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The Only Way is Down for our heroes in super silly Sci-fi disaster The Core |
Director: Jon Amiel
Cast: Aaron Eckhart (Dr Josh Keyes), Hilary Swank (Major
Rebecca Childs), Delroy Lindo (Dr Edward Brazzleton), Stanley Tucci (Dr Conrad
Zimsky), Tchéky
Karyo (Dr Serge Leveque), Bruce Greenwood (Commander Robert Iverson), DJ Qualls
(“Rat”), Alfre Woodward (Dr Talma Stickley), Richard Jenkins (Lt General Thomas
Purcell)

Dr Conrad Zimsky: “Yes, but – what if we could”
If you have any doubts about the type of film you are going
to watch, then that tongue-in-cheek dialogue exchange (and the words can’t
capture the playful, I-know-this-is-crap wink that Stanley Tucci tips
practically to the camera) should tell you. The core of the Earth has stopped
rotating. Which basically means all life on Earth is going to end in the next
few months. Unless, of course, we can restart the rotation of the Earth’s core.
So time to load up a team of crack scientists into a ship-cum-drill, made of
metal that doesn’t buckle under pressure (this metal is, by the way, literally
called unobtainium by the characters)
so that they can sprinkle nuclear bombs through the centre of the Earth to
kickstart the rotation of the planet and blah, blah, blah.
It’s perhaps no surprise that The Core was voted the least scientifically accurate film ever made
by a poll of scientists about 10 years ago. Nothing in it makes any real sense
whatsoever, and it’s all totally reliant on the sort of handwave mumbo-jumbo
where you can tell getting an actual logical explanation was going to be far
too much hard work, so better to roll with a bit of technobabble and prayer.
Questions of mass, physics, pressure are all shoved aside. The film sort of
gets away with it, with a leaning on the fourth-wall cheekiness – no fewer than
three times in the film the impossible happens with a “what if we could”
breeziness, as a character pulls out a theory or discovery with all the
real-world authority of the fag-packet calculation.
But then scientific accuracy is hardly why we watch the
movies is it? And this is just a big, dumb B-movie piece of disaster nonsense, which
throws in enough death-defying thrills, predictable sacrifices and major
landmarks being wiped out topside to keep the viewer entertained. In this film
Rome and the Golden Gate Bridge both get taken out by spectacular disasters.
Beneath the surface, the characters go through the expected personality clashes
and learn the expected lessons.
The script (most of which is bumpkous rubbish) really
signposts most of this personal development. Will Zimsky and Brazz rekindle
their respect and overcome decades of rivalry? Will Serge, on the mission to
save his wife and kids “because it’s too much to think about saving the whole
world”, have to pay the ultimate sacrifice? Will Major Childs finally get the
courage and determination to take command and make the hard calls? I won’t
tease the fate of Mission Commander Bruce Greenwood, but he is called upon so
often to reassure Childs that one day she will be ready to take command,
alongside other mentoring advice, that the only surprise is that he lasts as
long as he does.
So why is hard to not lay into The Core? Because, not that deep down at its core, it knows it’s a
silly film. The script has enough awareness of its cliché and scientific
silliness that it almost doubles down on it. And the actors play it just about
right: for large chunks of it they perfectly hit the beats of sly archness that
suggest just enough respect to not take the piss, but enough self-awareness of
what they are making. But these are all very, very good actors and when the
serious moments come, it’s remarkable how much they can shift gear – with the
grisly death of one character (while the others powerlessly try and save him)
played with an almost Shakespearean level of tragedy by a distraught Eckhart
and Lindo. Later, as three characters juggle over who will go on a suicide
mission to keep the mission on track, the bubbling emotions of shame, relief,
pride, respect and buried affections are genuinely rather affecting. Its
moments like this that makes me kind of love this big, dumb, stupid film.
But it remains stupid. Topside, Alfre Woodard and Richard
Jenkins bumble through roles they could play standing on their heads. A hacker
– Rat – is as clichéd and full of techno-nonsense as any of the science, which
is even more painfully obvious to us now that we’re all so much more tech-savvy
than we were in 2003. Events happen because, you know, they can. Discoveries
and scientific conclusions are made because the script needs them. But the film
knows this, it doubles down on it and it accepts that every problem is just a
“But what if we could!” away from being solved. Stupid, but strangely loveable.
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