Review
THE CORE
Starring Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart and Delroy Lindo
Directed by Jon Amiel
Now showing
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If you can get over the fact that The Core takes some serious liberties with scientific fact, it isn’t a bad movie.
The situation is as follows: the Earth’s core, essentially a giant ball of iron in a sea of liquid iron, stops turning because a huge electromagnetic shockwave weapon zaps it.
In real life, and ostensibly in the movie since it’s set on Earth, rotation of the core forms the magnetosphere, the same way an electric motor gives off electromagnetic fields when it’s rotating. This magnetosphere protects Earth from microwaves and fiery radioactive solar particles.
When the core stops rotating, the magnetosphere should dissipate immediately, the same way the electromagnetic field disappears as soon as you turn off an electric engine. But in The Core, it takes a year. Even before we consider that, though, we have to accept that the core stops because of a zap from a weapon that looks like a big spark plug hanging over a coil of wire.
Further damaging the film’s scientific credibility are the completely unlikely scientists. Dr. Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart) is a college professor who plays the trumpet to pieces of granite, but also understands and specializes in CAT scan-like machines that can see through lead, though it’s never clear where or why he does this research.
And a different, more reclusive scientist, Dr. Edward Brazleton (Delroy Lindo), who has spent 30 years working on a machine to bore through solid rock really quickly, has never considered selling his machine. Instead, he continues to work alone in the middle of nowhere with no funding. It also seems unlikely that this same scientist – after producing a fantastically effective rock-dematerializing heavy-duty ultrasound drill – could also produce a compound that is completely immune to the beams/waves/whatever that the drill emits. This compound, luckily enough, is the perfect material for a ship that digs to the centre of the Earth, a ship he’s been designing with the rest of his spare time. Right.
Scientifically, this is pretty crappy science fiction. But it has the same summer-movie appeal as other save-the-world films like Armageddon and Independence Day. It’s not tough to watch, it’s easy on the brain, and if you can accept the science, it’s actually entertaining.
Shock of all shocks is that there’s a female character in a leadership role – Major Rebecca Childs (Hilary Swank), a NASA pilot who never takes off her shirt or defers to anyone.
The film does a fairly good job of building suspense, too. Once the terranauts get underground, they begin dropping like flies. And after repeated mechanical and logistical failures, the likelihood that anyone is going back to the surface actually becomes slimmer. The way they get back to the surface is really stupid, but since I think there’s a slight chance you might want to see this film, I’ll let you find out what it is for yourself. |
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