The Core

There are many science fiction movies that require you to check reality at the door and buy into the truths that it presents. This proposes a difficulty especially for films that branch from our reality in only a small way. Often times a small step is just as difficult, if not more difficult, as a giant leap. In Jurassic Park the setup was very believable, amber leads to mosquitoes, mosquitoes lead to dino blood, blood leads to gene sequencing and thus living dinosaurs. It=s a leap, but done in a number of steps. The Core does not afford one a stepping off point for its preposterous supposition. It begins with Unobtanium, a magical substance, found by only one man, with inherent properties, never fully explained, that defy the laws of Entropy. Don’t try looking up entropy on the web, unless you are prepared to do a lot of serious reading. Essentially entropy comes from the second law of thermodynamics and is the unorganized energy resulting from a closed system. It states that things don’t spontaneously go towards order, they tend towards chaos. Think of a two year old. If you put them in a room for ten minutes it is more likely the room will be messier not cleaner when you come back. Of course The Core doesn’t even give a basic course in thermodynamics. Delroy Lindo just states all of this in one big speech about how he found Unobtanium, and it is able to transfer heat (unorganized) into strength and rigidity (organized). Then it is barely alluded to again. The problem with this is they can=t just make you jump off of the bridge; they need to give you a few steps. Here the writers just throw the audience off the bridge and hope they can swim.

So we have our magical substance. Now we need our setup. Freaky nature has been screwing things up around the world because the US government has been messing around with the weather. Their experiments have caused the earth to slow its rotation. You would have thought that astronomers would have been the first people to notice this, since the earth’s relative position to everything else in the universe would have changed, but no, it belongs to someone who studies the earth’s magnetics. In come a band of barely affiliated loose cannons who are experts in their fields. They will become the ‘terranauts’ who will tunnel to the center of the earth, set off a nuclear bomb, and restart the rotation of the earth.

Another inherent problem is the caterpillar train. The theory of the compartmentalized shuttle is that you can jettison damaged sections Of course this only works if the compartment that is damaged is the end one, otherwise you have to dispose of completely good portions of the train. Of course the script mandates that it is indeed the last section that dies. And there is the inevitable scene where a crew member is trapped in there by a matter of seconds and then the rest of the crew stands around in anguish doing nothing while he dies over a matter of minutes. It just makes no sense.

Like most movies of this catastrophe/save-the-world action movie the crew is picked off one at a time by various accidents until only the romantic leads are left. There is the jerk traitor who has to redeem himself with some heroic and fatal action. Of course the romantic leads give up hope of survival but in true hero fashion they continue to strive to save the rest of humanity if not themselves. Then after the world is saved they come up with an idea to save themselves. If you can’t figure out what happens in the end, I’m sorry, you have never seen a movie.

This movie was formulaic and uninteresting. If you already watched and liked the, in some cases marginally, better films Armageddon, The Abyss, Space Cowboys, and the granddaddy of this genre Alien, and you have nothing else you want to rent on a Friday night go ahead and get The Core. It is a passable action film, just don’t expect it to surprise or awe you. And don’t expect to remember much beyond the basic plot when you are done.