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Review: "The Sixth Day" 183

Posted by JonKatz from the -tech-culture dept.
There's almost no political discussion offline about the fuzzy boundaries between human and other "lifeforms" -- clones, cyborgs, mutants, AI. That topic has mostly fallen to Hollywood, which has taken up the issue in a series of movies -- Blade Runner, Gattaca, The Matrix, X-Men. Some of these movies are masterpieces. Some, like "The Sixth Day" are less ambitious. They are just entertaining. (Note: As some of you have noticed, we're doing a regular Sunday tech culture column devoted to certain movies, TV programs, music and books with tech themes.)

Adam Gibson (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Sixth Day's pilot-hero, is something of a Luddite. He drives an old Cadillac, disapproves of his partner's virtual sex partner, espouses lots of old-fashioned family values, and refuses to clone his daughter's dead dog. In fact, he finds cloning an abomination. Life and death are the natural order of things, he opines to a friend, the business of God, not man. The Terminator has morphed into Dagwood Bumstead, but good for him: at least somebody is worrying about how the gene map will be used.

Almost from the minute Gibson starts lamenting the immorality of cloning, we know it's a matter of minutes before he finds himself the target of the ubiquitous, evil bio-tech corporation which haunts his time, and is himself cloned. Not only is he genetically replicated, but he gets to watch his other self live in his house, tuck his daughter in and mess around with his wife.

His Adam Gibson is a helicopter excursion pilot who gets entangled in a murder mix-up that pits him against an evil corporatist genetic entrepeneur and brings him into the center of a plot to commercialize cloning and end human death and suffering -- for great profit, of course. He's the now-familiar lonely hero fighting the powerful and complex forces of science that are about to overwhelm the world with their technological wizardry, avarice and moral vacuity. It's amazing what a little brawn can do against even the most sophisticated security systems.

This is a Schwarzenneger movie of course. So no matter how many laser beams, futuristic know-how, security guards and fingerprint ID systems they throw at him, he can't quite ever be stopped or even slowed down. At points, everybody in the movie is moralizing. In a curiously off-kilter performance, Robert Duvall plays cloning mastermind Dr. Griffin Weir, who is astonishingly slow to realize there are tricky issues involved in the cloning of human life.

Schwarzenegger has become such a clunky icon that almost every movie he makes becomes a self-parody ("I don't want to expose her to any graphic violence. She already gets enough of that from the media," Gibson quips of his daughter before one fight breaks out).

Certain staple features of these films are beginning to emerge -- the evil, amoral, ruthless and greedy corporation which has acquired life-altering new technologies (this is becoming more believable by the day), and the hapless human, noble victims trying to sort their way through this unchartered and disturbing new world.

Still, Sixth Day is fast-paced and graphically inventive, although the use of DNA-threads in movies is already stale. Schwarzenegger's character raises all the right questions -- who gets to use the human gene map, and for what purpose? Who gets to decide when life should begin, when it should end, whether gene mapping should be used to alter human life?

Unfortunately, the off-screen world already has plenty of heedless bio-tech companies, hard at work on profiting from gene mapping, promising to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease -- perhaps one day, even death itself. History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris, but we live in a time when the inventors and purveyors of technology bristle with arrogance and greed as well as well as creativity and enterprise.

In The Sixth Day, Schwarzenegger is similiarly conflicted; he alternates between raising troubling questions about the potentially horrifying impact of genetic research and treating it as a David Letterman sort of joke. The villains in this movie get killed and cloned so often it becomes a joke even to them, as they complain of aches and pains from several bodies and lifetimes ago.

Naturally, The Sixth Day has a Hollywood ending. Schwarzenegger raises the questions, but doesn't know what to do with them, so he ends up ducking the issue in hokey fashion. But soon enough, it may not be such a joke to us.

This film has the surreal effect of raising issues that ultimately shouldn't be left only to Hollywood, as seems to be the case. In addition to being entertained, we end up feeling curiously grateful that at least somebody is talking about them.
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Review: "The Sixth Day"

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  • race smace (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ok...let us look at some of his other work, shall we? Conan - sure JEJ was the bad guy, but the asian dude was on arnold's side. T2 - black dude, sure he created the bad robots...but he came around and helped. True Lies - if you are looking for terrorists...then the balkans are always a good place for material...they have been fighting for WAYYY too long.

    People who say "x is racist" really should have their head examined. I mean hollywood provides the freaking scripts and casting. Sure there are ethnic bad guys..but there are ethnic good guys as well. I mean, you could look at the Matrix as racist because all the agents were white.

    The whole point is the that racism, although it has been a big issue in the real world, is NOT IMPORTANT in hollywood. They are so politically sensitive it has made movies into drivel.

    Get of your supposed high horse and start thinking. Sure there may be some racists out there, but blindly saying someone is based on FICTUOUS material is just stupid.

    (hey, I wonder what score this will get)
  • Well, if I was cloned today, it'd be over twenty years before my clone looked and talked like me, since he wouldn't instantly age. I think you're talking about identical twins, and even twins aren't completely identical.
  • The inventor's just Yakub from the Nation of Islam, that could be the point. According to the NOI, Yakub made a mistake and made white people, so maybe he made another and made robots?

    What a bad batting average that guy has.
  • oops - you're right - been a while since I saw it.
  • Whistler in "Sneakers"
  • There was an interview on Radio 4 (the BBC's highbrow radio channel) with I think Jeremy Paxman (of the Enigma Machine recovery story). The chap who had a chip implanted in his arm last year was talking about cyborgs and enhanced capabilities, and Paxman was beligerantly saying how credulous he was, and kept going back to the "why not just switch them off" defence against global cyborg domination. It was quite a mess.
  • Yes, Arnold was a luddite. He was anti-cloning, anti-genetic foods, anti-realdolls, anti-virtual girlfriends, etc. Everything but anti-remote helicopters.

    However, there are movies where the movie can convey a message different than the opinion of the main character. Or at least it can deal with the issues in a balanced enough way that viewers can draw their own conclusions. Just because this was an action movie, doesn't mean it wasn't a thinking movie.

    The fact that the villain was out to make money wasn't the problem. The problem was that he a) cloned some people without informed consent, and b) added defects so that he could control those people. The speech about the ability to save one person with a transplant, but not be able to save another because of the cloning laws made sense. (even if he was using it to convert the SecState). Also, his bribing of politicians seemed to be somewhat ok because the laws were evil--clones could be legally killed on sight. That is a basic violation of human rights.

    Arnold backed down from his position during the movie. The first step was when the real luddite killed his friend (who was actually a clone of his friend). He had been completely fooled. He realized that these clones had souls. Of course the final step was when he himself turned out to be a clone.

    His change was evidenced by his buying of cloned pets. He said that he changed his mind about a few things.

    Another good Arnold "thinker" disguised as an action movie is Total Recall.

  • History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris, but we live in a time when the inventors and purveyors of technology bristle with arrogance and greed as well as well as creativity and enterprise.
    History has shown the dumbness of failing to pursue technology and trade (China was the ultimate nation in the world until they shut out all outside contact for quite some time). It has shown that every group that learned how to smelt a better metal/allow would conquer all groups who were using an inferior metal,

    But where has history shown that pursuing technology without much thought has led to disaster? Let's see... there's Frankenstein (oops, literary example), Atlantis (oops, myth. If historical, we don't know why it really fell), Butlerian Jihad (oh wait, that only hurt the purveyors of technology because an organized mob of luddites destroyed everything. Oh, and it's literary)..

