The 6th Day

Day 162 - 6/11/09 - Movie #161

We had dinner with my brother-in-law and his girlfriend to celebrate his birthday, and went to Zum Stammtisch for German food. What could be more appropriate to eat before a Schwarzenegger film? Arnold-Fest rolls on with this film about cloning - I don't remember this film being released, so I've got no clue about it...

THE PLOT: Futuristic action about a man who meets a clone of himself and stumbles into a grand conspiracy about clones taking over the world.

AFTER: This is set in the "near-future" - where cloning is possible, but illegal (cigars are also illegal, and presumably trans-fats as well...) People in this future regularly clone their pets so they will live forever, but human cloning is too complicated...or is it?

The problem with the cloning depicted in this movie is that it isn't used to just make a new copy of a person or pet, they transfer over the original's memories, so that a cloned dog would remember the tricks you taught him, or where he buried bones in the yard. This creates something of a philosophical question - if your dog dies, and you grow him a host body, and transfer over his memories, it's still NOT the original dog - or is it? One theory says it will always be a copy - Arnold's character has an aversion to cloned pets early in the movie, and the points he makes are valid, but then that all gets swept under the rug.

I sort of have the same problem with the transporters in "Star Trek" - they break people down into atoms, teleport them somehow, and re-assemble them at the other end. But breaking something down into atoms? Doesn't that sound sort of fatal? Is that really the person who walks out of the transporter at the other end, or just some kind of duplicate? In other words, are all the billions of atoms moved across space, or just sort of duplicated at the other end? If the person is changed from matter to energy and back, are they really the exact same matter after that? I know, it's fiction and I'm over-thinking it, but still...

Then we get into the legal ramifications - what sort of legal status, if any, does a clone have? I think that if science is heading in this direction, the law will take a few years to catch up. Would it be legal to kill your own clone, or would that be considered suicide? Would a clone have any rights, is it considered a human, or just a copy of a human?

This probably looked like a good entertainment value in the theaters - you get to see two Schwarzeneggers for the price of one! Double the action, double the Arnold! But honestly it's more confusing than anything else... I couldn't really follow which one was which during the action sequences. And they missed an opportunity to have Arnie repeat the best line from "Total Recall", which was "If I'm naht me, dan who da hell ahm I?" Which reminds me, I should probably put "Total Recall" on my want list...

RATING: 6 out of 10 synth-cords