| Rating: | ★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Science Fiction & Fantasy |
Today, I had the privilege of enduring suffering through barely surviving watching The Core.
This movie deserves its own 50 Cent Review, but in fact I cannot divide the horror awful torture experience that was The Core into mere categories. This one requires a thorough dissecting; no, even a complete fisking.
So, before I begin, be aware of two things; firstly that there are massive spoilers here, in the extremely unlikely event that you actually want to see this movie; and secondly, that this movie is a close second for "Worst Movie Ever Made," right behind Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Without further ado, allow me to present the wonder that is a movie whose silly pseudoscience could be unstrung by a learning-disabled nine-year-old. This movie is.... words fail me.
Magically Craptacular.
Ok, let's start with the basic premise. The Earth's core has stopped spinning. This is bad, as it will cause the Earth's electromagnetic field Magic Force Field Which Protects Us All From Certain Doom to go away. This would be bad. See, out in space, there's this huge ball of fire we like to call the Sun. It spits out Deadly, Life-Threatening Microwaves which are stopped by our Magic Force Field. No mention here of the ozone layer, or the fact that the sun only actually sends us about 1300 watts / square meter of power.
The fun continues; we've got to turn the Earth's core back on! How? By drilling our way down to plant nukes on the core, of course. How will we get there, you ask, considering that below the upper mantle the earth is a ball of liquid rock of utterly frightening temperatures that easily melt any known material? No problem - we have unobtanium.
Yes, I said unobtanium. In the heat of the moment, the screenwriters realized that there really wasn't any kind of way to get to the core of the Earth, simply because it's too friggin' hot. So they just made some crap up. Unobtanium is a metal that actually increases in strength and structural integrity when subjected to heat and pressure, unlike every other substance known to man. In fact, it's SO spiffy, it can convert heat directly into 120 volt AC current. (More on this later.)
So they build a ship from this mythical "unobtanium," great, how will it drill its way down there? Well, this gentleman had a good idea that they didn't use; a nuclear tunnelling device. Instead, the writers used a LASER tunnelling device. (Again, more on this later.)
Having built the ship, they get the crew - two members of the shuttle crew, a geomagnetics professor, (Do they really have classes in this? Never mind, I guess they do,) a guy whose entire purpose in life, it seems, is to be an ass, a French weapons expert, and the inventor of unobtanium (and the Amazing Laser Drill Bit, might I add.)
So instead of doing something sensible like just plain drilling into the ground, for some reason they drag the ship, named "Virgil" (because Virgil is the name of Dante's guide into Hell,(wooooooo,)) out into the middle of the ocean and drop it into the Marianas Trench.
Ok, skip ahead a bit. They drill into the ocean floor, and down and down - for a whole day. Once they're 700 miles below the Earth's surface, they run into trouble. A giant geode, into which they fall. And get stuck. On a crystal which they claim is amethyst. Now to commemorate this occasion, I will break out the ordered list of points about said geode that are either the characters' own statements, or their actions, and point out why each is false, inaccurate, or just plain silly.
- The temperature of the liquid rock in which the geode was found was approximately 5,000 degrees. I know this because Dr. Josh Keyes tells us so.
- The geode can exist, in solid, non-molten state, because "there's a cobalt layer around it." (Another Keyesism.)
- There's no mention of the fact that the melting point of cobalt is actually around 2700 degrees and that geode would be SO screwed.
- The solution to the stuck ship, of course, is to put on space suits (which I presume are made of unobtanium as well based on their amazing properties. More on this in a minute.) and go outside to saw the giant amethyst in half.
- The only reply I can make to this is ?WtF?
- My jaw drops further upon seeing a sea of molten rock falling from the ceiling (Dr. Keyes says, "Uh-oh, we must have breached the cobalt layer," thus receiving the daily Captain of the Obvious award) and headed right toward the ship.
- This seems like a great thing, right? I mean, they can all get back in their ship now, because soon they'll be free - after all, that rock is 5,000 degrees, and the melting point of amethyst is only around 480 degrees.
- Nope, they instead stand around, with the result that the male shuttle crew member, whose name I freely admit I didn't give a damn about, gets hit in the head with a less-than-fist-sized chunk of crystal, and is instantly killed, as it cleaves through his suit and kills him immediately.
- Don't these suits have the ability to withstand 86,000 psi? They must, Dr. Keyes says so. Also, evidently, 5,000 degrees of heat, because after the guy is instantly killed by a tiny rock, he falls backward into the growing flood of lava and floats away. (Thus my comment about the amazing properties of the space suits. I wonder how their glass faceplates could fail to melt. Oh well.)
Having disposed of the geode, they drill deeper. Nearing the core, they discover that the (presumably hotter) molten rock here is filled with floating diamonds the size "of New Jersey!" (Silence, Keyes! And damn you, anyway.) No mention of the fact that the melting point of diamond is around 6400 degrees, incidentally the highest melting point of any known material. No mention of the fact that the core temperature, at its lowest estimate, is about 9000 degrees. Oh no. We're not supposed to know that, see. That would spoil it.