    Now, history does show the destruction of technologically advanced peoples. There was Rome--but it got beaten because of political rot, not technology. Germans got beaten in spite of their technology--but the whole world was ganging up on them, and they instigated battles on too many fronts. So I guess they died of hubris--but again political, not technological hubris.

    But what about pollution, global warming, and rapid use of unreplenishable resources? Well, we're working on correcting those issues. So far they haven't destroyed us.

    Now there are small-scale tragedies that have resulted from the free use of technology. Like Asbestos workers, Marie and Pierre Curie, etc... But there were many deaths that have resulted from blatant unwillingness to pursue science/technology--like all those poor people who were denied water and fresh air when they were sick, and bled by leeches. So I think history kind of balances it out...

    So Jon, I ask you, where is this historical evidence you allude to?

  • ...is a clone of Al Gore!

  • Interesting, I never noticed that before myself but now I'll have to look back over my Arnold collection. I think you mean Eraser with Vanessa Williams though, not The Bodyguard with Kevin Costner.
    SAVE THE BATS
  • ... considering that 99.9% of the movie is shot on location in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. The evil cloning center they blow up is really the downtown library building. :}
  • "Thats because no one really sees the effects of cloneing. If you think about it how would you react if some one that looked and talked like you came into your home and slept with your wife/girl friend"
    For some reason, your comments made me think of a nearly unrelated form of cloning that people are starting to notice is that of identity theft. While it may not involve invading your home or taking your significant other, it's no less violating to have someone do a little social manipulation and get complete access to every aspect of your public and private information, and therefore, your life. The increase in stories about people finding credit fraud due to someone "becoming" them is closer and more frightening to me.
  • I was thinking the exact same thing when I saw that :)

    No matter how many times I've seen it, Blade Runner is still 'new' and amazing.
  • I still don't see these "ethical ramifications". How is this any different than giving cows drugs to make more milk? Or giving chickens drugs to give them more meat on their bones? It's the same exact thing.
  • The mall he goes into to visit RePet is the Toronto Eaton's Centre!
    I live in T.O. and that one scene killed the disbelief for a little bit. A 3000km Taxi ride??!:)

    Posted using Fizzila [mozilla.org], Carbonated for OS X.

    Pope

    Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
  • Yeah, in Eraser, he protected Vanessa Williams, who is, um, black. And she was alive at the end of the movie.

    The reason black people die in Schwartzenegger movies is because Arnold is usually the only person who survives Schwartzenegger movies and he's not black. No hidden agenda here. Lots of white folk died in Blade, but you don't see me leading demonstrations...
  • He invented a technology that got out of his control. He was also brilliant. I don't see this as being a traitor, any more than Oppenheimer (sorry, he was white...bad example maybe) was a traitor.

    There's enough real racism out there that we shouldn't be worried about this piddly shit.
  • Making the technology that makes a nuclear bomb possible does ABSOLUTELY advance humanity and science, and it is not possible to make that technology precluding its use as a weapon. I'd go even further and argue that the friction between the US and the USSR drove the most productive and life-enhancing technological advancements in history.

    Look, the nuclear genie was not going to stay in the bottle. Had America not won the war in Europe when it did, it was very possible that the Nazis would have had The Bomb before America. It would be an odd value system indeed that would think that this was preferable to the Americans obtaining it, and demonstrating it, first.

    The reason that there wasn't a WWIII is because there COULDN'T be one without literally destroying the entire world. Both sides realized it, and neither was mad enough to try. It's a crazy kind of equilibrium, but I think it's the only thing that kept us out of a conventional war with the USSR for fifty years.

    As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's hard for me to feel remorseful about those tragedies. (Yes, I've seen Barefoot Gen and Grave of the Fireflies and cried profusely at both.) The Japanese military leaders started a war with a country that was trying hard to remain neutral, and it looked like they (the Japanese military leaders) were not going to agree to end it without an overwhelming display of power. The atomic option did two important things.

    1) I submit that the Japanese had to be made to surrender in order to restore peace in the Pacific basin. The invasion of the Japanese mainland was going to be obscenely expensive in terms of American lives, and positively ghastly in terms of Japanese lives. I think that the Japanese people would have been used as human shields by the military leaders, and would have been slaughtered wholesale throughout the country. The Bomb ended the war with the smallest possible number of Japanese casualties. Note that the conventional bombing campaign in Europe (particularly the firebombing of Dresden) caused much more destruction and death than the two bombs dropped on Japan.

    2) By demonstrating the technical ability and political will to use atomic weaponry, the United States established itself as a world leader. Whether you think this is good or not, I submit that the last 50 years has been rather peaceful compared to the previous 2000.

    As far as your original point, I don't think worrying about the body count by race at the end of a Schwartzenegger flick has anything to do with a racial bias in Hollywood. Again, just about everybody but Ahnold is dead at the end of these joints, and he's white, so of course there's going to be a bias. If he was mowing down fields of otherly-colored individuals and letting bad white folk away with a stern lecture, you might have a case, but he kills EVERYBODY.
  • Just ez long as Rudy Ray Moore get ta be da VP, 'sall good up in this muhfuckah. We need tha Dolemite Total Experience up in tha Chocolate City.
  • People shouldn't be playing god
    The equivilent of Godwin's law should apply to any arguement that uses the that term. I won't try to argue with the rest of what you said, since you contradict yourself every other sentence. Instead, I'll ask you what does Playing God mean? You said that cloning is Playing God, but helping people by "munipilating dna" is OK even though "you could also say is playing god". If we developed the ability to modify a persons's DNA so as to deactivate the genes responsible for diabetes is that Playing God? What about if we use the same technigue to make that person stronger or more intelligent? Is that Playing God? We use modify people's body chemistry with antibodics to make it more hostile to bacteria, thus allowing these people to survive dieases that would otherwise kill them. Is this Playing God? Species such as dogs, cats, horses, ect., (not to mention every type of ediable plant) have been altered to fit our needs by selective breeding for as long as recorded history. Have we been Playing God all this time?

    I can't accept the statement that "it was moraly wrong to clone a human. People shouldn't be playing god" unless you can answer what Playing God is and why it is morally wrong.
  • Hello sir, I'm from the Secret Service. Come with me please...
    --
    Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
  • 1 - gladiator is highly overrated. cheesy beginning. good scenes of slaughter. extremely cheesy ending. it could have been good, if you just took the middle part. NO irony. very bad cg (whoever thinks that was good didn't see it on an IMAX screen like i did).

    2 - ah-nold makes good movies. and horribly bad ones. it's about 50/50. the end of days was extremely horrible. eraser was really bad. total recall, true lies, terminator (even T2) were really good.... it's hit and miss. i do not want to talk about his attempts at comedy. it's too painful.

  • I'm sorry, but putting Torvalds in the same breath as Einstein is grounds for summary execution as far as I'm concerned. Also, memory is holographic -- you'd have a hard time editing it in any way.
  • The mall he goes into to visit RePet is the Toronto Eaton's Centre!
    I live in T.O. and that one scene killed the disbelief for a little bit. A 3000km Taxi ride??!:)

    Sure about that? There's a suspiciously similar one in Vancouever about 5 blocks west of the American Embassy.

    Simon
  • Every Hollywood movie about cloning but one has portrayed cloning as some kind of instant 3-D Xerox(TM) machine which makes an identical copy of the adult original.

