The Core (2003)

Directed by Jon Amiel. Starring Aaron Eckhart, Stanley Tucci, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, Richard Jenkins, Tchéky Karyo, Bruce Greenwood, Alfre Woodard, D. J. Qualls, Glenn Morshower, Rekha Sharma. [PG-13]

Unfathomably idiotic sci-fi disaster dreck has a character claim that “all science…is best guess”; The Core, by any reasonable estimation, is “worst guess”. The Earth’s core has stopped spinning, so the planet is headed for catastrophe, and some random college professor (Eckhat) is selected to lead a team of motley “experts” several thousand feet into the Earth’s crust/mantle and detonate a bunch of nuclear weapons at the core to get her to spin right round, baby, right round again. Even after accepting all the rampant silliness and clichés that come with this territory, it’s a premise that simply cannot be hurtled by any fully-functional brain, and it’s really badly made on top of that. The characters are cookie-cutter, the exposition is insulting, the sequences of global mass destruction are laughable (a lightning storm causes the Colosseum in Rome to blow up??), and the drilling scenes are both horrendously cheap-looking and make no sense at all—how can an exterior side view be captured while the vessel is digging…can cameras see through rock? In fact, the CGI glop is so unimaginative and unpersuasive, the best special effect ends up being scientist Tucci’s glorious hair. He also serves as the mouthpiece for the movie’s stab at critical self-analysis that summed up a lot of my feelings pretty succinctly: “You’re a bunch of suicidal morons! What are you, crazy? … Restart the core “somehow”? Oh, that’s a great idea! … I can’t believe I’m stuck in this floating septic tank with you lunatics! … You’re out of your mind!” When the survivors eventually do turn it around, the filmmakers are so restless to get it over with, they just skip ahead hours at a time and just pretend like there’s no need for the vessel to depressurize. I would have added at least ten points to the score below if someone had opened up the door on the surfaced “floating septic tank” and the survivors had exploded like big, overfilled bags of blood. I did add a few points to what would have been a more reasonable score because of how hard I laughed at the bird attack scene, the space shuttle landing in an L.A. river canal, etc.

17/100