BEFORE: It's Earth Day, and this film's been on the books for a while, so there's no better film to knock out today than one where people are struggling to save the planet, right? Bruce Greenwood carries over from "Gerald's Game", and let's hope he can help stop the Earth's destruction in a race against the clock...
THE PLOT: The only way to save Earth from catastrophe is to drill down to the core and set it spinning again.
AFTER: Wow, I don't even know where to START with this one, I'm betting there's so much junk science on display here that it will make your head spin, unlike the Earth's core, which apparently has stopped spinning under this scenario. Though I'm not sure I understand how the center of the Earth can STOP spinning, while the planet itself keeps rotating. Let's call this scientific NITPICK POINT #1 - if the surface of the Earth is still turning, like if we still have day and night and a climatic separation of the seasons, then logically the core is spinning too, because they're CONNECTED. You wouldn't see the middle of a vinyl record stay in one place while the outer edge of the record keeps spinning on a turntable, right? Or if you shook up a carton of eggs, then you'd be shaking up the yolks and whites inside of the eggs, too. Am I the crazy one here?
But that's the premise here, they have to send a bunch of terranauts down to the Earth's core with a few nukes and set off some kind of chain reaction that will save the planet, because the spinning core is what generates the Earth's magnetic fields. OK, this science point seems to at least have a little truth to it - but again, I think it's the rotation of the entire PLANET that creates the magnetic fields, not just the core. And then when the magnetic fields fail, the film shows people getting horribly burned, and the Golden Gate Bridge melting under the solar radiation that is reaching the Earth in much greater quantity. There you go, NITPICK POINT #2, I think some screenwriter mixed up the function of the magnetic field with that of the ozone layer. Right? We're off to a terrible start here if we're looking for any kind of accuracy.
But let's proceed - the military & NASA (which aren't even part of the same hierarchy in the U.S. government, if I'm not mistaken) have to assemble a team (please, please, please let it be a rag-tag team of scrappy losers...) that are willing to go where no one has gone before, and do something that nobody thinks will work, with untested technology and unclear mission parameters outside of "Fix it somehow..." Basically, this is just a rehash of "Armageddon" with the rocket pointed downwards.
And that brings me to NITPICK POINT #3 - assuming that they CAN build this vessel, and that creating a device that uses sonic waves and lasers to magically drill through rock without drilling, once they all climb aboard, that vessel should be heading DOWN, because that's the only direction that will get you to the core. Instead, what is depicted is a vessel that moves FORWARD, like a car or a train or any vehicle on the surface, where gravity is at their feet and they are sitting comfortably in an upright position. Assuming any of this is possible they would need to spend 15 hours falling down, not traveling across - so they would need a vessel where facing forward means facing DOWN, like look at the floor and go THAT way, and don't stop - or else it should be set up like one of those death-drops at the carnival, where you sit with other people in a row of chairs and it goes DOWN the track in rapid-fashion towards the Earth, and then once it hits the surface, it just keeps on going DOWN. And all of the scenes where the vessel (the Virgil) seems to be moving forward/across are wrong wrong wrong.
This, of course, assumes that there is no source of artificial gravity on the Virgil - nobody ever made a reference to this, so I think it's safe to say they didn't have time to invent this. Anyway, as the ship gets closer to the core of the Earth, one would expect Earth's gravity to have less of an effect, to the point where someone inside a ship near the core would experience a form of weightlessness, much as they do in space. So that's NITPICK POINT #4, we never see this phenomenon take place.
Oh, and before I forget, the government also decides to add a hacker for the team, for some unstated reason - right, the same government that's tapping its citizens cell phone calls to find terrorists needs a college kid to make sure no information about this project leaks out on the internet - because we sure wouldn't want anyone to find out from the internet that the government is trying to save the planet! They do have an image to maintain, after all. Really, this is the flimsiest of excuses just to get a hacker character into the film, because his skills are needed in the third act, and the act of drilling down to the earth's core requires no hacking skills at all! While they're at it, why doesn't the Pentagon hire the world's greatest lion tamer, just in case the project gets attacked by wild lions, or have David Beckham on stand-by in case they need to fend off a rival soccer team they might find under the earth's surface?
SO yeah, most of the science here is probably quite laughable, I just wish I knew enough science to say so for sure. But all the scientists' skills are pretty interchangeable here, so let's call that NITPICK POINT #5 - sure, why wouldn't a climatologist also know how to re-program a nuclear device? Science is science, right? And if you can pilot and land a space shuttle, that's obviously an experience that's going to prepare you to drive a giant hypersonic drill to the Earth's core - it's all the same right? Give me a break.
I thought (briefly) during this film about how far we've come since Jules Verne's novel "Journey To the Center of the Earth" - Verne didn't really know what was down there, so he did what any good author would do, he made up a bunch of stuff. As a kid I watched the 1959 movie version with James Mason, it was a staple of local TV's Saturday afternoon movie schedulers. (We didn't have TCM, or any cable back then, it was a dark time.). And I always thought that if you were to find yourself, say, a mile below the earth's surface, it would be really, really dark - but thanks to movie magic, they barely had to use headlamps at all, everything down below was quite bright! Same goes for "The Core", thanks to special effects and brightly-colored magma, this film didn't have an hour-long section in the middle that was just a black screen with people talking about how to drill further down and set off nuclear bombs.
(Also, spoiler alert, the Earth turns out to have a creamy center, I think it's mostly made of nougat. JK.)
And what year was this film released? 2003? Did we really, as a species, think at that point that the greatest threat to our planet was not global warming but the Earth's core slowing down? Why does Hollywood keep getting this wrong? Like in "The Day After Tomorrow" when the oceans were seen heating up, and somehow this led to massive winter over the U.S.? People just don't like documentaries as much as action films, so where is the action film that is going to get global warming right? What's the matter, Hollywood, is that a little too real for you? Yet there have been, what, about five or six "Sharknado" movies?
As laughable as "The Core" might be, it strives to make a point - that what this planet needs is a ragtag bunch of scrappy losers (and by that I mean "just about everyone") to join the team and be in their own action movie, where they all participate in exciting stunts like recycling or refusing single-use plastics, or maybe even cleaning up a beach or a section of ocean. Ok, so actions like "not using the car so much" or "walking to the store" aren't very cinematic, but they are heroic in their own way. A good Hollywood director, though, maybe SHOULD think about ways to make saving the planet on the local level more exciting - even though it might be a tough nut to crack.
Also starring Aaron Eckhart (last seen in "No Reservations"), Hilary Swank (last seen in "P.S. I Love You"), Delroy Lindo (last seen in "Gone in 60 Seconds"), Stanley Tucci (last heard in "Beauty and the Beast"), Tcheky Karyo, DJ Qualls (last seen in "Hustle & Flow"), Alfre Woodard (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Eat Pray Love"), Fred Ewanuick, Glen Morshower, Anthony Harrison, Dion Johnstone, Jennifer Spence.
RATING: 4 out of 10 dead pigeons
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