    I'm sure everyone here knows what a load of fetid dingo's kidneys that is.

    Yeah, I'm sure "The Sixth Day" (I haven't seen it; don't plan to) had some kind of Trekkian tecknobabble about reading someone's memories out through their eyeballs or something, and growing the infant to adulthood in days, including all the physical attributes that develop through interaction with the environment, like muscle, bone, and calluses on the soles of the feet, but gimme a break.

    The one exception, the one movie I've seen that did cloning pretty much right, was "The Boys from Brazil." (The plot is that an underground Nazi organization managed to save a tissue sample from Hitler, and has cloned 90 copies, who are all (as of the movie) kids of about 10. They're secretly trying to duplicate Hitler's upbringing, including murdering the kids' adopted fathers at the age when Hitler's father died, hoping that at least one of them will turn out ... very very badly.)

    The fact is, clones are almost exactly the same sort of thing as identical twins, except for the age difference of course. Twins are separate individuals, so are clones.

    The "almost" in that is that clones are less alike than identical twins. Aside from the age difference and the environment difference, identical twins have identical mitochondrial DNA. Clones don't necessarily, only the nucleus is transferred.

    And even identical twins do not have the same fingerprints!
  • This seems to ignore the fact that the 'information' stored in the brain is the result of interconnections between neurons, so that to 'download' information to the brain would mean recreating all of the interneural connections of the original brain. Probably a process analagous to rewiring the the global telecommunications network all at once.
  • The Terminator has morphed into Dagwood Bumstead, but good for him: at least somebody is worrying about how the gene map will be used.

    Oh, yeah. Knee-jerk rejection of new technology is really responsible contemplation of its impact. Right, whatever. I get so tired of these alarmist films that demonize whatever they technology they are depicting through gross exaggeration, doomsday scenarios, and distortion. The Net, Gattaca, and hundreds of mindless horrors movies casting technology and science in the role of humanity's ultimate enemy. It doesn't impress me. There is a difference between thoughtful, provocative treatment of technology's philosophical questions (like Blade Runner) and the latest parable about evil scientists recklessly endangering the future of the world.

    Eric Christian Berg

  • Don't we realize that this isn't the first A.S. to deal with the ethics and morality of biotechnology? Aren't we forgetting the parable of Junior [imdb.com]?
  • That's bullshit.

    in Terminator: Back Cop == Good Guy
    in Preditor: Indian guy, two black good buys
    in Last Action Hero: English Guy==Dick
    in Eraser(?): Black woman==moral protagonist

    etc. etc.

  • OK then, what kind of music do you find the meaning of life in? As far as I know, some thrash metal bands have produced the best lyrics there are. As opposed to anything I have heard lately.

    That's not to say that you will actually find the meaning of life in thrash, but picking it out is a poor choice. You should have picked on pop music instead. The lyrics there are laughable, to say the least.
  • s/double plus unfortunately/double plus ungoodly

    learn your newspeak, man. the idea of luck and chance is not one which should be introduced into one's vocabulary. only from the party comes good, after all.

  • Common gateway interface? correct me if im stupid

    Computer Generated Imagery.

  • Well, I think this raises another problem. personally I have damn near close to zero interest in running for public office, etc. I don't want to speak for everyone, but a lot of the techies I know feel the same way. Red tape is not exactly a typical geek-attractor.
  • I agree mostly, with one exception: In T2, the inventor stayed behind and sacrificied himself so the others could get away. Granted, he was mortally wounded at that point anyway, but I think this still redeems him from the "spineless" category.
  • Exactly - I love how politicians think "cloning" means you can instantly create an exact replica of someone, fully grown, with the exct same thoughts, memories, etc. as the original. It's frightening that the exact same people who least understand the technology have such a huge say in its future.
  • ...read him like you would read Gibson. Gibson doesn't know his technology that well. In fact, most of the time, he glosses right over it.

    The story in every Gibson book has essentially been: what happens when you inject paticular individuals into one potential evolutionary track of society/technology, and then let Murphy go nuts all over them.

    Gibson never ever says that he believes it will go that way, or that everything will happen the way he envisions it in his books. He just says: "this is one way I think things could go... given that technology continues to advance at a predictable rate, and that someone overcomes many of the limitations we have now, and that noone reroutes the evolution of corporations and society."

    That's how I read Katz. "This is something to think about, here's what happens when I compare these movies with this paticular thought foremost in my mind... I wonder if ..."

    He's looking at these movies with the filter of a paticular concept in mind. This of course colors the way he views these movies. But if YOU can only look at a paticular concept (movie) in one way, then you're limiting your own vision.

    If I may digress still further, it is the same reason that religious people read the bible more than once: when you read a paticular passage with a paticular mindset, that passage could have entirely different meaning to you than it did last time.

    I hope someone gets my point. I have a difficult time explaining myself at times.

    Have a nice day!

    Failure is not an option.
  • Philip K. Dick, author of such stories as "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", which seemed to be the inspiration for "Total Recall", after removing the final bit about invisible magic destroying wands, aliens and the UN.

    I believe he also wrote "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", which is probably the source material for "Blade Runner".

  • As others have mentioned, Vanessa Williams in _Eraser_ wasn't exactly spineless; she's willing to turn whistle-blower against her employer. And she lives.

    'Commando' also comes to mind; I believe Arnie had a non-white female co-star who even used a LAW. But it's been a hell of a long time since I watched that one.
  • Can't happen. Genotype does not define, by itself, adult phenotype; you also need the environment...
  • What's your view on growing cloned embryos (thus rejection-proof) and putting them on ice for spare parts?

    If we can do that (probably), and work out how to take, say, stem cells, stimulate differentiation, and grow an organ from them in a decent amount of time (perhaps months; after all, many wait much longer than that now), transplant care could benefit. But the ethical ramifications would be... interesting.

  • On the other hand, clones (most likely) did not choose to be a clone, and in many cases will never even know that they are one! Despite this, it seems very probable for a whole new prejudice to happen. At least on the lines of black slavery, jews in the holocaust and homosexuality. Perhaps even unprecedented.

    Heinlein has a book Friday where essentially genetically engineered people are a "working" class that have little or no rights. Friday, the main character, is one such girl who does dangerous work for the man who commissioned her creation. She "passes" but, if she ever lets people know, they are usually irrationally fearful of her. A lot of the resolution for her in the book is dealing with the fact that she herself tends to think she shouldn't have rights. Rachael

  • Whoa there. Sam played an ENGINEER, not a computer whiz, big difference ;-). You can be both, but Sam was definitely playing an Engineer.
  • WARNING... PLOT SPOILER BELOW! IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE DON't READ ON!

    (I can't remember any of the character names, so please bear with me...)

    Ok, Remember when Arnold meets up with the anti-cloning dude that killed his buddy? The dude wanted Arnold to shoot him in the head, so he couldn't be cloned.

    Fast-forward to the scene where the Arnold is shown footage of the villain (who looks way too much like Steve Jobs, IMHO) getting killed on the mountain top. The reason we see the footage is because it's through the villain's eyes. We see him getting killed by the anti-cloning zealot. Now, if the guy knows enough about the cloning process to request that Arnold shoot him in the head, then why the hell didn't he shoot the bad guy in the head when he was on the mountain?
  • It has nothing to do with backward compatibility.
    It has to do with intelligent design. It's not only because of the impracticality of having 24 individual signals for every pixel, it also has to do with the stupidity of even considering it.

