The 6th Day

The 6th Day sees Arnie being cloned, with the original wanting to displace the clone before it's too late. Or something. Either good or bad, depending on who you talk to, but the overall feeling these days seems to be that Arnie is perhaps a little past his sell by date, both this and End of Days failing to be major crowd pullers. The ongoing popularity of Trevor Rabin doesn't seem to have abated in any way, however. I suppose his drum and bass mixed synth efforts are much more pallatable to the average modern action thriller audience.

In fairness, The 6th Day is a fairly respectable effort. Deep Blue Sea contained some good ideas, but was sabotaged by what essentially not enough craftsmanship to develop the them to best advantage. While 6th Day does suffer from this syndrome to some extent, the mixture of ideas and sheer will to keep going allow things to move along quite nicely. The opening track starts with a curiously Arabic (I think) influenced idea, but soon surges with synths, percussion and choir which is possibly augmented and manipulated synthetically. In the grand tradition of the over blown, but hugely popular theme for Armageddon, Adam's Theme is a simple, but fairly stirring rock anthem that mainly works because it so firmly believes how jolly sincere it wants to be, but blatantly isn't.

The action motifs aren't anything too special, but are so busy and loud that they can't fail to generate at least a little excitement. While the Arabic idea seems odd, it does at least add a little acoustic vibrancy to the synthetic palette. I can't honestly say it's a score a enjoy hugely and I still find Rabin's music over bearing to the point of irritating. The reliance on a wall of sound for effect rather than quality of timbre and instrumentation is frustrating, but for this kind of thriller is almost certainly all that is needed. Anything more thoroughly well composed would no doubt be wasted under Arnie's thick Austrian accent and the explosions. A film score you could hold a minor rave to.