“The Core” starts off smart, if slightly unscientific, and begins laying the foundation of the impending doom with clues that only one man seems capable of unraveling. Strange things are happening all over the world: unexplained EM pulses, birds going haywire and crashing into things all around them, the guidance systems of the shuttle hundreds of miles off target. All these clues lead to the conclusion the outer layer of the Earth’s core has stopped moving, thus the Earth’s electro-magnetic field is collapsing. And it falls to a crack-squad of likeable characters to save the world.

Mindless entertainment where you just want to see something visually entertaining.

The characters, the were realistic and likeable.

The poor handling of special effects and the bad follow through of simple cause-and-effect relationships.

Slap the science advisors for this film.

Like I wasted 5 dollars at Blockbuster.

Were actually very good, and did credible performances despite the movie they were trapped within.

If you just want to see monuments destroyed with no real logic behind it, this is perfect. Or if you really like science fiction that has little or no ACTUAL science in it, this is the way to go.

It was pop-culture fluff made to sell tickets and lost all integrity it could have had long before it became availabe for public viewing.

Warning, spoilers contained within. Read at your own risk.

The biggest problem with “The Core” is that it is essentially a smart movie, and while you can make a dumb movie smart and enjoyable, you CAN NOT make a smart movie dumb and have it even passable.

I am a big fan of disaster flicks. I liked “Twister” despite the fact that two people were yards away from a monster tornado and never once got hit by debris. I liked “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact.” I thoroughly enjoyed “Volcano” and “Dante’s Peak.” I like humans fighting nature and winning, and I can reasonably suspend my disbelief and accept (to a degree) how incredibly lucky these people are to narrowly escape death at every turn.

“The Core” starts off smart, if slightly unscientific, and begins laying the foundation of the impending doom with clues that only one man seems capable of unraveling. Strange things are happening all over the world: unexplained EM pulses, birds going haywire and crashing into things all around them, the guidance systems of the shuttle hundreds of miles off target. All these clues lead to the conclusion the outer layer of the Earth’s core has stopped moving, thus the Earth’s electro-magnetic field is collapsing. To quote the movie “In 6 months we’ll be back in the stone age, in two years the whole planet is fried” (nicely demonstrated by a peach being roasted by a flaming aerosol can).

This is an interesting twist, full of potential - if you can get past the complete implausibility of it. I guess the film-maker’s scientific advisor not only hasn’t watched the Discovery Channel anytime in the last ten years, but also didn’t do too well in high school, either. Let’s knock these science no-no’s out one at a time.

First up, the pace-makers going out. The first scene of the movie opens up with a man’s watch ticking to a halt, and him commenting on how weird it is. The man is relatively young, probably 33 at the most. He walks into the room, gets a weird expression n his face, and drops over dead. Out on the street, people are screaming and crying, cars are crashing and people are dropping dead. Apparently 35 people in a 10 block radius all dropped dead at the exact same time. The explanation turns out to be an EM pulse (electromagnetic) which would basically permanently shut down anything electronic that is running when the pulse occurs. That’s all fine and good except for two big flaws there with the way this scene was set up. They forgot to make all the other electronic stuff stop too. All the stop lights, clocks, PCs, elevators, carousel rides and automobiles are still functioning perfectly fine. Apparently this EM pulse only hit those people and one man’s watch. The other faux pas here is the fact that they people all keeled over dead at the same time exactly. Pace-makers don’t work like an alarm clock and constantly send pulses. They monitor the heart’s beating and if it senses any irregularities, it will send a jolt to the sensor cells of the heart to stimulate it to beat correctly. So, even if ALL the people’s hearts decided to beat irregularly at the same moment, and all their pace makers had been disabled thus preventing any artificial correction of their heart rhythm, they still shouldn’t have all dropped dead at the same instant. They should have had chest pains, had heart attacks, passed out, etc.

Okay, we’ll give them that one for brevity, and maybe we can write off all the other electronic equipment working fine around them....

The next uh-oh sign is the birds in London flying helter-skelter into everything from people walking to buildings to the ground. This is later determined to be caused by the shifting magnetic field, because birds (like many animals such as bees and turtles) use magnetic fields to help them migrate. Another cute piece of science fact gets obscured here by the poor job the effects team did. Yes, it was scary and reminiscent of Hitchcock’s “The Birds”to see birds dive-bombing a city en mass. However, half the birds that were crashing starting falling off the statues they were sitting on, and it seemed that none of them remembered to use their eyes at all. See, the magnetic field over one square in London is going to be the same, and birds don’t use magnetic fields to fly from the ground to a tree to avoid a cat; they use their eyes. But, I was still willing to give them that for dramatic purposes. It was visually cool, and frightening, and strange enough to pique my interest, I could let the inaccuracies slide.

While Keyes (the only scientist bright enough to put these clues together) is working with his grad students on trying to figure this out, the shuttle is crashing on re-entry because the on-board guidance system has been tricked by the strange happenings. It’s telling them they are on course for a touch down in Houston, but really they are about to crash into downtown LA. Through a feat of remarkable flying, and brilliant coordinate plotting and thinking by Bec (Hillary Swank), they manage to control crash into a river, and not kill a single person - but yet, Bec is brought before a tribunal because she gave the coordinates, and everyone is expecting her to be chucked out of NASA. Who cares that everyone on board saw plain as day that the instruments weren’t reading properly....but luckily Keyes has gotten his information to the officials in time, so they decide to not let her take the fall to save face by blaming the whole incident on her, but to send her to help pilot the new ship that they are going to use to fix the Earth’s core.