    Or don't you remember RGB monitors? 4 bit color:Red Green Blue plus White.

  • "The benefits outweigh the dangers"

    Vaporspeak. What you really mean is it's god damn cool, don't yall think is so so god damn cool, cloning owns.

    You're forgetting the fact that genetics has the same approach as digital technology, to be predict and record and easily manipulate. Yet we still use analog signals in monitors because any fool knows that understanding things like current is far superior to having a bit for every little thing we want to accomplish. So far geneticists haven't sought to understand only to control and what corp takes any responsibility nowadays? Daytraders, and sahareholders do it for the lack of consequences in the short term.

    1) Yes it's a bad thing. Genetics is still prenascent quackery. The best anyone could think of is super humans, as if time (learning experience etc) doesn't exist.

    Most branches of knowledge have a number of levels such as basic principles (arithmetic), abstracted concepts (algebra, calculus, discrete math), and applied concepts (geometry, trig, game theory).

    Genetics is nowhere near this. It's in the "infomercial" novelty stages.

    Science shouldn't make things easier only more practical, it shouldn't make better humans it should teach them.

    2) How'd you come to that conclusion?

    You said:"That's like banning medicine and nutrition".

    Just because a bunch quacks can't stop drooling doesn't mean they have a clue.

    Ever seen a labrador-pit-bull? I havbe. It's the most confused pathetic animal I have ever seen. It constantly needs to jump all over the house, yet it doesn't ever get any satisfaction out of it.

    Nauseating.

  • I am genuinely curious what role people of color play in the 6th Day.

    Well, I don't remember any black people in it at all, except as extras in the background, or bit parts with one or two lines.

    However, I do distinctly remember that chick with the purple makeup [imdb.com] is, shall we say, nice to look at. Does that count as "people of color"?

  • Yes, I understand that thermite just burns extra hot rather than exploding. And that's exactly how the movie protrayed it. They got it right. I was praising them for their accuracy.
  • It isn't often that a movie takes the time to get real science down correctly.

    I agree. The "The 6th Day" was far, far better than most sci-fi flicks these days. I especially like the little touches, such as how the interactive holographic girlfriend required a special mechanized chair to, um, "get it on". They actually understood that holograms are just light and can't be touched! Amazing!

    It was also cool when Arnie and his clone whipped up a batch of thermite. They even named one of the ingredients (aluminum), and lit it by using a magnesium ribbon as a fuse (lighting the magnesium with a pocket propane torch), just like in real life! And instead of a big explosion, it just burned really hot. Wow. "MacGuyver" this ain't.

  • Whistler was the blind guy. He was white. If you're thinking of Sidney Poitier's character, sure, he was black, and worked with computer geeks, but he never actually did anything with computers. He was the ex-CIA guy.
  • spineless (e.g. the inventor in T2)

    Eh? The guy sacrificed his life to save the world!! Which "T2" did you watch, huh? Besides, that character was pretty good as far as black characters go. Other than "Theo", the guy with glasses in the original "Die Hard", he's the only example of a black computer whiz I can think of in a Hollywood movie.

  • Naturally, The Sixth Day has a Hollywood ending. Schwarzenegger raises the questions, but doesn't know what to do with them, so he ends up ducking the issue in hokey fashion. Perhaps you didn't pick up on the ending. The version of Arnold followed through most of the movie is actually the clone. I believe he eventually realizes he is the clone, nevertheless he tricks the real guy into leaving his family and heading off to Brazil or wherever.

    Am I wrong?

  • TR is the most faithful reproduction of PKD

    Forgive my ignorance, but what is PKD?

    ---

  • he's the only example of a black computer whiz

    Don't forget Wing Rhames(sp?) in Mission Impossible. He was their l33t hax0r.

    ---

  • I thought the credits rolling at the end was the best part of the movie....
  • Ever heard of a retro-virus?
  • I thought those "Cort Scannners" (I think that's what the were called) were super cool. They shine a light into his eyes, and within seconds his whole life (in minute detail) is on a disk. Imagine the BANDWIDTH, people!!!!

  • I think he falls under the traitor catagory because he invented the robots to begin with, thus condeming the human race to suffering, etc., etc.

    -- gfoyle

  • I guess this is where I admit that I haven't see an A.S. movie in a long time because I can't enjoy them because of the racist undertones.

    Having said that, were there any people of color in Kindergarden Cop or Twins? I don't remember any, but it has been a long time since I've seen them.

    -- gfoyle

  • Or maybe it would decide to make T3 [imdb.com].

    But a little more seriously, if the scientist had not worked on the project then the computer never would have been built. He is still a part of the problem (even though he may not realize it be the Terminator comes into his life), and he still has to die for it.

    -- gfoyle

  • Re:What about race? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So, you've only seen two, perhaps three A.S. films because you "can't enjoy them because of the racist undertones." Right... as it happens, I can't think of an A.S. movie that I haven't seen yet. Even so, I must say that I had never noticed these alleged "racist undertones" until you pointed them out. This does make me wonder, though, if perhaps you're not just imposing your own repressed feelings of racism on the movies and holding them up as a scapegoat for your own self-hatred at being racist.

    The way I see it, people's minds are designed to make generalizations on past experiences. Some people may have had, for example, an overwhelming number of negative experiences with black people. This would cause them to be wary of other blacks whome they might later meet. You could substitute any ethnic, religious, or socio-economic class for blacks in that statement (try geeks). There's nothing wrong with this, it's the natural way our minds work. If it weren't for our ability to generalize in this way, it would be nearly impossible for us to learn. Think about accidentally touching a piece of red-hot metal. Your mind will relate the pain and later advise you against touching anything that appears red-hot. If you did not generalize in this way, Bad Things could and would happen.

    The point of all this is that if you feel someone else is generalizing unfairly against some group, the most effective thing to do is provide them with positive examples and experiences from people of that group. In this way, you take advantage of the same mental function that caused them to form their prejudice in the first place.

    Buck Tandyco

  • ...well then, here [imdb.com] is a movie that actually had a believable premise -- all the way back in 1978 -- and largely had its scientific act together to boot.And talk about your potential for social upheaval! Hoo boy.
  • Political discussion about cloning is horrendously dangerous.

    This is a dumbass thing to say. Just what exactly is "dangerous" about any kind of political discussion whatsoever? My answer, at least, is that political discussion is dangerous to anyone who profits from political quietism. People who can't be bothered with politics, or think that their elected representatives should be prevented from representing their interests or their opinions, put power in the hands of people who don't represent either their interests or their opinions.

    We could do with a few limitations of government, such as don't ever regulate something that isn't being used to hurt someone else. "The right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor's nose."

    I don't take this analogy very seriously. If someone were standing in front of you at arm's length, swinging his fist at your nose, how long would it take you to get uncomfortable? My guess is one swing or less (depending on whether you knew it was coming). It wouldn't matter even if the guy was the best stuntman in Hollywood and could pull his punch every time, you still wouldn't like it. Likewise, in the real world we need more than the other guy's assurance that his actions won't harm us: we need a buffer zone (the law), and we need a neutral authority to enforce it (the government). The trick is to keep the authority accountable.

    I would prefer if politicians didn't talk about cloning. Let them argue about how much a congressional toilet seat costs instead, it would be much more productive for humanity.

