Someone decided that it would be a good idea to try to review the disaster movie craze of the 90s. Many of you will probably recall such scare-classics as “Volcano”, “Arachnaphobia”, “Dante’s Peak”, “Outbreak”, “Deep Impact”, “Armageddon”, and I seem to recall one about an earthquake. If you have a phobia rooted in any natural occurance, there was a movie created especially to make you wet yourself. “The Core” is a truly sorry attempt.
Imagine this: electromagnetic fields are causing havoc on the Earth. The reason? A US military project has gone horribly awry, stopping Earth’s core from rotating. A boyishly attractive college professor, an African-American genius, a female NASA navigator, a lovable Frenchman (does anyone here actually KNOW a lovable Frenchman?), a computer hacker, a German-American Carl Sagan with a tape recorder and a heck of a lot of cigarettes, and a pilot we like to call Superfluous Bob must journey to the center of the earth and use several megatons of explosives (modified with plutonium rods) to restart the core. Interspersed with footage of the journey are random shots of famous locations being destroyed by lightning, storms, and dead pigeons. Sound improbable to you? You’d be right.
I do not wish to delve into all the technical problems with this film. I would like to complain about the moronic story, the excessive paranoia, the stereotypes, and the twenty minutes of credits. These twenty minutes of credits involved about ten minutes of credits for Canadian casting, shooting, catering, transportation, etceterat, when by our observations CANADA NEVER APPEARED IN THE MOVIE. If you can PROVE me wrong, please do. Don’t theorize about unlabeled shots, please, as most of those can be reasoned out as to the locale. PROOF. I would like some.
The characters were two-dimensional. Every time Herr Zimsky came on-screen, I told him to shut up. Rat was amusing, but predictable (and did a great trick with a cell phone that should have been brought up later but wasn’t). Josh was a pretty-boy. Superfluous Bob was a gruff father-figure whose lines were limited to character-sage-wisdom speeches and pointless statements. The Frenchman was lovable, which amazed me and is the only reason I enjoyed the film at all. I will admit: I actually shed a few tears when he died.
Focus on the Family liked this movie for its moral statements. Yeah, well, the movie was absolute rubbish. The best things I got out of it were a free AOL CD that I took from the lobby, a few memorable lines, a great mental image of the Coliseum exploding, and a topic of debate for the parental units (what are the odds of accurately modifying a bomb by thirty percent with no tools and an indeterminate amount of plutonium?). Spare yourself. Save your money to watch “X-Men 2” in May. See you there.
A Brief Note From Ailly: Nadia failed to explain the Crew of Three, which was basically all that we talked about in the theater. The question is, and please email us a response if you have a thought (visigoth1789@hotmail.com), Is it not highly probably that three people (I use the term roughly) returned to the surface? The Gang is of one mind: yes. There was the Dude, the Chick, and the Baby. Baby is also the reason Dude and Chick were so sweaty in the final few scenes beneath the surface. (Okay, back to Nadia)
If you do choose to see “The Core”, the song playing over the credits is “Echelon”, to save you the wait. Unless you’d really like to watch the credits, because they’re pretty amusing. Second assistant sound supervisor, anyone? Inferno designer?
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