The Core (Review)

core_ver2Something is throwing things ‘off’. Pacemakers, birds, space shuttles, all go varying degrees of haywire. Drs Josh (Aaron Eckhart) and Serge (Tcheky Karyo) realise it first. They take their information to Zimsky (Stanley Tucci) the preeminent mind in the field. Cynical at first – after all he didn’t come up with the theory – he reluctantly pushes the information up the line. All the way to the top in fact.

The core of the earth is unstable, and if something isn’t done the planet has less than a year to live…

But how do you get to the core of the earth? And assuming you do, how do you fix the problem? Well in short, the answers are a/ a big fucking drill and b/ a big fucking bomb. There’s some window dressing around the decision making and some jargon that makes it sound trickier than it is, but there’s you answers.

So a small handpicked team of scientists – including the three already mentioned – an inventor (Delroy Lindo) an astronaut (Hilary Swank) and a couple victims… soldiers hop into a big tube and commence blasting their way to the centre of the earth. Above them is the usual control room full of big-wigs wearing concerned expressions, all floating crazy ideas and arguing over the Big Decisions. There’s also a weedy hacker named Rat (DJ Qualls) because again this film is trying to rip off the mid-90s, and every film needed a hacker then.

Of course even though the plan itself seems simple, nothing goes smoothly. There’s already enough pressure building in a tin can thousands of miles beneath the earth’s crust, but when things go awry that is magnified. There are dilemmas, sacrifice and fatalities, but unfortunately not much drama, even though Aaron Eckhart does his best to make everything seem 110% more serious than the material deserves.

The visuals don’t really help. Apparently navigating through lava is akin to swimming through a vat of Fanta, and large pockets of unstable material come up on readings looking like Asteroids 3.0. I’d love to see what more modern CGI programs could achieve, and given the current obsession with remakes, that might be sooner than is necessary.

And by ‘necessary’ I mean sooner than ‘never’, because they needn’t bother remaking this. They probably shouldn’t have bothered in the first place.

The Core is another example of a ‘because we can’ film, trying to ride on the coattails of the late 90s disaster flick fad, which gave us such ‘classics’ as Volcano, Deep Impact and of course Armageddon

Unfortunately it arrived a decade too late and a decade too early; too late to benefit from box office drift, too early for the CGI revolution that could have rendered the subterranean shenanigans more realistic, instead of looking like a metal pen floating towards the bottom of a lava lamp.

Final Rating – 6 / 10. At it’s ‘core’, both the film and the Earth are very dense.

About OGR

While I try to throw a joke or two into proceedings when I can all of the opinions presented in my reviews are genuine. I don't expect that all will agree with my thoughts at all times nor would it be any fun if you did, so don't be shy in telling me where you think I went wrong... and hopefully if you think I got it right for once. Don't be shy, half the fun is in the conversation after the movie.
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