    Sure. Let's just sit back and let it all happen. Then, when your grandchildren are slaves to the hive mind and Bill Gates' third clone gets a royalty every time anyone has sex, you can explain to them how it was for the best just to let the market decide everything.
  • Democracy needs self-imposed limitations to function even moderately well. The US used areas of the constitution and bill of rights as its first basis of such self-imposed limitations. Long ago we set a general principle, "People will have freedom of speech," and since then we've been interpreting and reinterpreting it.

    Technology is experiencing exponential growth, and sooner or later, we're going to have to address that by laying down some fundamental self-imposed limitations of government dealing with technology, because it is clear that government does not move fast enough for politicians to keep up with technology.

    I would rather see a freedom of technology clause, and have such battles of government move into the court system, where someone could invoke freedom of technology as grounds for innocence. Then simple laws regulating certain use of technology could be formulated, but no laws restricting the development of technology could be created. It would have made the entire crypto debate a moot point, as most of us knew it should have been.
  • It's frightening that the exact same people who least understand the technology have such a huge say in its future.

    Precisely. The fact that they have such a huge say about that which they don't understand is exactly why we need to make sure they say nothing about its future.
  • I don't see why cloning is such a big issue, the benefits definitely outweigh the consequences. Furthermore, I don't even see any consequences. The only argument against cloning is that "humans will live unnaturally longer".

    1) Is this a bad thing?

    2) According to this argument, we should outlaw medecine and nutrition.
  • (Katz wrote)Unfortunately, the off-screen world already has plenty of heedless bio-tech companies, hard at work on profiting from gene mapping, promising to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease -- perhaps one day, even death itself.

    Cure diseases and extend human lifepsans? Those bastards! How dare they!

    I can't speak for Katz, but it looks to me like the "unfortunate" part of the whole bit is not that "heedless bio-tech companies" are working on cures for diseases, but that they're working on profits first and foremost. So if it's more profitable to invent a new artificial flavoring than it is to cure dengue, that's what they'll do.
    If it's more profitable to do it without telling people what's in those flavorings, they'll do that too.

    I certainly don't mind genetic engineering when it's being used to cure diseases. But I don't see the need for it as a means to create a fluffier snack cake. And if there are going to be gene-altered snack cakes on the store shelves (there already are), I'd at least appreciate being told that that's what they are so that I can make an informed decision whether or not to consume them.

    It's also unfortunate if the tech firms are heedless, which Katz seems to take as a given. Actually I do too, IF it's the CEOs who are calling all the shots. The gene-tweakers in the trenches probably understand more about the consequences of their actions than the shareholders or the general public ever will. But they're not the ones making the decisions.
  • The only argument against cloning is that "humans will live unnaturally longer".

    1) Is this a bad thing?

    No. It is a thing. Sanitation, proper nutrition, and even earlier, tool use and fire all led to longer human life spans. That's good. But humans still breed like rabbits, even though they don't suffer die-offs like rabbits. This has led to severe overpopulation, and a great deal of suffering has resulted. Too many people on this rock. That's bad.

    2) According to this argument, we should outlaw medecine and nutrition.

    Okay, assume that we accept that medicine and nutrition cause people to live unnaturally longer (as opposed to *naturally* longer). Even then, it does not follow that they should be outlawed. Nor should genetic engineering or cloning BTW. But humans may need to change their ways so that they can enjoy the benefits of their technology without the detriments that can follow. F'rinstance if medicine or nutrition or biotech allows all your children to survive where in earlier times many of them would have died, you compensate by having fewer children. Technology has even allowed humans to keep screwing like rabbits, while reproducing more like pandas. It's called contraception. Ain't technology wonderful? Now all we have to do is use it.

  • in the real world, we don't *have* anything resembling life to debate about. Real politicians and real citizens have to generally deal with *real* problems and issues, not hpyothetical issues surrounding AI that may not develop for another 50 or 100 or more years..
  • Start with Total Recall. Remove any hard scifi relationships (such as TR's connection to Philip K. Dick, was it?). Make it PG instead of R, so don't expect to see any gore, or Sharon Stone naked.

    Then add heaps of product placement. When I first saw the XFL football game I thought it was a joke. Then when I saw the OnStar controlled vehicle I was rolling my eyes.

    Lastly, take all of modern science EXCEPT cloning and send it backward a few years. Bio scanners today can differentiate between a living and dead thumb (that's one of the first questions that comes up!) but it's a vital part of this movie that they can't. He can drive a helicopter by remote control, yet when he needs to blow something up he has to light the fuse and run away.

    This movie was all over the place. Even for an Ahnold movie, it was below par. I think his last good one was True Lies, personally. That seemed to have the right mix across the board.

    Ah well, politics here he come.

  • I'm not sure what you're implying? Are you saying that the type of thermite they made SHOULD have blown up? Because it shouldn't- it does just burn hot enough to sink through most metal. One of the cruelest things to do to a person is to set a thermite bomb on the roof of their car and set it off- it'll burns right through the top of the car, and perhaps even the frame if doen correctly. Try to miss the gas tank though.
  • But where this movie really shines is it's fresh take on the future; The future is not a dark place--it is sterile, bright, cheery.

    Bright-and-cheery is in fact the old-fashioned view of the future. With the exception of the postapocalyptic subgenre, visual SF movies most often portrayed the future as shiny and upbeat. Think of Amazing Stories covers by Frank R Paul [frankwu.com]; the polished look of The Day the Earth Stood Still [imdb.com]; the perfectly pristine appearance of everything in 2001: A Space Odyssey [imdb.com].

    StarWars in 1977 first popularized grimy spaceships, and the hugely influential BladeRunner in 1982 gave us claustrophobic, murky cityscapes -- surprisingly, only because Ridley Scott had a small budget and needed to hide the smallness of his set with rain, fog, and darkness. Since then, noir future has been a trope.

    Curiously, there is a clear example of noir SF from 1926: Metropolis [acusd.edu].

  • I agree completely with Viereo that this movie doesn't need cloning as the "evil idea".

    In this movie, cloning is made to look evil, but the "cloning" in the movie is not anything like what we know of as modern-day cloning.

    Today, we are nowhere NEAR what they had in the movie. We have, so far, cloned a sheep. Dolly was NOT grown in two hours, she gestated naturally for the term that sheep normally gestate for, and Molly did not have the "memories" of the "original" Molly.

    In this movie, we are made to believe that: 1) clones can be grown in two hours, and 2) they can have all of the same memories, et al.

    The evil doesn't come from the fact that there are two people walking around with the same genetic code (if that were evil, I wouldn't want to be an identical twin). The evil (or moral ambiguity, if you prefer) came from the fact that there could be two of the exact same person. Same genetic code, same age, and same memories.

    If you take away the Same genetic code issue, but are left with the Same Age and Same Memories issue, this movie would still be about identity-theft and the idea of trying to find yours. Think about it. If this movie was about Arnold's character being some guy abducted off the street, having his memory wiped and a new one installed, then having plastic surgery to make him look like someone else, then the issues of the movie still hold true. It is the theft of the identity that we have a problem with, not the idea of cloning.

    Truthfully, I found this movie to be frightful, it is SO hypocritical. In the beginning of the movie, all we hear from Arnold is the wrongness of clones. Then he gets cloned and finds out he is a clone. Well, then clones become ok, and the movie becomes about the evil that the corporation is doing by cloning people, and in the end, the Clone Arnold goes off to be a happy person in some other country. I also do not like the religious undertones that the filmmakers are FORCING down my throat. First off, the movies is called "The Sixth Day", in reference to the idea that man was created by God on the sixth day of creation, and during the whole movie, people are whinning about cloning as "Playing God". Cloning is not playing God, creating the idea of genetics and implementing it in the Universe is Playing God. Cloning is just playing around in the World that God created. If you think that is playing God, then using fire is also playing God (because, Prometheus stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humans.)

