What the Flick

THE SIXTH DAY, on DVD (and TV), is Governor Schwarzenegger's contribution to cloning literature. Besides giving Arnold a chance to play two of his character, this movie also features Robert Duvall as the genetic science genius and Tony Goldwyn as the Dr Eeeevil entrepreneur who's making money cloning dead pets and human organs for transplantation. The cloning of whole humans, however, is absolutely against the law; naturally it is rampant at Dr Eeevil's facility. Arnold plays a "real people" person, a loving family man with a cute kid; this should tell you all you need to know about the plot. Arnold ends up cloned when, in a pattern repeated throughout, Dr Eeevil's assistants screw up and think he's died along with their boss. As he unravels what's happened, the henchmen repeatedly try and fail to kill him. By the time it's over, we learn that Dr Eeeevil's been cloning himself and those hapless henchpersons over and over, he's got a tank full of blank bodies just waiting to be turned into you or me, and of course Arnold and his clone hit it off and make a cute pair. Besides the bad science involving the "blanks" that are 90% grown and just waiting for your DNA (how did they grow without DNA you may ask, but don't bother) and memory chip, there's the bigger clone question: why keep remaking those stupid henchmen? In the real world, wouldn't it have been easier just to recruit some new, and potentially more adept, killers? Also, even going with the movie's request-a-clone technology, a fresh-baked clone would look more like the Arnold of PUMPING IRON than his SIXTH DAY self, and any idiot could tell them apart. So the whole premise is dumber than a sack of cloned hair.

Also on DVD comes a movie to prove the adage that nothing is scarier than a clone. Oh, that's supposed to be "clown?" Whatever. In GODSEND, an attractive, loving couple (Rebecca Romijn & Greg Kinnear) resorts to drastic measures when their 8-year-old son dies. Salvation conveniently appears in the form of the wife's former teacher, Dr Wells (Robert De Niro, which should have been their first clue that trouble was around the corner), who offers to use their son's DNA to clone a new baby just like the one they had, as long as they move to the small town where his clinic is located and never talk to their friends or families again. Faster than you can say "Adam," which is the kid's ridiculously unoriginal name, they pack up and ship off to the mysterious doctor's clone protection program. She spawns Adam 2, and he's a cute baby with a blank slate. Flash forward to them happily celebrating his 8th birthday in their new lives. A day or two later Adam starts to exhibit the frightening habits of a junior serial killer in training. This turns out to unscientifically involve some mumbo jumbo about the cloning and Dr Wells, but it does add a few legitimate chills and thrills to the movie. The rest of the BAD SEED-like plot is good for a scare (and the kid's spooky stare), but again leaves those crazy cloning questions: first and foremost, if the wife could carry an implanted embryo (as she did), why not just make a new baby by legit in vitro rather than go through all this trouble to get the same damn kid? They wouldn't have had to move, her mother could babysit, and life would've been so much simpler. In a way, the choice of going to Dr Wells and getting the whole clone thing going displayed a turn of mind that made me think they just deserved all the crap that came later.

Finally, I actually paid good American money to see CODE 46, a movie set in a future world where all the unskilled jobs seem to be in Shanghai and India and society is divided between crowded, disinfected, and pass-controlled cities and the vast "outside," where people are free to starve and barter, have diseases, and go native. Everyone speaks a kind of future Esperanto, mostly English with random Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese words thrown in to confuse the audience. I mean, because the world is so "global village." Frankly, if this is where free trade is leading, I'm rolling up the NAFTA carpet. Yeah, I'm getting to the clones. Around this world, in vitro births, sperm donors, and cloning have become so widespread that there's no telling to whom you might be related, making all of society a multilingual version of Appalachia or a high-tech Brady Bunch. So there are laws (the Code 46 of the title) to make sure that you don't accidentally mate with a relative - which is where the trouble starts here. A jowly Tim Robbins plays a Seattle insurance investigator sent to Shanghai to determine the source of counterfeit "papelles," the little license-like cards needed to travel between cities. He finds the counterfeiter (Samantha Morton), but rather than arrest her, he (for no reasons apparent on screen) falls in love with her, has an affair, and gets himself in a whole lotta' trouble. Question: can Samantha Morton get a role with a different haircut? Her moony eyes make her a good choice for these disaffected futuristic babes (see MINORITY REPORT), but I'm over the hair. Anyway, I think their affair is supposed to represent the strength of human passion over bureaucracy et cetera. But the two love scenes between them are endless, boring, and painful to watch (and gratuitous: the point could be conveyed in a tenth of the time), the opposite of passionate and free. (Plus one of them borders on just plain repulsive psychologically; it involves ropes and someone's mama's clone, is all I'm going to say.) The movie fails its human and its scientific storylines.

But about the clones: the movie never says why they were bothering to clone people at all, and certainly not in batches of 24. It's an awful lot of technology (and created so many complications) just to get more stunningly ordinary people. Wouldn't you think there'd be enough of them already? Why not clone athletes, or scientists, or Cindy Crawford or Jude Law? Or at least people with common sense? Maybe that's Code 47 and still being discussed at headquarters.

So, what these movies tell me is that society is in no way ready for cloning: either we're duplicating inept sidekicks, or potential serial killers, or just plain unattractive people with bad haircuts. What's the point? Any one of us, mated with any other one of us, would have a better chance of producing a better outcome than all the science on call in these movies. And maybe that's the way it should be.