The Core (2003)

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In the realm of guilty pleasures, few are guiltier than The Core. Director Jon Amiel’s popcorn muncher is easily one of the most preposterous science fiction films ever made. Its plot, such that there is, centers around the effort to save humanity after the Earth’s core stops spinning. You see, without the trillions of tons of molten iron swirling around inside the globe’s center, the planet wouldn’t have a magnetic field. And without a magnetic field, Earth would have no protection from the Sun’s radiation, which would subsequently microwave our little blue ball like a 8,000 mile diameter Hot Pocket.

The first person who realizes this doomsday scenario is coming to pass is geophysics Professor Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart). After he and his colleague, Dr. Sergei Leveque (Tcheky Karyo), are called into investigate a series of mysterious deaths by a sinister Army general (Richard Jenkins), Keyes begins to notice spectacular Aurorae Borealis in the night sky.

Being terribly brilliant, like most movie professors (and impossibly hunky, like few real life professors), he cross-checks internal geo magnetic surveys against an Internet search for mysterious surface phenomena. Faster than you can say “You can find anything on Google,” Keyes determines that only three months remain before the Earth’s surface becomes a cosmic hot plate.

Desperate, Keyes goes to the only scientist who has the President’s ear, Dr. Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci). A pompous, self-promoting genius in the Wile E. Coyote vein, Zimsky assembles an elite team to get the core spinning again, and brushes aside all daunting obstacles in under 15 minutes of screen time. Need a vehicle that can drill through the Earth’s crust and survive inside the 9000° plus Fahrenheit temperatures below? No problem! Dr. Edward Brazleton (Delroy Lindo), Zimsky’s eccentric ex-partner, has been building a ship made from the indestructible new metal “unabtainium” for the last 15 years.

How about some pilots qualified to guide the craft through several thousand miles of molten rock and metal? Easy! Astronauts Robert Iverson (Bruce Greenwood) and Rebecca “Beck” Childs (Hilary Swank) are so good, they landed the space shuttle Endeavour in a Los Angeles aqueduct. How about a computer expert to keep news of impending doom off that pesky Web site? Simple. Über-nerd Rat (DJ Qualls) is so good that, in his own words, he can “hack the planet.”

To quote the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “All this is, of course, impossible.” Unlike the makers of past sci-fi-apocalypse movies (Day the Earth Caught Fire, Deep Impact, Armageddon), The Core’s creators embrace their film’s ridiculousness. Granted, there are a few somber moments when major characters are fricasseed by hot magma.

But screenwriters Cooper Layne and John Rogers dilute these obligatory downers with a fusillade of verbal zingers, most of which the talented cast deliver right on target. (Only the sequence involving a space shuttle having problems on re-entry is truly disturbing, and should’ve been cut out.) For his part, Amiel wisely focuses on the crowd pleasing aspects of the end of the world. Things like Rome being demolished by a massive electrical storm, San Francisco being flash-fried by a huge beam of radiation, and pigeons dropping dead by the million. The Core is absurd, idiotic, and about 20 minutes too long. It’s also one of the most amusing pieces of awful cinema since Meteor, ideal for a do it yourself session of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

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