The Core has to be the most preposterous piece of poppycock I’ve seen in a cinema in a long time. Which is not to say it is dull, just that it is complete nonsense you can’t take seriously for a split second. Unfortunately, it would appear that its makers and the actors trapped within its script do seem to be taking it relatively seriously. There’s the odd joke here and there, and a little offbeat characterisation, but this kind of thing has to have a good basting of irony if it is to work at all. If only they had played it for laughs! But then maybe the actors were just battling for all they were worth to say their lines without cracking up.
The Core has been described, in the fashion so amusingly parodied at the start of Robert Altman’s The Player, as “Journey to the Centre of the Earth meets Armageddon“, and that’s about right. Of course what we now know about what lies beneath the Earth’s relatively thin mantle renders most of Jules Verne’s fantasy irrelevant, but the Armageddon theme of courageous humans battling genocidal aliens would, in fact, be more plausible than what happens in The Core.It begins with a series of mysterious and disturbing events: one day, a whole lot of people suddenly drop dead all at once; a day or so later, the pigeons of London’s Trafalgar Square suddenly go all kamikaze and start dive-bombing tourists. Naturally, the second event would not be so very unreasonable had pigeons a brain to speak of, but such events start, in The Core, to trouble the leading military minds of the United States. Clearly, this is a more puzzling problem than that of invading Iraq and turning it into a democracy overnight, so they call in a young and attractively dishevelled professor of geophysics, Prof Josh, played by Aaron Eckhart as a kind of ludicrous footnote to his performance in Possession. It can’t have been hard for this usually adventurous actor; he didn’t even have to change his clothes.
The attractively dishevelled professor, with the help of a couple of research assistants, some dramatic gestures and a few hyper-powerful computers, soon cottons on: the core of the Earth has stopped spinning. Instead of such a cataclysmic event leading to the instant destruction of all life on the planet, as you’d expect, it means some very funny weather and some alarming special effects at the Colosseum in Rome. Obviously, something has to be done. Ah! The attractively dishevelled professor, along with his polar opposite, a well-dressed but balding and egocentric colleague (Stanley Tucci), with the help of the military and its secret projects and billion-dollar chequebook, will find a way to address this problem before the Earth’s atmosphere decides to go walkabout and the whole planet gets microwaved to death by the sun.The solution involves building a near-magical craft that can bore through solid rock. That takes about five minutes. Then pilots have to be found for this craft; enter two survivors of a recent Nasa crash landing, which we’ve just seen, and which was more exciting than the remainder of the movie. The more important of the two Nasa veterans, because she’s by far the best-looking, is played by Hilary Swank: oh, I forgot, she’s a navigational genius. For her to master this newly invented subterranean craft takes about 30 seconds and a quick homily from her superior officer.And so we’re off.
The craft carrying these intrepid “terranauts”, as they dub themselves, looks like a long straight turd, or perhaps a fat earthworm with rigor mortis. It has detachable sections, and the moment you hear this you know that, sure as God made centrifugal force, they are going to get detached, one by one, with as much explosive drama as possible. This subterranean odyssey is naturally beset by multifarious unforeseen dangers, which will require all the ingenuity and self-sacrifice of the terranauts (a much better title, by the way). Some of this is mildly suspenseful, but the only real tension is wondering about the order in which the less-good-looking cast members will be allowed to sacrifice themselves with a quip and a tear.As for the scientific element supposedly underpinning this science-fiction, that’s what begins to cause one’s willing suspension of disbelief to start descending toward the ground like a Zeppelin that’s just developed a puncture the size of the United States.
Our heroes throw around so large a quantity of scientific gobbledegook, at such a pace, that the viewer immediately picks up the scent of a diversionary tactic. You begin to wonder whether all this technical chatter contains so much as an atom of scientific sense. Diamonds “as big as Cape Cod” well below the Earth’s mantle? And I thought diamonds were formed out of fossil matter from the surface getting slowly and inexorably crushed. But those huge diamonds are, in fact, one of the story’s more apparently plausible ideas. The rest is mumbojumbo to make Shirley Maclaine’s spiritual ideas sound self-evidently true. In the midst of this fantastic voyage, as our terranauts struggle with the unforeseen problems thrown up by their environment and mission, we see them engaged in argument over some new urgent calculation they have to perform. One of them yells at the attractively dishevelled professor, “Your R is too small, Josh!” And, indeed, there is something wrong with his R, whatever that may be. By this point, however, the viewer is absolutely sure that, as far as something wrong with The Core goes, it’s not just the R.