The Core



The Core is a 2003 film about a group of scientists who must travel to the center of the Earth to restart the faltering core of the planet. The government gets a group of four scientists to find a way to make the Earth's core continue to spin, since it's winding down and with it goes the Earth's magnetic field, and without it the entire surface will be melted by cosmic winds. Using literal Unobtanium to build a ship hull that grows stronger the more pressure is put on it, they set off to deploy a circle of nuclear bombs in the core with the idea to restart it spinning.

It goes without saying that the science is atrocious... actually it went with saying, it's The Intuitor's pick for movie with the worst physics. But enough about that, we must get to what little story there is!

Glib disdain aside, it's a decent popcorn flick with good special effects and a premise that wouldn't be out of place in a Jules Verne novel. That said, parallels to Journey to The Center of The Earth aren't likely to be favorable for this movie because the characterizations aren't much to write home about. You have intrepid lead scientist, sexy romantic interest female scientist, Deadpan Snarker scientist, and geeky enthusiastic scientist. Aided by a Playful Hacker with a rat motif.

Now say your mantra three times and lie back thinking of England.

"Rat: [Sitting in front of a dozen PC towers] Okay, I know these look like computers... Totally not."
 * Blatant Lies - When Rat gets caught by the FBI:

"Dr. Josh Keyes: Blindfolded. Do not pass go. Go directly to PhD."
 * Convection, Schmonvection
 * Averted, mostly. The characters were being protected by the Unobtanium hull of the Virgil, and they couldn't exit the craft without suits of the same material. when he went out into the magma-free, but appropriately very hot impeller compartment to.
 * Dan Browned
 * Deus Ex Nukina: The Earth's outer core has stopped spinning, and nuclear weapons are the only thing that can get it started again.
 * Disaster Movie
 * Do Not Pass Go

""Will you take a check?" "Why not use a credit card? You'll get miles.""
 * Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto Us: The explanation for the construction and deployment of DESTINI: "Someone was going to build it, so we built it first."
 * Drawing Straws - For who has to go on the suicide mission outside to release the locks holding the compartments together. It seems to be lengths of wire instead of straws, but same idea. Interestingly Subverted--
 * Dwindling Party: Once the Virgil undertakes its mission, crew members get picked off one by one by the mission itself.
 * Everything Is Online - Using a single PC, Rat manages to route the entire U.S. electric power grid to Coney Island.
 * Executive Meddling - In the comments to a rant by David Brin about the movie, one of the six writers, John Rogers, tells the sordid tale.
 * For the sake of those who don't want to bother, it's basically summed up with this: "... This, by the way, is why screenwriting pays so well. They don't pay me to write. I'd write for free. They pay me NOT to punch people in the neck."
 * To give an example of a thing the executives said to him: "John, we really like this last draft, but one thing bugs us. The whole idea of the north and south pole switching places -- it's WAY over the top and unbelievable."
 * Fatal Family Photo
 * Follow the Leader - The film was pitched as "Armageddon, but down."
 * Freeze-Frame Bonus - When pigeons lose their sense of navigation and are flying into plate-glass windows, one of the windows finally breaks. If you freeze-frame on this moment, you'll see that the window is broken not by a flying pigeon, but by a flying trout.
