A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: The Core

Date Viewed: 3/30/03

Details:

Aaron Eckhart (Keyes)

Hilary Swank (Beck)

Delroy Lindo (Brazleton)

Stanley Tucci (Zimsky)

D.J. Qualls (Rat)

Tcheky Karyo (Leveque)

Bruce Greenwood (Iverson)

Alfre Woodard (Stick)

Director: Jon Amiel

Score: 3/4

The Review: At the outset, I went into this movie expecting to be disappointed. In my experience, epic science fiction films tend to be highly polarizing: either they are excellent (rare, e.g.: Contact, or Apollo 13), or they are abysmal (much more common, e.g.: Battlefield Earth, Mission to Mars, Epoch, Treasure Planet, Armageddon, or Solaris). So I was surprised that The Core fell comfortably near the middle of these extremes, on the good side of neutral (in the company of Evolution and Titan A.E.), without many of the glaring and intrusive scientific bloopers that kill most epics, but also not afraid to take some risks. It does not have the intellectual punch of Contact, and may not bear multiple viewings, but it's not bad. And it has something that even the most recent Star Wars epics have been missing: a welcome and persistent sense of humor.

Formulaic? Sure, but so what! -- the discovery that civilization is doomed, reaching down and grabbing a borderline technology that hasn't yet been prototyped, the assembly of an oddball team, the quest itself with hardships and tragedy along the way, and a lot of help from Lady Luck at the most inopportune moments. Tom Swift Jr. comes to mind, or something from the pen of E.E. (Doc) Smith like his "Skylark" series, or Blish's "Cities in Flight," or Van Vogt's "Voyage of the Space Beagle": incredible just-in-time discoveries, inventions or engineering beyond the forefront of science, by a mind that meets all obstacles, drawing on resources that seemingly appear out of nowhere when they are needed. Yes, this is space opera at its most intense, except focusing on inner space.

The problem is not a tiny one: the Earth's outer core has stopped spinning, and dire forecasts flow from the decrease in the magnetic field and lots of peripheral atmospheric effects. The assembled team certainly is odd, including the best of the best: the best computer hacker / criminal, the best rogue inventor locked away in a desert lab, the best problem solver who happens to be a college teacher, etc. etc. And the craft that is constructed shares features from Jules Verne and Van Vogt: they call it Virgil, and it looks like a very big, very mad, really tough, annelid worm.

Suspension of disbelief is definitely required, but it is not strained beyond the breaking point. Yes, the geophysics is a bit stretched, and the magnetohydrodynamics of the outer core more than a bit stretched (keep thinking, conservation of angular momentum), and the materials science is over the edge, and communications with the surface is beyond the pale - "but other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" Visualization of multiple rock types is a tough problem, especially for audiences with no geology to draw upon, so the images were curious but not a focal point. But the major issue is an enormous scale mismatch problem! What makes for excellent grand scope and global effects has to be compared with the short-term and highly-localized effects that might be achieved by human play-scale toys: as if pea-shooters were used for a problem requiring asteroid-scale relativistic velocity weapons. We're not there, yet, although the "suspension of disbelief" clause would have you thinking we could be.

Characterization is not too bad. One welcome, if iconoclastic, point: the hero is a college teacher, someone who has decided to use his smarts for teaching, as opposed to the Stanley Tucci character (a broadly played Carl Sagan caricature), whose smarts feed his ego. For awhile, I think it will be hard for me to take any role that Tucci fills, seriously -- because all I can think of is his character in Big Trouble, and he has no shred of credibility.

(30-Mar-03)

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