Film Friday: The Core (2003)

I’ve got a film on my mind: The Core. The Core isn’t horrible, but it’s not a good film either. Strangely, The Core has generally good writing, good special effects, some likeable characters, an interesting plot, and decent production values, but it's still not a good movie. Why? Because it’s lazy.

** spoiler alert **

The Core is a high-budget ($60 million) disaster movie that pretty much bombed, though it eventually turned a profit. It is the story of a group of people who must travel to the Earth’s center to restart the Earth’s core, which has stopped spinning. Without that spinning core, the Earth’s magnetic field will fail and we will be exposed to solar radiation, which will kill us all. In the meantime, the intermittently good/evil US military is planning to use a secret weapon to try to restart the core. . . the same weapon that stopped the core spinning in the first place.

Oh, where to start. If you look at the movie on paper, it should be a pretty good film. The story is interesting and isn’t packed with filler, nor do inexplicable things happen. There are some likeable characters and some good actors. The writing sounds good when heard in isolation and some of it is quite witty. But it never adds up to much because it’s just so lazy.

The first tip off about the laziness is the acting. At no point do you ever get any sense that the actors know who their characters are or that they care about what they are doing. For example, Aaron Eckhart plays a generic scientist who solves the riddle of what’s happening. I like Eckhart, but he doesn't seem to realize he’s a scientist or that he’s the lead character. It feels like he just showed up on set one day and started reading some lines. Tchéky Karyo, who I also like, plays another generic scientist and Eckhart’s friend. We are meant to see these two as fairly close, but there’s no chemistry between them because neither actor acts like they are anything more than acquaintances. Stanley Tucci plays another generic scientist who is also the half-hearted villain. He’s kind of bad, but not really, and Tucci doesn’t bother establishing him as more than just arrogant but helpful. Delroy Lindo plays Tucci’s “nemesis.” Lindo invented both the ship they will use to get to the center of the Earth and the “unobtainium” out of which the ship is made -- a deus ex machina material that solves all possible problems. Tucci stole credit for Lindo’s prior inventions, but Lindo doesn’t care and remains quite civil.

Bruce Greenwood plays an assh~le space shuttle commander who will pilot the ship, and Hilary Swank plays the “super smart” shuttle co-pilot who will go along. They couldn't have less chemistry. Greenwood is bland except when he’s reading insulting lines at Swank. Swank (a high school drop out) is unbelievable as someone with even a middling brain and basically stares at things. Meanwhile, back at HQ, the military is represented by lifeless Richard Jenkins who gets about as worked up over the end of the world and his role in causing it as if someone told him the lawnboy was coming Wednesday instead of Tuesday. “Oh, really? Ok, I’ll mark my calendar.”

Even when the scenes call for emotion, these actors don’t seem to care. For example, in one scene, Swank is supposedly upset because she killed Tchéky. Yet, she delivers her lines like she’s ordering lunch and almost giggles. When Rome is about to be destroyed, their hacker lifelessly says “Rome does not look good.” When Jenkins learns that friend-of-the-family Swank won’t be fired by NASA, he sounds about as happy as if he learned the lawnboy will now be coming on Friday. And at no point do any of them seem all that upset the world is ending. It’s like these actors didn’t bother reading the script ahead of time and are just winging it line by line.

What’s more, this same laziness pervades the writing. The characters have no backstory -- what you see is what you get, and their relationships never rise above the level of acquaintances tossed together for an uninteresting weekend, i.e. there is no urgency, there is no emotion. In fact, the one time Tucci shows emotion comes across as perhaps the worst moment in the film, as he delivers lines so poorly written that you can almost see him begging the others to cut off his ridiculous tirade so he can stop speaking the lines: “You wanna be a hero? You wanna be a martyr? What do you want to be? You're out of your minds! Thank you!” Also, when things need to be done, they just sort of happen without difficulty or explanation. Oh, you need a hacker, here he is. Oh, you need to build a spaceship in three months that hasn’t been designed yet, will take 10 years to build, and is not like anything else on Earth? No problem, we’ll take care of it while you go get lunch. . . don’t worry, we have “scientists” who can do this sort of thing. Oh, you need to find the secret government project? No problem, it's on the map.

Moreover, few of the technical aspects are explained to any degree. . . “we go, make boom, core start, movie end.” And what science they do give is horrible. It's so bad that a poll of scientists voted The Core the least accurate science fiction movie, and Dustin Hoffman actually led an initiative of the National Academy of Sciences to get Hollywood to start getting their science right and to stop making movies like The Core. What's worse, “unobtainium” is used as a catchall explanation to solve all problems the writer didn’t want to bother thinking about. How do they get through the Earth’s crust? Unobtainium. What protects them from the planet crushing forcing? Unobtainium. Where do they get power? Unobtainium. How do they save themselves once they lose their engines? Unobtainium. It slices, it dices, it cuts a planet in half. . .

But what really kills this movie is the overall laziness of the story. The story happens just as you expect, and that's it. There are no surprises, no interesting twists, no memorable moments, and no variances at all from what you would expect from your average low-budget disaster film shown on the Sci-Fi Channel. And that is truly disappointing.

Now in truth, I enjoy this film enough to watch it, but then I'm a fan of bad science fiction. But if you're looking for anything more than "Mega Storm 4" or "Attack of the Giant Killing Thingy," you will be disappointed. And that's too bad, because with the money and the cast invested in The Core, this one had potential.