Two Arnolds? Can the world handle that?
Arnold plays a helicopter pilot and a great family man. His love of his wife and two kids is shown clearly at the start of the film, and it’s not too surprising then that later his loved ones will be in danger if he doesn’t do something about it. Taking a step back from that, the story also tells us that, in the near future, cloning of animals is permitted, but, due to 6th Day Laws, cloning of humans is not. Of course, if all laws were followed in an action movie, it might not be that interesting of a film, and so some nefarious folk are indeed cloning humans. When Schwarzenegger gets cloned, and gets butted out of his own family life, he takes action against Robert Duvall’s character, the scientist behind the cloning. Arnold eventually teams up with his own clone to battle against the bad guys.
For me, The 6th Day never established a firm foundation. Besides watching one of my favorite actors, I just never had much invested in the characters or the story. The bad guys, for example, came across as very cookie cutter, i.e., generic, and superficial. Other elements of the story, like the SimPal and Re-Pet and the transport service Arnold and Michael Rapaport ran wasn’t interesting or just didn’t gel well with the rest of the story. The SimPal just seemed unnecessary, as though it were supposed to bring about some kind of creepy comic relief, but for me it was just silly and unneeded. Similarly, Rapaport’s character wasn’t very strong, and he and Arnold didn’t come across as close friends as they were made out to be.
Still, The 6th Day has a few bright moments, but these are very brief and don’t add up to much. The action isn’t anything remarkable, and the story and characters are hardly memorable, especially when compared to other great sci-fi movies, even Arnold’s own Total Recall.
Presentation and Extras
Visually, The 6th Day almost looked like a new film but some parts of the film had splotchy visuals and artifacting, but not a whole lot, not enough for me to say that the overall the appearance of The 6th Day was quite good. There is a lot of gee-whiz sci-fi effects and set design in The 6th Day, and with the nice contrast and vibrant colors, these ideas come across well. In terms of audio, expect a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Surround track that sounds very good.
There are a decent amount of extra features on this release, all in SD however, and all extras that were out on the DVD release before from what I’ve read online, and in fact even more were on the DVD than on this blu-ray. What you get is a twenty minutes documentary broken up into nine parts, and it’s your typical fluffy making of stuff with plenty of clips of the movie itself. I never understood why features like this decide to show a lot of footage from the film that it’s talking about, it’s very redundant. Up next is a fifteen minute extended commercial called “The Future Is Coming,” essentially touting how good and distinguishable The 6th Day is. Brief animatics showing computer animation and a Storyboard Comparison feature, showing three scenes in a side-by-side comparison of the rough cut, and the final cut. Basically, there is a bunch of extra features here that don’t really add up to a whole lot.