    Anyways, Katz should have chosen a MUCH better movie/book to use as a jumping off point for a discussion on cloning.

  • So what if its a "faithful reproduction" of Dick's story? Movies and books are worlds apart. How was the acting? Unconvincing to horrible. The pace and direction badly needed work. Just because I like most of Dick's writings doesn't mean I'm going to fall over backwards for a script that completely echoes to the story.

    If your looking for "faithful reproductions" go to the bookstore, they're called paperbacks.
  • I doubt they do. After all, most of 'em aren't fools.

    However, there ARE other ethical issues -- such as, can we -- and should we -- develop cloning techniques for use as spare parts?

    For instance, should one clone a person, take stem cells or other interesting tissue from the embryo, and them implant these in an organic matrix that provides the infrastructure for growing into an organ? I believe we're already working on the organ-growing part, albeit very slowly. You need much more than cells and a nutrient bath...

    Or, develop the embryo first, cryogenically freeze it, and then essentially have such cells in reserve?

  • One problem with your inaccurate claim: Schwarzenegger was not in The Bodyguard. Kevin Costner was.

    "When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood."

  • The interesting thing about "The 6th Day" is that the filmmakers clearly understood what cloning is and is not. They actually provided explanations in the storyline as to how one creates an exact, fully-grown copy of someone with all their memories intact, as opposed to a newborn infant who happens to be someone's identical twin. What goes on in "The 6th Day" is more akin to Dr. Who's "regeneration" than actual cloning, but the movie actually acknoledges this. I was pretty impressed by that.

  • I can see where you are coming from, but I think messages can be sent without disrupting the "firefight" and even if they are not intentional (which would be taking credit away from the artistry of movie making, which is there even in 'block busters'). I think people of color in his movies are killed far too often for being bad guys or traitors, or are completely absent from his movies, for this not to send a message. Just because a movie is part of a genrea (in A.S. case shoot 'em up) doesn't mean they can't carry something deep. For example The Searchers can be seen as a typical John Wayne cowboy movie, but it raises important questions about the cowboys' relationship to society and what we would call today "the circle of violence", all the while being entertaining to Coboy Movie fans. Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man is classic SciFi, but it also is a commentary about what is the correct way to punish people who violate society's rules (I doubt anyone in the goverment of TX has read it). Just because something is entertaining, doesn't mean it can't affect how people think (or make people think for that matter).

    -- gfoyle
  • It would be a lot more helpful if you did reviews on movies that are just released, not ones that are two weeks old. It's really pointless, people have already seen this movie if they want to.

    Unlike The 6th Day, Vertical Limit, Proof of Life, and D&D just came out on Friday. These movies are what people may actually care about.

  • It would be a lot more helpful if you did reviews on movies that are just released, not ones that are two weeks old. It's really pointless, people have already seen this movie if they want to.

    Don't be too sure about that! I haven't been able to see it yet but I really wanted to. Time is tight with a lot of us geeks! :) You're right, but there are still a lot of us who can't make it to the movies all the time... I still have to take my girlfriend to see Bounce, and that's probably going to happen a week from now or so.

  • Until Dolly, cloning was always a science fiction topic. Since it's not real, why worry about it?

    Hollywood does have the ability to make what's not real to appear real or plausible. Everything starts as a dream -- Hollywood puts image to a dream.

  • I think Katz wrote this so that he could sound off on some of his favorite themes, not because this was worthy of a review. The second half of the "review" was a political speech by Katz on the evils and arrogance of corporatization - but as other posters have made clear, this was a Schwarzenegger action film, not a documentary of cloning. It was full of unexplained innuendoes such as "History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris". An example for clarification would be useful.
  • Er, no.

    That's Metrotown mall in Burnaby.

    There's less than 30 seconds in the whole movie that's outside Greater Vancouver and Whistler areas.
  • I saw 6th Day, and I really enjoyed it. But much more than the action or plot, I enjoyed the philisophical questions it raises about cloning, and the implications on our (potential) future. I composed some observations and morality/philisophical questions I thought of as I watched the movie for the second time. (spoiler warning!).

    Note: The movie assumes--I do too--that you can clone a human in two hours, and they'll have exactly the same memories/thoughts/soul/physical characteristics of the original, as well as be exactly the same age. At least no more than two hours younger :' )...

    - - - - -

    If your child had a terminal illness--three weeks to live, say, and you could choose to clone them with everything except the illness, would you? Would you kill the original today, or let them die naturally?

    What if it were terminal, but they had five years to live? What if they were generally healthy, but had their arms and legs chopped off in an industrial accident? What if only one of their arms were taken off, but they were a concert pianist? What if they had one of their fingers mildly disfigured, but enough to affect their piano playing career?

    What are the boundaries (ethically and legally) declaring when a child should live as is, and when the original can be killed, and then cloned?

    If things such as this are supposed to be determined "in the interest of the child", can it ever be decided to kill and then duplicate that child?

    - - - - -

    Imagine coming home, and someone has duplicated your child, so now there are ten of them watching Pokemon, when you arrive home from work.

    What if you could not tell the difference between real and clones? Would you randomly choose one of them and have the rest killed/adopted/relocated to Mars/whatever?

    What if you could tell the difference between real and clone?

    Either way, if your child's "soul" truly exists in all ten children, how would you deal with the hurt of those other nine, when choosing only one?

    - - - - -

    If, as at Re-Pet (get a copy of your pet, three hours after it dies), they can "tailor the fur color to your furniture or wallpaper", or even "soften the teeth". This implies, in humans, that they could make "stronger muscles" or even "tougher skin", and effectively make a superhuman, and duplicate it into a super-army.

    This seems like it could be the biggest military threat the world has ever seen. Wouldn't other countries get trigger-twitchy about it?

    - - - - -

    Homosexuals--the non-closeted kind, at least--know they are homosexual. But they, many would argue, certainly did not choose to be so. We all know homosexuals are prejudiced against, and are a long way from being considered legally equal to heterosexuals.

    On the other hand, clones (most likely) did not choose to be a clone, and in many cases will never even know that they are one! Despite this, it seems very probable for a whole new prejudice to happen. At least on the lines of black slavery, jews in the holocaust and homosexuality. Perhaps even unprecedented.

    ...and please. That stupid dot-in-the-bottom-of-the-left-eyelid would never happen. If clone's creator wants them to assimilate among the general population, the last thing they need is a definitive marker, saying "kick me!".

    - - - - -

    Cloning has parallels with Time Travel, and even rivals the god-like power implied by traveling back in time.

    Let's say a bad guy had the power to clone at will. In the movie, Dr. Whatevershisname refuses to clone any longer. His wife was a five-year clone, and died a horrible death, which turned his thinking around. Because of this, he tells his boss, Druker, that he quits.

    Druker says "I can't let you do that. First I'm going to kill you. And then I'm going to clone you, with a synchording (complete picture of the contents of the brain) taken two months ago, before you were ever against cloning. Everything will continue like this conversation never happened."

    As soon as someone has a thought you don't like, you kill them, and reproduce them from a week-old synchording, effectively erasing that "bad" thought. Amazing, god-like power.