Now here they tell us what exactly happened and how they plan to fix it. As we know, it turns out that the liquid portion of the core has somehow stopped moving, therefore the magnetic field is not being generated and the Earth is in serious trouble. But here the film makers step all over science’s toes until they are bleeding and not able to fit back into their proper shoes. Let me give a few brief reasons why this is a stupid plot path to take. A) If the core stopped moving, the magnetic field would just collapse, not linger for a few years and fade away. You have a magnet and make a nail stand up, if you put a piece of wood between the nail and the magnet and block the waves, the nail doesn’t graceful and slowly fall back to the table. It drops as soon as the magnetic pull is disrupted. So the theory that the core has stopped moving completely is flawed there, because no one would be left to sit around and figure up ways to fix it. As soon as it was gone, the world would be burned up as the sun rose systematically across the land. B) If the core stopped moving, it would no longer be liquid metal. It would slowly cool and become solid like the center of the core. So, if for some reason the magnetic field were to defy reason and stay long enough for all this to be figured out, it would no longer be a liquid environment to get moving once again. Okay, let’s stick these concerns on the back burner for a moment and tell ourselves that really they meant to say the core was slowing down and would be stopping so we can skip ahead to some of the effects shots - the things one really goes to see at this kind of movie anyway.

We have a problem in Rome with a huge magnetic storm brewing because of upper level high static discharge. We’ve been anticipating this, they were worried about it throughout the beginning of the movie, lightening storms where there are thousands of strikes per square mile. So it’s going to happen in Rome. The sky gets dark, static starts zapping people on coffee pots and TVs. I’m getting excited, it looks like they might be doing something right for a change here. Lightening begins to hit the Colosseum. It looks cool, I’ll admit. Strange though how lightening is supposed to be a release from a high area of charge to a low one, not necessarily from sky to ground - as a matter of fact most strikes we see are from ground to sky... but these bolt are all from sky to earth, over and over in the same place, the Colosseum. I guess I missed in geography and history the fact that the Colosseum was built on a sheet of highly charged iron.... Well, the lightening finally makes it explode like a tree does. Anyone know why the tree explodes when hit by lightening? Because all the water that is in the cells are instantly vaporized into steam by the high heat and the resulting pressure forces the surrounding tree-meat and bark outward. Stone isn’t known for either it’s highly conductive nature or its high water content.

But the problem with this scene doesn’t end with exploding stone monuments. It’s the stupid people running away from lightening chasing them up a street! The lightening is traveling in a straight line up an asphalt street, tearing it up as it goes, and people are able to run away from it. Hmm. I guess all those golfers who got knocked senseless when lightening struck the ground 10 feet away should have just run and then the force wouldn’t have laid them flat. My irritation is building here.

I’m going to plunge straight into the second most asinine scene in this movie. The Golden Gate Bridge melting. The shot starts zoomed in on a man’s arm setting on his car window ledge, in a few seconds its severely burned. He draws it in to the “safety” of his car. Apparently his magic windshield protects against cosmic radiation better than the ozone layer does. The shot becomes more absurd as the Golden Gate bridge begins to melt, yet all the cars and the same man with a burned arm, are secure in their non-melting cars so that they can yell as they fall through into the water below as the melted bridge collapses. If Detroit made such wonderful cars that they can withstand heat and radiation that could melt the Golden Gate Bridge, why the heck do the melt so quick in a car crash?

And the most-asinine-scene-of-the-movie prize goes to Brazzleton’s self-sacrifice scene. I know the film makers wanted to show how human drive and determination can push a body to extremes, can make the impossible happen, but for crying out loud! There are extremes and there are absolutely-not-possibles! The scene sets its self up that someone has to go into the in-between chambers of the ship (that are the same temperature as liquid core they are driving through) to manually release the switches to let the pods fall off to carry out their last ditch effort to save the world. Problem is that corridor is probably 8000 + degrees, their nifty suits can withstand about 4000 degrees. Hmm. He opens the door and a visible wave of heat slaps him, he grimaces in pain, walks zombie-like to carry out his task. The human brain begins to shut-down at about 108 degrees, the organs stop functioning about 112, this man is walking, talking (though pained), thinking and determinedly going deeper into the corridor and turning stubborn switches as his suit melts off around him. COME ON! Maybe if they hadn’t made it such an EXTREME difference in what the suit could take it may have had more credibility.

There were tons of other stupid things contained in the movie dialog like: “ The core’s the size of Mars, you’re talking about jump-starting a planet!” ER ER ER That’s not right. Didn’t these guys ever build a model of the solar system in grade school? Mars, Venus and Earth are so close in size that (on a planetary scale) there’s not a lot to differentiate them. Maybe if he said Mercury, but he didn’t.

This movie is just filled with so many missteps, mis-wordings, and poorly planned effect points that it lost what it could have been.

They tried to oversell the horror and drama to make a buck, and pandered to what they thought movie-goers wanted to see that they missed a real opportunity to tell a good story well. There was plenty of horror and science to play around with had they taken the time to simply “proofread” and think about the effects they were shooting. The movie could have been a classic, but instead it turned out to be a joke.

The film-makers can claim that the movie was poorly timed because of the shuttle accident, but I think anyone with half a brain would leave this movie saying “It could have been so much better.”

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Created Sep 19, 2003 at 11:53pm • Submit your own review...