Superhuman feats on sci-fi lines

The ``Bavarian Beefcake'' is back in action in yet another futuristic adventure: ``The 6th Day''. But, as ANAND PARTHASARATHY discovers, Arnold Schwarzenegger's fictional plight may be uncannily close to fact.

``IMAGINE COMING home from work one night to what you think is your surprise birthday party - only to find that someone who looks and acts exactly like you, is in your house... and eating your birthday cake!'' It was enough to cause the granite jaw of filmdom's foremost action figure, to drop. And that is why Arnold Schwarzenegger was attracted to the character of Adam Gibson that he plays in his latest film:

``He is not a typical action hero, who everyone knows, right from the start, will kick butt... he is an ordinary man who in order to save himself and his family, learns to fight back and risks becoming as vicious as those pursuing him''.

If ``The 6th Day'' had been made a decade ago, the explanation would have come from a conveniently forgotten twin brother. But this is 2001: and for weeks now, the newspapers have been headlining startling developments in the science of cloning: the world's first genetically modified primate - a baby rhesus monkey, named ANDi (for ``inserted DNA'' read backward) unveiled two weeks ago by a U.S. laboratory: the closest step so far to human cloning. The first individual of an endangered species - an Asian gaur or wild ox - to be cloned and given birth to by a surrogate cow, was also announced this month. Fears that scientists may be violating the ban on human cloning imposed by dozens of Western nations...

So ``The 6th Day'' (the day God created Man), set only a few years hence, suggests a nefarious underground racket in cloned humans, in a world where pets can be legally cloned and replicated. The film opened its India run on January 26.

Schwarzenegger plays Adam Gibson, a helicopter pilot who doesn't care too much for the cloning capers around him. His partner Hank (Michael Rapaport) seeks solace in the company of a computer- generated, holographic Virtual girlfriend. When the family dog dies, Adam's wife (Wendy Crewson) yearns for a cloned replacement - but he is uneasy at the implications. Instead he gets his daughter a semi cloned ``Sim-Pal'' doll, a life-like, life-sized toy. But when he gets home he finds he has been replaced by his own clone.

The dirty work has been inspired by a shady billionaire (Michael Drucker) whose firm ``Replacement Technologies'', is supposed to clone food supplies for a hungry world. Instead he and his tame scientist (Robert Duvall) run a black market in cloned humans. When Adam is cloned by mistake, he must be found and killed so that no one discovers the duplication.

Once past the educative lead-in, the film settles into the tried and trusted ``Arnie'' formula of incessant sci-fi violence and superhuman physical feats. Scenes purporting to show the cloning and ``syncording'' - replicating a person's mind - are quite gross as are some of the macabre ``graveyard'' jokes that pepper the film. ``Give me a break, I've already been killed twice today'', says one baddie, after he is cloned afresh every time ``Arnie'' kills him.

``The 6th Day'' is directed by Britisher Roger Spottiswoode who was also responsible for the last James Bond yarn, ``Tomorrow Never Dies''. ``We found ourselves in a bit of a dilemma'', he admits. Even as the screenplay was being written, ``we realised the story was taking place more like five years in the future rather than 20''. So he decided to present human cloning as a ``very near and recognisable future''.

Did he succeed? ``It's well crafted entertainment, with enough ideas to qualify as science fiction and not just as a futuristic thriller'', writes veteran critic Roger Ebert. Others were less charitable when the film was premiered in the U.S. in November last. The reviewer of ``USA Today'' wished she could clone herself and ``dispatch my critic clone to snooze through this very long `Schwarzenstew' of what-ifs and what-nots about the moral implications of duplicating humans''. Her final suggestion: ``Why not rest on the Sixth Day instead?''

However Schwarzenegger's beefy and largely verbiage-free screen action has a faithful following here which may disregard the film's more thought-provoking content and settle back to enjoy the familiar bone crunching action. In a sly take off on his famous signature phrase, ``Arnie'' tells a petshop owner, in the film: ``I might be back!''.

But fans of the ``Bavarian Beefcake'' may have no such doubts. They will be back in the theatres - if he is.

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