The Core
Directed by Jon Amiel
2003 PG
Usually I put all spoilers in the "spoiler zone". But there are a few
minor spoilers in the main text of this review: this really
doesn't matter:
The Core
is immune from being spoiled.
I believe there
really are dwarves, hobbits and elves prancing around in such a place
as
Middle Earth. I have
booked my holiday to
Hogwarts
(it was fun last year). But even I was unable to suspend my disbelief
for a single second of
The Core.
A (what a game chick might describe as a square jawed hunk
of a) geophysicist suspects the end of the world is nigh. He knows this
because a bunch of people croaked when their pacemakers mysteriously
packed in and, in a fantastically amusing scene, a flock of pigeons
flies amok in London, causing absolute mayhem, smashing the glass and
knocking over double decker buses. Some mumbo-jumbo about magnetic
fields is muttered darkly, portentously and patronisingly.
Our geophysicist instructs a student to just go away and write a
simulation of the earth's magnetic fields. Then he sets a
peach on fire to demonstrate to military top brass that the earth is
doomed - be afraid - TO BE MICROWAVED TO DEATH BECAUSE THE
EARTH'S CORE HAS STOPPED SPINNING!!!!!
AAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEIIIIIIEEEE!
The
Core is basically Armageddon below yer feet,
and like the witless asteroid movie,
The Core
soon dishes up more Hollywood physics: cheesy lightening strikes
mysteriously cause entire stone buildings to explode! The failing
magnetic fields let in space microwaves that boil the ocean and melt
the steel that holds up the Golden Gate Bridge! HAHAHAHAHAHA
It is hardly worth mentioning that magnetic fields do not
block microwaves, the atmosphere does. Besides, if the solar system
microwave radiation were powerful enough to burn up the bridge then
they would fry all satellites, space probes, not to mention the
shuttle. (Note also that rays powerful enough to melt the bridge leave
at least one human apparently unscathed in his car). But never mind.
This is nit picking at a carcass of festering, squirming flesh that is
The Core.
Talking
of the shuttle,
The Core
portrays a frighteningly prescient disaster. Basically the shuttle
crash-lands. For readers of the far future, I should explain that only
a couple of months ago (I write this drivel in April 2003) the space
shuttle Columbia burned up on re-entry causing pretty fireworks. This
has caused a huge headache for the monumentally expensive folly of the
utterly pointless International Space Station. But back to
The
Core. This movie shows the shuttle pursued by
some fancy plasma special effect. It vanishes from the radar for a few
short seconds then re-emerges, if I got this right, with a positional
discrepancy not untangential to a quarter of the world's
circumference away! HOOO HA!
Apart from a few
nice exceptions, such as the bridge, the effects looked El Cheapo, some
of the compositing was terrible, and the blowing up of things just
looked like textured, weightless polygons scattering in random
directions, which is exactly what they were.
The Core is one of the dumbest
movies I have ever seen, but it's one saving grace is that
there is some casual entertainment to be had tearing its
stupid plot apart. And at least the scientists were not portrayed as
mad white-haired loonies. For all the scientific nonsense, science and
engineering itself was made to seem quite good fun.
Oh, and Hillary S has just tunneled into the resident list of
truly appalling actresses.
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spoilers corner
Spoilers!!!!
Warning: this box contains a movie post-mortem
analysis that freely gives away important plot twists and details. If
you have not yet seen this movie and intend seeing it, avoid this
spoilers box until afterwards. Bookmark the page, see the movie, see if
you agree with my review then write an arsy comment saying I am talking
total b*ll*cks :-)
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For pointless
indulgence, let's crank out a few more gems of The
Core daftness. In scores of screenshots we
are lavished with CGI images of the ship and other objects seemingly
floating in a fiery environment. When the hell did dirty molten rock,
let alone dirty molten iron, become transparent? Is mercury
transparent? Exactly.
If the six nukes were
to be placed at equidistant points around The
Core, then how could it be that two nukes
were visible in the same shot even though they would have been hundreds
of miles apart? How the hell did Aaron Eckhart manage to extract fuel
rods from the reactor and magically use them to make a bomb "bigger",
both from a technical viewpoint and from a, oh freaking hell
my skin has fallen off because of the radiation viewpoint?
Those bombs were awfully small. The energy released by a
nuclear weapon compared to that within the earth's core would
be trivial. Worse, it is hard to see how a nuke could transfer angular
momentum to The Core. The blast would dissipate energy equally in all
directions.
And as for the bit early on where
the astronaut chick twiddles a couple of knobs and in mere moments
vastly improves Aaron Eckhart's imaging application - SIGH.
Wanton inanity.
There is the whopping
question how the ship works. Basically it uses photogenic, whirring
lasers to vaporise the rock. To vape high-density rock as fast as seen
in The Core would
require the combined output of a few power stations, not to mention the
need for the craft to endure a fusillade of scouring, ultra-hot,
ultra-pressurised plasma. How did the craft cool itself? Where do you
dump heat when you surrounded by it? Liquid nitrogen? But of course!
The pressure at the outer (liquid) boundary of the
earth's core is roughly 1.3 million atmospheres and the
temperature there is at least 3000 Celsius, well over half as hot as
the surface of the sun. What are the crew wearing: liquid helium-cooled
asbestos Y-fronts & knickers? Nope, they were snug in almost Star Trek-like
uniforms and helmets. This would be more forgivable except - Holy Cow
Batman - they venture outside the craft!!! It is
difficult enough for a small, high tech, unmanned sub to withstand
pressures at the bottom of the deepest oceans, with pressures less than
a thousandth as much, and the temperatures are friendly. And guess
what! Within the earth's mantle, Delroy Lindo repairs the
craft - which is supposedly immune to such extreme temperatures and
pressures - with an arc-welding torch! AAAIIIIIEEEEE! (And did you
notice how conveniently oxygen was routed into the torch from Eckhart's
breathing apparatus? What a hoot!)
Fantastic
how the ship managed to maintain contact with mission control through
thousands of miles of rock, magma and molten iron. Neutrino radio?
Gravity wave FM? How did they compact so much bullshit into one short
movie? Almost as much as I can casually cram into a web page I suppose.
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There are no more
spoilers below this point, except maybe in any user talkback comments.
End of spoilers
corner
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Sharks get 'em
all at the end