    - - - - -

    Just a mistake I noticed in the movie: When Arnold was originally cloned (and awoke in the taxi, at the mall), he also had a copy of his keys! They cloned the keys, too?! :' )

    - - - - -

    Killing your clone is legal. What if a clone, thinking they are the real, kills the (actually) real one?

    - - - - -

    Here are some links of interest:

    http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Biology/Genetics/Clon ing/Human_Cloning/ [yahoo.com]
    http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=cloning [slashdot.org]

  • I thought it would be good to point out that the movie pretty much gets its genetics right. The movie had a couple of things that you just had to accept as something that got invented in a hollywood future, like the 'blank humans' and the whole 'read your mind through your retina' thing, but those were just there to address limits of cloning (specifically that your memory doesn't get copied and that the clone, when created, it just one cell and needs to grow up just like you and me). When it talked about what was needed to clone someone or how they actually went about doing it, I was convinced that they had someone who knew what he was talking about working on the script.

    For this, the filmmakers should be aplauded. It isn't often that a movie takes the time to get real science down correctly. If you don't think this is important to making a movie good then you haven't seen Mission to Mars

    Mr. Spey
    Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger

    is a twit - he's a MentalMcNugget for the masses, he isnt a social commentator, he's a shill. Lets skip the mindless idol worship and smell a cup of reality... Your not trying to be serious are you?

  • So, you're saying that these issues aren't being dealt with enough outside of Hollywood?

    If you don't hear everyone talking about the morality of cloning, there's a reason: there is no real morality problem to be discussing. Just lots of imagined ones.

    So, let's say we can make a genetically identical copy of an organism. So what? A lot of people think that there will be some sort of dillema about who will be the real person: the original or the clone. Funny though, isn't it, that we don't seem to ever have these problems with identical twins?
  • You could have rewritten "6th Day" without using clones, and the storyplot could still hold. The real feats here are being able to:

    Record someone's memory;

    Inject it in someone else's brain;

    Grow an adult human in two hours.

    Cloning only helps the memory 'receiver' looks like the original one... So in fact 6th Day is not much about cloning as about "memory transmission", a lot like in "Strange Days".


  • Can't happen. Genotype does not define, by itself, adult phenotype; you also need the environment...
    Interesting point. However, they covered this in the movie. :)

    The effect of the enviroment on a particular individual is just information, largely stored in the brain. The movie dealt with this, by providing a means for duplicating onto disk all of the information in any given person's brain for later download into the clone. Not surprisingly, the bad guy billionaire is quite careful to maintain a good back-up schedule. :)

    I say largely stored in the brain become some "enviromental" information might be stored elsehwere -- i.e., such as in the case where a man has had had a leg amputated due to a childhood accident. (An injury that wasn't, of course, repaired by growing a new leg.) The movie even dealt with such "information" in a scene where the clone was provided with the same wound as the original who had cut himself shaving that morning.

  • Yes, I do think that black people often are stuck with shitty roles in "white man Hollywood movies" where the front cast is made up by an all-white crew, but that ain't got nothing to do with Arnold.

    (Just as a hint... The Terminator had Paul Winfield as the very good-willed Detective Traxler. YES, he got killed, but he was neither spineless nor a bad guy.)

    Guess it's the same old song. Hollywood is trying to please the mainstream audience, and unfortunately too many people still want to see stereotypes. There are so many other movies where the bad guys are made up by the classic bad guys: How about City of industry, for example.

    Hey, I was shocked when I read some bullshit comment about The Perfect Storm where you really have to look hard to find grounds for racist talk.

    Here, this is an actual comment on IMDB from some dickhead, submitted July 15:

    "I found the begining of the movie to be especially irritating. The first 30 minutes of the film had a white woman kissing all over her black lover in several scenes... I could tell I wasn't the only one to find this unsettling as I could look around the theatre and see other viewers were upset with this bit of racial propaganda.

    Once again the media bosses strike with propaganda designed to make white women want black men instead of white lovers. Whenever I see this in movies I always let it be known that their ploy doesn't fool me. And I'm not the only one!"

    So as long as assholes like Jerry Dean who submitted this bullshit form a major part of the audience, major motion pictures will mostly stick to their current formula.

    I'm not saying that all non-whites are oppressed and it's a conspiracy by Hollywood and stuff, it's just that there is some undertone in many movies, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle.

    It's hard to say something about a "trend" though with so many movies out there; every example can be fought back with four counter-examples. I guess in the end everybody forms his own opinion, finds 10, 20 movies to support his statements, and sticks to that.

  • Unfortunately, the off-screen world already has plenty of heedless bio-tech companies, hard at work on profiting from gene mapping, promising to eliminate cancer, aging, heart disease -- perhaps one day, even death itself.

    Cure diseases and extend human lifepsans? Those bastards! How dare they! They won't get away with it, not if Jon Katz has anything to say about it!

    History ought to have taught us to be wary of this Frankenstein-style hubris,

    History ought to have taught us to beware fearmongers and those who attempt to constrain the pursuit of knowledge and enjoying the fruits thereof.

    1. Read one of Katz's luddite screeds.
    2. Read the Unabomber Manifesto, to see Katz's ideals taken to their "logical" conclusion and acted upon.
    3. Read an account of the evacuation of Phnom Phen, wherein anyone educated or even wearing glasses was marked for execution, to see those ideals put to work on a mass scale.

    JonKatz, Ted Kazynski, Pol Pot -- three colinear points.

    Oh, and history also ought to have taught you that you'll be laughed at if you use trite cliches like that "Frankenstein" bit, but apparently it hasn't.

    but we live in a time when the inventors and purveyors of technology bristle with arrogance

    Indeed, how dare they have brains and presume to use them. The utter gall, huh?

    and greed

    The nerve of some people! Once they cure cancer and heart disease, they actually expect personal gain out of it?

    Katz desperately needs some serious slapping around by the Invisible Hand.

    as well as well as creativity and enterprise.

    Yeah, I supppose we can put up with that creativity and enterprise stuff, if we really have to, but if we let them get away with it, they'd better damn well remember to stay poor and humble!

    Were you really at the head of the line to light the fires when they burned the library at Alexandria, Mr. Katz, or do you just write like you were?


  • Agree. The Sixth Day owes me roughly 12 bucks back. As for the comment, Certain staple features of these films are beginning to emerge -- the evil, amoral, ruthless and greedy corporation which has acquired life-altering new technologies (this is becoming more believable by the day), and the hapless human, noble victims trying to sort their way through this unchartered and disturbing new world - firstly, this is not new. Secondly, the films that you point to such as The Matrix or Blade Runner are not based on this situation at all. A good example would have been Veerhoven's "ROBOCOP" which was a very clever sel-parody and an entertaining flick. This is what the Sixth Day should have been but failed to be humble enough to be.

    1. humor for the clinically insane [mikegallay.com]

  • Re:Political discussion about cloning?? (Score:3)

    by zCyl ( 14362 ) on Monday December 11, 2000 @03:53AM (#1861039)
    Just what exactly is "dangerous" about any kind of political discussion whatsoever?

    The fact that modern people are impatient and demand a reaction to any problem that's discussed. This results in countless knee-jerk reactions on the part of politicians who want to be able to say they did "something" about a problem. I reference the ever successful war on drugs.

    > "The right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor's nose.

    I don't take this analogy very seriously.

    That happens to be a quote of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Holmes, and is one of the defining political statements that clarify the meaning and interpretation of the freedoms expressed in the Bill of Rights.

