YMMV / The 6th Day

• Broken Base: The Strawman Has a Point trope should give an indication as to how contentious the position of the villain is. Some viewers believe human cloning could help millions whilst others believe it is one of those boundaries that should never be crossed. Just like real life.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Unless they were ALL clones (which means that the Sixth Day laws would protect him), Clone Adam is guilty of multiple counts of murder and was caught on camera doing so. He is also guilty of breaking and entering, vandalism, arson, assault and car theft. This by extension means that Real Adam is also guilty of these crimes as no one knows that he has been cloned. This man is in for many years of legal trouble and probably prison.
  • On the other hand, considering that most of Drucker's forces were actively working to suppress knowledge of the cloning technology, it's probable that they had resources set up to eliminate any record of the two Adams being present in the same area which helped to protect Adam even after their defeat.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: For nearly 20 years, the notion of the XFL existing in the future was seen as a hilarious miscalculation on the film's part (by the few who even remembered its existence in the first place) ...until in 2020, when the league had a much better-received revival...which then went under again after just a couple months before it was ultimately bought by Dwayne Johnson, which eventually resulted in its return three years later.
• Magnificent Bastard: Michael Drucker, billionaire owner of Replacement Technologies, is secretly an illegal human clone. Accumulating wealth and lobbying powerful politicians, Drucker aims to abolish the titular 6th Day laws and legalize human cloning to let people live forever. His scheme is only even discovered when pilot Adam Gibson switches places with his friend when scheduled to fly Drucker and Drucker and the other man are killed by an anti-clone extremist. Realizing Adam was cloned in error, Drucker fights both Adams to keep his secret, even catching a trick they planted for him and fighting tenaciously to clone his own dying body when wounded.
• Moral Event Horizon: The newly cloned villain robbing his dying predecessor of his shoes, showing an incredible Lack of Empathy to HIMSELF.
• Nightmare Fuel: Everything about Drucker's flawed clone during the climax is absolutely skin-crawling. You get to see the previously unflappable Drucker struggle - dying, in pain and visibly desperate - to bring the half-formed, fetal-looking abomination to life... and when it does activate, it treats him with the same disdain he treats everyone else with, clearly seeing him as just so much biological waste to be left behind. The malformed clone doesn't realize that anything is wrong until Adam shows him a mirror. Every bit of it is richly deserved and serves to puncture Drucker's high-minded claims from earlier, but it doesn't make it less horrifying to watch.
• Retroactive Recognition: Terry Crews, in his first film role, plays Vincent, one of Drucker's henchmen.
• Strawman Has a Point: Drucker does do plenty of evil and vile things to try to protect his secret, but the fact remains that his cloning technology could be used to save many lives, and is already used in-story to clone organs for life-saving surgery, and to provide food after fish stocks have been depleted. His arguments on saving lives by conquering death and allowing eternal youth are not given any serious rebuttal, but are treated as wrong because he's the villain, absent, perhaps, the simultaneous existence of an individual and his clone demonstrating the difference between "eternal life" and "printing" a new xeroxed copy. His conversation with Adam hints that Drucker's vision of the future would be a eugenicist tyranny with him and his cronies in charge, but this is never directly spelled out or expanded on. Even him being willing to take desperate measures to protect his secret is lessened by the fact that under the 6th Day laws he faces execution simply for existing and would have everything he owns seized, and he in fact already has been murdered once by a religious zealot. Additionally, he is also lobbying to get the laws changed to make his actions legal, which would eliminate the need to keep his status a secret, and also means not needing to resort to some of the more shady tactics he uses elsewhere ^note For instance, when turning off life support and cloning his star player who suffered a lethal injury, Johnny Phoenix is given genetic defects as leverage - if cloning was legal it could be written into the contract that doing this would extend the length of the contract, freeze the salary, and so on.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The Speaker of the House of Representatives has a 10-year old son with an inoperable brain tumor who cannot be cured under the Sixth Day laws. Since he had his latest child when he was already 50, he really wasn't expecting that he would be Outliving One's Offspring. Drucker manipulates him to gain political capital to have those laws repealed, offering him a clone of his son but doesn't tell him that the clone will have a new, congenital defect intended to keep the Speaker in line.
  • Dr. Griffin Weir has to watch his wife die a second time because of the flaw that Drucker (accidentally) ^note Weir was unaware of Drucker using this as standard practice to keep certain clones in line; Drucker's response to this coming to light is not only to explain precisely why he does this (and Weir even acknowledges the reasoning), but also explicitly state Weir's wife was supposed to be exempt from this inserted into the clone. She makes him promise not to resurrect her a second time.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The story focuses on cloning humans and treats the technology to record, copy and view the entire memory of a person as ancillary. Being able to make copies of a person's mind seems like it would be the focus of much more ethical, legal and philosophical debate and makes you wonder why everyone is so obsessed with the biological side of cloning people.
    • The ability to copy people's minds appears to be completely distinct from the biological cloning technology, and is presumably not constrained by the same legal obstacles, so it ought to be an active area for technological exploitation in its own right. This is possibly an example of Schizo Tech- the setting is recognisably similar to the modern world despite the existence of technological know-how that seems more advanced than the core premise of say, 'Blade Runner'.
  • You have a movie with two Arnolds... and they don't fight each other once. In-story, this is because they Copied the Morals, Too. Since both the original and cloned Adam are fundamentally good people, they would have no real reason to fight each other, although it might have been intertaining if Drucker decided to create another, evil Adam clone to fight him in the climax.

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