermind with a god complex. Thus begins your basic chase-thriller, but with a twist: the picture is set in the near future, and the evil corporate mastermind likes to clone people for fun and profit. Is Schwarzenegger’s clumsily named Adam a clone or an original edition? Will he live long enough to bring down the evil mastermind’s dastardly scheme? Have you ever been to the movies before?

THE 6TH DAY is bad filmmaking on so many levels that I’m having difficulty deciding where to begin. Do I start with the horrifically glaring product placements that make suspending disbelief impossible? How about the mechanical, by-the-numbers script that telegraphs absolutely everything that will occur in acts two and three in the first fifteen minutes? Of course, there’re always the wooden performances, ghastly set design, and glaring continuity errors, but that seems like piling on. Tell you what – let’s handle this by focusing in one bad judgment that’ll give you a sense of the wrong-headedness of the rest of the production. The evil corporate mastermind (Aside: Ever notice how studio films, which are paid for by corporations, love to use corporations as villains? Do you find the hypocrisy as insulting as I do?) needs a brilliant scientist to actually do his work. THE 6TH DAY employs Robert Duvall in the role, and it’s about the worst choice imaginable. Duvall is making an entirely different movie than everyone else involved in this train wreck, and his character’s pathos, humanity, and fundamental decency so overcome the weakness of his arc and dialogue that he single-handedly shows us what might have been. Like the men in the Plato’s Cave Analogy, we’d have been better off ignorant: Duvall’s brilliance makes everything around him look like nothing more than shadows on a wall, and his casting reflects the same kind of poor judgment that permeates every facet of the production.

THE 6TH DAY is bad science fiction because it steals whole concepts and conceits from other works without bothering to credit them or toss them a nod in any way. Additionally, it weasels out of crafting a compelling vision of the future by telling us that it's taking place in "the near future - sooner than you think." Of course, what vision it does muster looks just like everyone else’s vision of the future - silly wigs, but with more product placement. And its technology – well, it’s simply counterintuitive and unbelievable.

What a disappointment.