 * Good Smoking, Evil Smoking
 * Hey, It's That Guy!:
 * Morty plays a hilariously egotistical scientist.
 * Christopher Pike traveled back in time to save Earth.
 * Hollywood Darkness:
 * Either Virgil has a backup generator which allows running a small pilot light (and the welding machine in the scene where the power cables are attached to the hull after the core of the reactor had been pulled out), or the characters have a sixth sense which allows them to see in pitch black darkness. It's a perfectly sealed shell thousands of miles below Earth surface. There is no way it can get light inside once the electrical power dies.
 * When Braz steps out in the entrance tunnel to operate the controls which allow separation of Virgil compartments, his helmet lamp cracks instantly from heat. However, there is daylight-like light around him, they didn't even bother to simulate the darkness. (Of course, the walls were supposed to be 9000 degrees, which would mean they'd be glowing white-hot -- so if anything there should have been more light.)
 * Hollywood Hacking: "You want me to HACK THE PLANET??". And he does.
 * Pushed to the extreme of the trope for Rat - he is at the same time cartoonishly thin on one side and cartoonishly junk-food engorged on the other side. Nobody seems ever to ask how film hackers are never fat, even as they eat enough pizzas and chocolate bars to feed an entire platoon and never seem to do any physical activity except typing.
 * Hollywood Science
 * Heroic Sacrifice: Where to begin...well look at the poster...now...only 2 of the crew survive.
 * It's a Small Net After All: See Hollywood Hacking.
 * Lampshade Hanging
 * Meaningful Name: The ship is named the Virgil, after Dante's guide through Hell in the Divine Comedy.
 * Multinational Team: Subverted. It should have been an entire world effort, since everyone would die if it failed, yet it seems to be an almost 100% American project with French meddling (Serge Leveque brought from his government nukes stamped with the French flag). And maybe Dr. Conrad Zimsky had been Polish by his name and mannerisms (Poles have among Europeans, but not among Anglophones, the reputation to be insanely proud).
 * Plot Induced Stupidity (also Third-Act Stupidity): the death of Serge Leveque could have been easily averted. It took 2 minutes, 36 seconds of movie time before the compartment was ejected and crushed. A simple and quick manual-control opening of the doors maybe 2 ft to allow the man crawl outside before ejection could have not taken more than 4-5 seconds. The entire scene had been Played for Drama.
 * Product Placement:
 * "I'm gonna need an unlimited supply of Xena tapes and Hot Pockets."
 * In a deleted scene, one of the minor characters gets a Hot Pocket foisted on her. We can't tell if her reaction was "Mmm, that's good," "Mmm, that's too hot", or "Mmm, get this thing out of my face."
 * Redemption Equals Death: Zimsky finally gets over his ego after Braz punches him in the face during a tantrum. Of course that means he's pretty much the next one to die.
 * Reverse Polarity
 * Running Gag: Zimsky's ego. Anytime anybody challenged him on anything, he'd ask, "Do you have any idea who I am?"
 * Science Hero: Ironically, given the sloppiness of the actual science, the protagonists are quite intentionally written to be these.
 * Screw the Rules, I Have Money: Brazelton hasn't built a prototype of his ship at the time the military catches up to him because he didn't manage to improve his production methods enough to build the thing without spending a ludicrous amount of money. So the military gives him a ludicrous amount of money ($15 billion to be precise).

