Written by Cooper Layne and John Rogers
Directed by Jon Amiel

I have a bone to pick with most of the disaster films on the market.  My point of contention is how they take a disaster of global proportions that probably ends millions – if not billions – of lives, and boil it all down to the audience rooting for a few people to survive.  Never mind that the rest of the Earth probably has bodies rotting all over the place, we are supposed to cheer at the end because a select few have managed to survive.  It’s part of what I think contributes to the desensitizing of the country, whereby we have grown to care little about events that affect our neighbors or society as a whole, but only how events affect us.  No, I’m not blaming the media or disaster films for making us selfish as a nation, but they are indicative of a huge problem that runs deep in our society.

The Core is no different.  It seems like a typical day in the city, but suddenly things begin to go wrong.  A businessman passes out for no apparent reason.  Traffic accidents occur with alarming frequency.

Professor Joshua Keyes (portrayed by Aaron Eckhart) is pulled out of the college course he is teaching in Chicago.  He and his old friend Serge (portrayed by Tchekly Karyo) determine that a group of people were killed by some sort of sound wave.  The military is done with them once Professor Keyes assures them that it wasn’t a weapon of some kind, but the phenomenon that caused it isn’t quite over yet.  Soon common birds in the city are behaving in a Hitchcockian manner and dying as well.

What’s happened is part of the Earth’s core has stopped turning.  Within a year, the entire electromagnetic field above the planet will collapse and end life as we know it.

However, the government proposes to put together a team to try and get the core to start turning again.  At that point, The Core turns into every other disaster flick where a team of misfits comes together to save the world.  It’s sort of a Journey to the Center of the Earth meets Armageddon.

The movie is predictable pretty much from the get-go.  There are targets drawn on members of the team for those whose death is certain.  There are a few I wasn’t sure if they were going to live or die, and two I was convinced would come out of it in the end.  It’s also no real surprise what “secrets” will be discovered along the journey. Will they succeed in getting the Earth’s core to spin again?  What do you think?

Eckhart has had so many promising roles that his taking on this one is disappointing, as is Hilary Swank as Rebecca Childs, the “pilot” of the ship that would take them down into the bowels of the Earth.  Delroy Lindo and Stanley Tucci have a few brief interesting moments as scientists who were partners at one time and developed the technology that might be able to save the world.  The payoff I was hoping for from Tucci’s character, however, never materialized.  Probably the best character and acting job in the entire film comes from DJ Qualls as a hacker named Rat.  He’s got the best line in the film: You want me to hack the planet? He wants me to hack the planet… Ok, if I decide to do this, I’ll need an unlimited supply of Xena tapes and Hot Pockets.

Films like The Core want to dazzle the audience with special effects, usually to distract us from the story and the fact that the general public that’s viewing the film would likely be among those first killed were a disaster like this to really strike.  The journey down to the deep, dark depths of the Earth somehow ends up looking like a cross between what we all believe that should look like, coupled with being shrunk and injected inside the human body, and finally twisted up a bit with an episode of the original Star Trek series.  There are parts with wondrous beams of light seeming to envelop the ship.  Other parts have them encountering what appears to be giant amoebas.  It’s all rather strange and nonsensical.

You know in these types of films, it’s never some backwoods burbs that get destroyed as the preview of the impending doom rears its ugly head.  This time, instead of the asteroid destroying Paris, we get a static lightning storm reeking devastation upon Rome as the Coliseum bursts into pieces after standing for some two thousand plus years.  It’s not some deserted part of the African bush that gets incinerated by microwaves, it’s San Francisco.  The odds are astronomically small that land masses would be affected rather than the ocean, and then that cities would be affected are even more remote.

The DVD has a few interesting moments in the special features where the creators of the film talk about the visual effects.  The rest of it is pretty boring, with it seeming like most of the people are trying to convince the viewer that The Core is better and more important than it really is.

Have nothing better to do on a rainy day and want some escapism?  This film might deliver in that regard.  I wouldn’t even rank it up there with some of the better disaster flicks.  The characters are underdeveloped and cardboard and the whole premise is pretty preposterous and unbelievable.  I’m a champion of suspending disbelief when viewing films of this type, but this one pretty much insults the viewer’s intelligence with what we’re expected to swallow.


SPECIAL FEATURES:

• Commentary with Director Jon Amiel
• To The Core and Back – The Making of The Core
• Deconstruction of the Visual Effects
• Deleted & Extended Scenes