So, they get hit by a diamond, which dents the amazing unobtanium, and causes the rear section to begin melting, through some incredible bending / melting correlation of which I was previously unaware. So they have to eject the last compartment of the ship, tragically with the weapons expert trapped inside. Sorry, Frenchie, Americans only on our victory tour.
A note here - originally the nukes for the mission were loaded in the rear compartment, and would presumably at this point be crushed and melted. However, they must be made of unobtanium too, as they teleport themselves into a compartment near the front of the ship in the few seconds between the diamond's impact and the forcible ejection of the damaged compartment. (More on these nukes later.)
Now, as they approach the core, they discover that *pause for gasps of surprise* the nukes they brought aren't big enough. So what will they do? Why, in a matter of an hour or so, orbit all the way around the core, dropping sections of the ship behind them so as to leave bombs in a ring around the core, so they can go off in sequence and turn the core back on. Mmmmhmmmmm. No mention of the fact that the core is 4712 miles around, or that at the speed they claim to be travelling through the outer core, they'd take 22 hours to go around. (They were claiming a speed of 186 knots - 214 miles per hour, or so.)
But wait, you ask, what drama can arise next? Well, through use of a diagram which, as near as I could tell, showed that if they turned a switch the whole entire ship would come apart in chunks, they told us that the ship's not designed to eject portions that AREN'T damaged, as though the computer running it would be able to tell and keep the door closed.
So, this occasions an excursion out of the cabin into "core fluid" by the crazy inventor guy, who turns the Magic Destructo-switch, and then dies. They begin the process of setting out the bombs. (A note here on these bombs - at the point when the bombs moved by themselves earlier, they were all stored in one huge rack, all five of them. There were at that time 4 crewmembers - 3 males - left. Now, ONE BOMB requires the full strength of two adult males and a chainfall to move. HTF did they move ALL FIVE IN A RACK with only 3 guys? Hmmmmm?)
They spin around the core at dizzying speed, setting bombs - when *pause for gasps of surprise* the last bomb's not big enough because they jacked up the calculations again. So what can we do? After another sequence in which YET ANOTHER crewmember is set adrift in a ship section, this time with a nuke, they decide to augment the power of the final nuke with.... the fuel rods from the onboard nuclear reactor. Not that this would help much. See, weapons-grade plutonium and reactor-grade plutonium aren't the same - reactor grade will blow up, but you need a hell of a lot, and for it to effect the existing reaction mass, it would have to be INSIDE the frigging bomb.
But set that aside. Now the reactor's down, so *jaw drops* whatever will they do? Why, weld the power leads from the reactor directly to the unobtanium hull, of course. See, unobtanium converts heat directly into 120 volt AC. So, of course, everything turns back on immediately, and when the nukes go off - and work, of course - the ship is catapulted back up through the Earth's core and mantle in a mere hour or so, where (according to the movie) it took them three days to drill down. Where do they come out? The ocean floor. 800 feet deep, to be exact.
OMG! They're trapped! *Jaw drops* Whatever will they do? Well, surely not (God forbid) use their Amazing Miracle Space Suits to, say, swim to the surface. Oh no. They use ultrasonics to get whales to circle the ship, so that the Navy people looking for them see the whales and go pick up the ship.
You'd think I was kidding, wouldn't ya?
Ok. Now I'm leaving out many, MANY things wrong here - the hacker (who is "the best of the best" despite 64 indictments for computer fraud - do "the best" usually get caught like punks? Never mind.) who is hired to "hack the internet. All of it." Like the fact that despite the Amazing Properties of Unobtanium, the laser drill would melt. Unless, of course, unobtanium is also optically clear.
I'm also leaving out the fact that the magic Death Rays from the Sky can (and do) melt the Golden Gate Bridge without melting the cars sitting on it; and what about cell phones? Or GPS? If space was filled with Magic Death Rays that could melt steel, don't you think the satellites, orbiting outside the Earth's electromagnetic field Magic Force Field would be pretty much f*cked?
This movie was so monumentally bad as to be completely hilarious, except for the fact that the filmmakers so obviously wanted us to take it seriously. By the time they got to the geode, Tara said "If they get out and walk around, can I just leave?" Which was how I felt, but I stayed the course. Now, of course, I regret this. This movie sucked the intelligence right out of my head.
So, in closing, I would just like to say, this movie goes soooooo far beyond craptacular. It is... words fail me....five barfs. It is the worst movie of the year. It is one of the worst movies ever shown in a theater. It is, how can I put this - oh wait, the New York Times did it for me; monumentally dumb.
The insulting thing is the filmmakers actually expect this to be taken seriously - this movie is an insult to the intelligence of millions. Sadly, many of those millions are too dumb to realize it. Some of them even think it's a great show.
Review By Xenodox
