20131003: Action Review--The Core

The Core

1. Fundamentals
1. American live action feature length film, 2003, rated PG-13, 132 minutes, action-adventure.
2. IMDB: 5.3/10.0 from 60,668 users. Estimated budget 60 million USD.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 41% on the meter; 40% from 99,703 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 3.3/5.0 from 1,812,332 user ratings.
5. Directed by: Jon Amiel.  Screenplay by: Looper Layne, Jon Rogers.
6. Starring: Aaron Eckhart as Dr. Josh Keyes, Hilary Swank as Major Rebecca Childs, Stanley Tucci as Dr. Conrad Zimsky, Richard Jenkins as General Thomas Purcell, Delroy Lindo as Dr. Ed 'Braz' Brazzleton, DJ Qualls as Theodore Donald 'Rat' Finch, Tcheky Karyo as Serge, Bruce Greenwood as Commander Robert Iverson.


2. Setup and Plot
1. The hot, flowing liquid core of the Earth is slowing down more than a bit.  It needs to be fixed or we will lose the EM field that protects us from Solar radiation.  Dr. Brazzleton came up with two huge inventions allowing a ship to penetrate the crust and survive to go down to fix the liquid flowing part.  Those would be a laser boring tool, and a hull material that becomes stronger with greater pressure.  The US recruits Rat to help with information control: they ask him to hack the Internet, which he gleefully attempts with next to unlimited concentration.


2. The Destiny project led by Dr Zimsky may have been the cause of this.  This gets a passing mention early on.


3. There's a great pressure to finish the probe in three months.  The overt signs around the world get worse.  The Marianas trench is chosen as the insertion point.  The probe, which Braz named Virgil, makes a successful entry.


4. It travels in 700 miles, then gets jammed in an unexpected open space in the mantle material.  This is a giant geode full of huge crystals.  They start the repair, only to find that the geode's shell has been breached.  They get the jam cleared, but Bob dies from a red hot shard penetrating his helmet.  They rev up and proceed.


5. On day 2, they approach the mantle to core boundary.  They encounter huge (multi-ton) diamonds, and one of them breaches the hull.  They lose Serge, who sacrifices himself to save the mission (getting the nukes out of the afflicted compartment).


6. As they get further in, they start going much faster (140 mph instead of 60 mph).  This means that the nuclear charges they brought are insufficient to fix the problem.  At this time the Destiny project (Deep Earth Seismic Trigger Initiative; DEST-INI, Destiny) is revealed a bit.  Supposedly the 'other side' made one of these, so we made a better one.  The entire problem was caused by our testing of Destiny.


7. The rest of the film is about the team re-designing the original plan with the nukes and getting it done before Destiny is used again to try to fix things.  The heroic efforts step up.


3. Conclusions
1. One sentence summary: Modern heroism is portrayed against a flawed script; good acting and visuals.
2. Four stars of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 10/10 Excellent.


2. Sound: 10/10 No problems.


3. Acting: 10/10 The principal actors were quite good, the supporting actors more than adequate.


4. Screenplay: 6/10 We just don't have this technology, or anything like it: the lasers, the hull, the communications system with the surface, or the ability to circumvent the whole Internet.  This film should have been set in 2070 or 2110 or other year when such technology might be possible.  So the film becomes a fantasy; that is, certainly contrary to fact.  Also, the driver for the plot was Mutually Assured Destruction, which does not quite have the currency one might have seen in 1975.  The US government being the culprit has more resonance today, perhaps, after the Snowden disclosures.


5. SFX: 8/10 Still looks good in 2013, which is not bad for a 2003 effort.