The Core (2003) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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The deeper you go, the worse it gets!

For a modern, big-budget, 21st Century science-fiction film, The Core is an atrocious mess of screenwriting, pseudo-science, and uninteresting visuals. It had some interesting ideas, but only pulled off about a third of them in its attempt to be the next big disaster movie of the year.

First Impressions

Judging from this trailer, the film appears to be another in a long line of disaster films that were part of the 90s resurgence. It’s a story as old as time. The Earth’s core has stopped spinning, and it’s up to a highly specialized group of scientists that can walk together in slow motion, to tunnel down into the planet and jump start it again. Like your father’s old ‘72 Chevy Nova. It’s time to see if The Core is as crazy as has been reported.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In Boston a number of people suddenly drop dead. In Trafalgar Square the pigeons turn suicidal and begin flying into people and buildings. Geophysicist Dr Joshua Keyes (Aaron Eckhart) and nuclear weapons specialist Dr Serge Leveque (Tchéky Karyo) are called before Lieutenant General Thomas Purcell (Richard Jenkins) to explain what happened. Josh correctly guesses that all the people in Boston had pacemakers, and that the Earth’s magnetic field is somehow shifting. Elsewhere, the space shuttle Endeavor commanded by Robert Iverson (Bruce Greenwood) and piloted by Rebecca “Beck” Childs (Hilary Swank) gets off course and must set down in the Los Angeles River.

Josh is brought before a number of military and scientific advisers, including Dr Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci) to explain that he believes the core of the Earth has stopped rotating. This is what is causing the problems they’ve been experiencing, and if they don’t get it restarted, the planet will be dead within a year. The group of scientists and military travel to the Great Salt Flats to meet with Dr Braz Brazzelton (Delroy Lindo) who has created unobtainium, a material that converts heat and pressure into energy. General Purcell enlists Iverson and Childs to pilot the machine, and taps a computer hacker named Rat (DJ Qualls) to prevent the project from going public on the internet.

The team trains for several months as a new ship is built from the unobtainium, christened Virgil. The Marianas Trench is chosen as the entry point into the Earth’s crust, being at its thinnest there. Virgil uses a laser array to soften the ground ahead of them, allowing the worm-like ship to tunnel deep into the planet. At one point, the vessel falls into a cavern made of crystals and impales itself on a large spike. Some of the team goes outside to cut the crystal spike. Josh plugs his suit’s oxygen into the cutter when it loses power and nearly suffocates. Iverson is hit by a high-speed shard of falling crystal and dies.

Virgil continues its descent towards the core. Josh, Braz, and Serge begin configuring the nuclear bombs on board which will create a chain reaction within the core to start it spinning again. Beck, now the lead commander on-board, attempts to steer around diamonds “the size of Cape Cod.” One damages the rear compartment of Virgil forcing the team to jettison the damaged piece of hull. Serge manages to get the detonation timers out of the final section, but becomes trapped and is jettisoned with the section. Josh is upset with Beck for not canceling the ejection override.

Upon reaching the planet’s core, Josh and Zimsky realize that the density of the super-heated rock is less than originally calculated–which means they don’t have enough megatonnage to restart the rotation. Zimsky gives up and suggests that they need to use DESTINI (Deep Earth Seismic Trigger InItiative), a seismic weapon, to restart the rotation. Josh theorizes that it may have been this device that stopped the rotation in the first place. Rat diverts the power from the DESTINI station to prevent them from firing the weapon. Meanwhile, the effects of the slowed rotation of the Earth continue to plague the surface including a massive series of lightning strikes in Rome, and an EM tear that melts the Golden Gate Bridge.

The bombs must be ejected within the segments of Virgil, but the override mechanism to eject a non-damaged compartment is in the outer hull which is thousands of degrees. Braz sacrifices himself to open the override switch. Zimsky and Josh reconfigure the bombs and begin ejecting them. Unfortunately, Zimsky is trapped in one segment and Josh must sacrifice him. Using Virgil’s power rods with the final bomb to make it strong enough, the explosions manage to restart the core. But Virigil is now powerless and trapped. Josh uses the unobtainium shell to convert the heat into energy and Beck is able to pilot the ship back into the ocean where they use vibrations in the hull to attract whales as a SOS to the fleet. In the end, Rat releases the information about these six unsung heroes who saved the planet, onto the internet for the public to acclaim.

“The objective is simple. The obstacles are gigantic. We’re going to need all the help in the world, but if we are to avoid panic and chaos, the world at large can never know what’s happening here.” – Josh Keyes

History in the Making

The Core was the second to last film by British director Jon Amiel, who was known for his comedy’s Tune in Tomorrow and The Man Who Knew Too Little, plus the heist drama Entrapment. It was also the first film in the 2000s wave of disaster films which features The Day after Tomorrow, Snakes on a Plane and Cloverfield. This second wave of revitalized disaster movies followed a successful rebirth in the 1990s that includes classics like Twister, Independence Day, Dante’s Peak, Volcano, Titanic and Armageddon.