  • more bad science (Score:3)

    by aiabx ( 36440 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @07:11AM (#1861040)
    how about a cloning movie written by someone who passed grade 7 biology? DNA comes first.
    -aiabx

  • "Greedy" Biotech Companies (Score:3)

    by TheHornedOne ( 50252 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @09:45AM (#1861041)
    I am getting pretty friggin' tired of the anti-biotech sentiment here at slashdot. Yes, companies are patenting genes left and right, but not so they can corner the market on therapies derived from these patents.
    Gene patents serve to protect the massive investments required to a bring a cancer treatment, a potential AIDS cure, or a method of reversing a genetic disesase all the way from the basic science of discovery to the production and approval of the final product. It takes years and it costs millions or even billions of dollars.
    Yes, I said "billions", and stockholders are not going to allow scientists such as myself to throw that kind of money around without legal protection of their investment. This is not software development: the resources involved are far more substantial in nature.
    Yes, there is an element of greed, but come on, how innocent of this vice are you, my friend? Are you involved in a big programming project? Do you see it gaining dominance in the market? Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't that make some money and wouldn't that be nice? Yes, you say? Guess what: you're greedy. Welcome to the club of humanity.

  • Jon, have you even watched those films? (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 10, 2000 @07:57AM (#1861042)
    Your examples of Hollywood masterpieces (riiight) that have taken up the topic of humans and human-like artificial life are Blade Runner, Gattaca, The Matrix, and X-Men. About these films, you say:

    Certain staple features of these films are beginning to emerge -- the evil, amoral, ruthless and greedy corporation which has acquired life-altering new technologies (this is becoming more believable by the day), and the hapless human, noble victims trying to sort their way through this unchartered and disturbing new world.

    Go back and watch the films again.

    In Blade Runner, the evil is born of a large corporation, but your "hapless, noble human victims" is way off. Humans have almost no part in Blade Runner. The hapless characters (and, in the end, the only real victims) are the "bad" replicants. The only noble, admirable character also turned out to be a replicant. The movie has very little to say about the evils of large corporations or about how "Joe Human" is any sort of victim.

    In Gattaca, there's no mention at all of evil corporations. Embryo selection is just something that society did, something that happened. The "good guys" and the "bad guys" are all human, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone to call "hapless" or a "victim." Vincent/Jerome runs scared for some of the film, but he's manipulating the system, largely in control, and always a step ahead. And in the end, he wins.

    The Matrix has no evil corporations and no human-like artificial life. All of the humans in it are either vegetables or conspirators -- none of them much qualifying as "hapless."

    Even X-Men, which should be fresh in your memory, doesn't much fit your description. Evil corporations? Nah. The "bad guys" in X-Men are other mutants, fighting on the same side as the "good guys," just in a rather more violent way. There's no profit motive driving them, only a fight for surivival. The hapless victims in X-Men are the mutants alone in the outside world; the noble characters are the mutants working together. Humans are "bad guys," if anything, but are actually mostly just pawns.

    Not a single one of the films you mention (well, except The Sixth Day) fits your "evil corporations design human-like artificial life that turns out to be evil and wreaks havoc among a bunch of bumbling normal people." It amazes me how much your anti-corporatist, semi-Luddite world view has distorted your memory of these films.

    Go back and watch them again. Each one has a message (even if at least one of them does an awful job of conveying it). The message just doesn't coincide with what you claim it is.

  • Schwartzenegger on Social Issues (Score:5)

    by Phaid ( 938 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @07:15AM (#1861043) Homepage
    Using an The Sixth Day as a benchmark of the American social consciousness of genetic engineering is like using Total Recall as a springboard for discussion of the exploration of Mars. These films use their theme - loss of memory, cloning, spies, whatever - as a McGuffin, a simple prop to get the character from one firefight to the next, to threaten and then rescue the girl, knock over a few fruitstands, and then watch the sunrise at the end, battered but victorious. There never will be consequences or revelations in these films, because actually thinking about the topic at hand would get in the way of the violence and flippant remarks.

  • GIMME A BREAK JON! (Score:5)

    by Chas ( 5144 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @07:10AM (#1861044) Homepage Journal

    You do NOT go to a Schwartenegger flick to be truly enlightened. You go to be entertained. Nothing more.

    Reading into a an action flick like "The 6th Day" is like trying to find the meaning of life in a thrash metal album.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • Political discussion about cloning?? (Score:5)

    by zCyl ( 14362 ) on Sunday December 10, 2000 @07:18AM (#1861045)
    Political discussion about cloning is horrendously dangerous. It's about as dangerous as political discussion about the internet or computers. Anytime a bunch of stiff-assed politicians sit around a fancy table with leather seats and talk about some form of technology they don't understand, the innevitable result is that they are afraid of it! And anything they're afraid of, they pass irrational and unreasonable legislation against. Cloning doesn't work like in Arnold's little movie. Hollywood has to make some "alterations" to how cloning really works in order to make it interesting enough for the big screen. In reality, a clone is no different from an identical twin that must grow up from birth, there is no transfer of thought, memory, etc. Unfortunately, there is nothing interesting about an identical twin growing up while someone is going through a mid-life crisis, so no movies exist to match reality. And double plus unfortunately, our politicians have no exposure to this technology EXCEPT the media, so they get the mistaken impression that it actually works like Arnold's movie, and thus get even more terrified of it.

    We could do with a few limitations of government, such as don't ever regulate something that isn't being used to hurt someone else. "The right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor's nose."

    I would prefer if politicians didn't talk about cloning. Let them argue about how much a congressional toilet seat costs instead, it would be much more productive for humanity.
  • Anyone with a special place in their heart for the old style technology/Arnold films, such as Running Man, T2, and Total Recal would love this. I was nearly convinced that Arnold was dead, starting with the horrid 'Kindergarden Cop' moving to the hokey 'Last Action Hero' all the way up intil the insultingly stupid 'End of Days'.

    Arnold is back, in spite of himself. It's not that he's a great actor in this, but then again, he never was. You take an interesting situation stick him in them middle and watch him fuck shit up. The movie is not pure Arnold gold, but it's a step back in the right direction.

    Perhaps the only real problems was the unnessescary scenes-- a football crunch up that could have been stolen from the editing room floor of 'Any given Sunday', a helocopter chase that serves no purpose then to show off CGI, and of course the obligitory car chase that kills the suspension of disbelife through unrealism.

    But where this movie really shines is it's fresh take on the future; The future is not a dark place--it is sterile, bright, cheery. The wall screens don't show big brother looking down on you, they show happy ads and football updates. It's quite interesting how it demonstrates a future where the middle-class family seemlessly brings technology into their lives without batting an eye. But, at the same time there is an underlying uneasyness about all these new advances.

    The purpose Arnold ultmatly serves in this is as a character study about letting go. He is the last old hat person in a changing world. When his daughter wants a grotesquly realistic robot doll that can play and sing just like a real freind, Arnold asks 'Why not just have a real freind?'. He finds himself the only one unconfortble with the idea of cloning his pet, as all of his peers think it's no big deal.

    The battle, and subtle commentary becomes this: He's faced with a situation he knows to be wrong, yet his only advocates are radical protestors while the rest of normal society find him too triditional. And such is the situation many of us will face in the near future: As morally ambigious technology becomes more intertwined into our lives, do we question it and risk being labled a closed minded zelot? Or do we simply accept it without question in exchange for a sense of normalcy?

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