The 6th Day (2000)

Adam Gibson runs a helicopter charter company that ferries people up to the mountains so they can go snow boarding or skiing. When a high profile business man, and keen skier, Michael Drucker approaches his company he thinks nothing of it when he has to undergo the standard checks to ensure his clients safety and confidentiality.

Michael Drucker owns Replacement Technologies, a company that is at the fore-front of cloning technology. They can do everything from fish cloning, to repopulate the barren oceans, to RePet, a company that perfectly clones dead family pets. There are even rumours that the company is breaking the 6th day law, a law passed banning the cloning of humans.

Once they reach the mountain summit something goes terribly wrong and the passengers are apparently murdered by a anti-cloning protestor. When Adam wakes up in the back of a taxi with no apparent knowledge on how he got there, he heads home only to find that he is already at home - there's a perfect double at his birthday party and he's helping himself to his wife.

The picture is bright and colourful with plenty of detail and the CGI images blend in surprisingly well with the real life footage. The bit-rate remains above average during the film and both the daylight and dark scenes are handled superbly with no signs of either artifacting or outlining. This is one advantage of a big budget film, they spend plenty of money on the picture reproduction and this one is first rate.

Whilst examining the disc packaging I nearly had a heart attack when I noticed that the sound symbol only indicated a stereo soundtrack. With the additional languages and the extras I thought Columbia had squeezed the sound to accommodate everything. Fortunately, this is a misprint as the film does indeed contain a full blown 5.1 soundtrack, there's even the Dolby Digital fanfare at the beginning to rest assure us insecure types. However, the sound is rather plain and boring with only the occasional use of the surround channels. Although the stereo steerage at the front is reasonable enough there were times when the dialogue was a little inaudible and some volume adjustment was required. Perhaps it was Arnies incoherent ramblings that I couldn't quite pick up, but once the action and explosions kicked in everything perked up.

The menu is animated and scored and extras are rather good, even if they seem to have that emergency padding feel to them to bolster a flagging film. Although interesting, the featurettes are short and needlessly split up. However, these truck load of extras are better than the barren American version.

This film has a definite Total Recall feel to it and even the plot twist could have been taken from the film. Even the graphics and scenery are, in a manner, suspiciously similar and the guns comparable to the other Arnie action feast Eraser. Mind you, these films did try to project a near future and it does work well with the technology temptingly close, even if the cloning method employed is (hopefully) a little too far fetched.

This is not one of Arnies best and perhaps he should now consider the unthinkable and hang up his boots and explore his interest in politics. It's not as if he needs the money, and his vast personal wealth can be put to some good use as you need plenty of it to get anywhere as a politician in America. Maybe Demolition Man was right, Arnie for president!