This was not some made for video knock off film. It was an A-list studio production from Paramount with a number of high profile and up and coming actors. Aaron Eckhart had already had several smaller roles in Erin Brokovich and Any Given Sunday, with this as his first sci-fi film. His prominence would increase with roles in The Dark Knight, Thank You For Smoking, and Olympus Has Fallen. Hilary Swank was already known for The Next Karate Kid and acclaimed for her role in Boys Don’t Cry. She would go on to win a Best Actress Oscar for her role in Million Dollar Baby two years later. Character actors Alfre Woodard (Star Trek: First Contact), Stanley Tucci and Delroy Lindo rounded out the cast. But a great cast does not necessarily make for a great movie.

Genre-fication

For the most part, modern disaster films fit into the overall genre of sci-fi films. When the disaster genre first became popular in the 1970s, the film’s like The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, or Earthquake dealt with interpersonal drama amongst a global or localized disaster. There had been some older sci-fi disaster films like When Worlds Collide or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but 70s era films did not stray from random accidents that were very much within the realm of possibility (tidal waves, fire, and seismic activity). It wasn’t until the 1990s that the genre became more focused on sci-fi elements with characters fighting aliens or other incoming threats from outer space.

The Core actually owes much to an 1864 Jules Verne story adapted to film in 1959 as Journey to the Center of the Earth. That story and its various film adaptations include characters descending under the Earth’s crust to find mysterious crystal caverns and eventually a hollow Earth populated with giant dinosaur-like creatures, as well as an ocean. It was pure fantasy, but served as a hypothetical travelog to one of the few places man had yet to explore. The Core also ends up being fantastical but for mostly scientific issues. By 2002 much was known about the make-up of the planet and its core. The film chose to ignore much of this in order to attempt a disaster film of the worst possible magnitude. What if the Earth stopped rotating is right up there with many other disaster films about world-ending events, except that The Core takes the ludicrousness to new depths.

Societal Commentary

The main themes behind The Core, and they’re not that deep, are comparing two different approaches to science. There’s Josh’s version, which is honest and fun. He seems to enjoy his classes and teaching students. He’s smart and intuitive, and most of all honest with himself. Then there’s the Dr. Zimsky version of science. He uses it as a way to gain popularity and advancement. His work has taken him to become an advisor to the government, and allowed him to work on the weapons system DESTINI. But his work has also calloused him. He has been at the top of his game for so long, his thinking has become sloppy. He bristles when challenged and thinks about the payoff at the end of any project.

The film also makes a big deal about keeping the news of the Earth’s core secret. Presumably a global panic would ensue if people found out that they were all about to die. This is different from other global disaster films. Here, the government enlists Rat, a hacker supreme, who’s kung-fu is better than everyone else’s. His payment, Xena video and hot pockets. All he needs to do is scrub the internet of any reference to the actual problem. Sure, people are probably already panicking due to strange deaths, erratic bird patterns, weird lightning strikes and melting bridges, but maybe those things are easier for the group to explain. Rat becomes a strong hero at the end of the film, as he fights back by hacking the government power grids to stop DESTINI and eventually releasing the truth of the mission unto the world.

The Science in The Fiction

Certainly the biggest element of The Core that people often discuss is the science, and how bad it is. In sci-fi films from the 50s and 60s, and maybe some of the 70s, having pseudo-scientific principles could be overlooked. There was still a lot of information that was not known to the scientific community and the public about how things worked. But in the early 21st Century, to have characters perform acts in which it’s so hot that a wrench melts in their gloved hand, becomes ludicrous to the extreme. The Core is famous within the scientific community, having made many lists of the most unrealistic films ever made.

Some of the foibles that the film makes include: birds would still be able to navigate without the Earth’s magnetic field, an electro-magnetic tear would not occur as the EM field would dissipate at an equal rate, cars (and their occupants) would burst into flames before the bridge would melt, and cavities with geode crystals inside would not form miles under the Earth. Granted, that having only the “normal” types of peril (heat, pressure, lack of oxygen, the time to travel to the core) might not have been enough for the film, so there was a lot of other things that were invented (or ignored) in order to make the film more actionable. However, even the characters don’t seem to believe it some of the time.

The Final Frontier

The Core may be the first film to mention the unique metal unobtanium. This word, a portmanteau of unobtainable and uranium (or any other metallic suffixed word), was actually a word in use in science circles as far back as the 1950s. It became a word to indicate any hard to find or rare mineral. Viewers may also recognize it as the metal being mined on Pandora in the 2009 film Avatar.

When it comes to films with bad science, The Core is more of a beginning than an end. Recent films Geostorm and Moonfall (one by Dean Devlin, the other by Roland Emmerich, both of whom worked on Stargate and Independence Day, among others) are also considered films of ill repute when it comes to scientific accuracy. Those films seem to realize how much of a suspension of disbelief is happening, and lean way further into the ludicrousness of their plots. In fact, The Core’s inaccuracies are not limited to the plot. The inattention to detail even extends to the film’s credits where Bruce Greenwood’s character, Robert Iverson, is incorrectly credited  as “Richard Iverson.” Oh, the humanity!

The Core may enthrall some viewers with its personality. As an action film with a small group of characters racing against the clock to complete an impossible task, it has more going for it. Audiences may enjoy wagering on which characters will inevitably die off first, and in what manner. Did anyone have hit in the head by a superspeed, flaming chunk of rock on their bingo card? But all in all, the film is more of a laughable and sometimes incoherent mash of a story. And in that way, this might be the perfect film for a Sci-Fi Saturdays rewatch.

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