"Rat: "I speak one language. 10100. With that I could steal your money, your secrets, your sexual fantasies, your whole life. In any country, any time, any place I want. We multitask like you breathe. I couldn't think as slow as you if I tried.""
 * Sharp-Dressed Man: Dr. Conrad Zimsky. Not only he is always elegant like a head of state, but during the helicopter landing scene, when everyone else has a beaten-up bag, camera closes in on his Louis Vuitton bag... even as he is going to a very possible death.
 * Shout-Out: Oddly enough to Sailor Moon of all things. Kenyes tells his grad student assistant "You can use our T1 line to look up Sailor Moon crap, you're up to this!".
 * The Virgil.
 * Signs of the End Times:
 * People with pacemakers all dying due to localised electromagnetic pulses.
 * Birds mass suiciding because their directional sense was off, causing them to fly top speed into buildings.
 * The ozone layer developing holes that let through unfiltered sunlight hot enough to melt the Golden Gate Bridge.
 * Stealth Parody: Many believe the film to be this, some film critics and even reports from the actors acknowledging that they knew how goofy it all was (Aaron Echart said he couldn't stop laughing that he was wrestling a nuke). That there were originally going to be DINOSAURS below the Earth would support this. That they were removed (Likely due to being unrealistic), does not.
 * Story-Boarding the Apocalypse
 * Summer Blockbuster: Averted. The movie opened in March.
 * The Rat - Averted. The character of Rat wasn't an informant, he was simply a really really good hacker.
 * And then played straight, as Rat is the one who decides to inform the world about the "Unsung Heroes" of the Core mission.
 * Unobtainium - Lampshaded, the characters literally call the material "unobtainium" ironically.
 * Braz: "It's actual name is 36 syllables long, so I call it just Unobtainium".
 * Artistic License - Astronomy: The sun does not emit evil microwave death rays that can boil San Francisco Bay and melt the Golden Gate Bridge. (And if it did, a magnetic field wouldn't stop them.)
 * Artistic License - Aviation: Not only does the Space Shuttle not rely exclusively on a magnetic compass for navigation, a magnetic compass isn't even part of its navigation package. Earth's normal geomagnetic field changes not only with latitude and longitude, it also changes with altitude, and at the altitude for Low Earth Orbit it's very different than it is down here on the surface. The shuttle determines its location partly by data fed to it from the ground -- which also doesn't rely on magnetic compasses -- and partly by extrapolating this data via its very limited onboard computers. (And nowadays, one would suppose, from GPS.)
 * You Fail Biology Forever:
 * One of the first signs that something is going wrong is when pigeons suddenly go mental and start smashing into everything. This is explained by the changes to the Earth's electromagnetic field messing with their natural navigation systems. While it is true that many birds such as pigeons use electromagnetics to navigate, it is for long-distance travel only. It would be more like if your car's GPS went on the fritz: instead of flying to London, they'd end up in Norway. They still have eyes, they wouldn't just whack into anything in their way!
 * It may work if the field was fluctuating wildly and causing the pigeons to get confused and panic, but that's probably overthinking things.
 * Lampshaded in the movie itself. When the hero asks "What do pigeons use to steer by?", one of his grad students replies, "Their eyes."
 * Artistic License - Geology - More examples than any human being can list, but we're going to try:
 * In Real Life, the Earth's core spins because the rest of the Earth is spinning. It rotates once every 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds, just like the rest of the Earth does. Relative to somebody standing on the Earth's surface, the core doesn't appear to move at all. If the core "stopped spinning", it would appear to spin in the opposite direction relative to the Earth's surface. (And where would all that angular momentum go? At the very least, the rest of the Earth would have to speed up.)
 * The Earth's outer core weighs in at 1.8 sextillion metric tons. You'd have to throw one hell of a monkey wrench into the path of that spinning freight train to brake it from one-rotation-every-24-hours to a dead stop. And even if you did, all that angular momentum would have to go somewhere; the rest of the Earth should have sped up by quite a huge margin.
 * Not to mention we haven't developed a single nuclear warhead powerful enough to even break 6.0 on the Moment Magnitude scale. Krakatoa laughs at our most powerful nuke. So how can you expect a nuke to even give so much as a nudge to all that molten iron?
 * When the Virgil descends through the Earth's crust and into the mantle (and, later, when it has to travel upward through the mantle to escape), the mantle shown is clearly supposed to be a liquid, thereby not requiring the use of their drilling laser. In Real Life, the upper mantle is a semi-liquid goop that flows like pitch (at best), while the middle and lower mantles are most decidedly solid.
 * A cavernous gas-filled geode, surrounded by 800,000 pounds per square inch of pressure at several thousand degrees, would never be able to form in the first place, much less endure for the years or millennia before the Virgil encountered it.
 * The geomagnetic field protects the surface of the Earth from charged particles (like the solar wind and cosmic rays), but it has no effect on electromagnetic radiation such as microwaves. If the Earth was hit by an evil microwave Death Ray from the sun, like the one shown in the movie, we'd be fried whether the Earth's magnetic field was there or not. (And if space really was filled with that much microwave radiation, every one of our satellites would be fried instantly.)
 * When the "Virgil" begins its journey toward the core, it begins at the Marianas Trench, which rends itself apart to form a whirlpool that sucks the ship downward. The problem: the Marianas Trench is on a convergent plate boundary.
 * Artistic License Medicine: A failure of the Earth's magnetic field isn't going to stop a pacemaker. (Or a wristwatch, for that matter.)
 * Even if a pacemaker does quit working, the heart it's attached to won't suddenly stop beating entirely. Pacemakers are given to patients with irregular or erratic heartbeats. A failed pacemaker may be a medical emergency, but it's not a guaranteed instant death sentence.
 * You Fail Physics Forever
 * Sound waves do not change frequency when they pass from one medium to the next. (They do change wavelength, though, since the speed of propagation always equals the frequency times the wavelength.)
 * The Second Law of Thermodynamics, in particular, takes a mighty shellackin' in this movie. Even if unobtainium were a perfect insulator, so that no external heat could get in at all, the interior of the Virgil would still generate an enormous amount of its own waste heat from human bodies, life support systems, electronics, the motors running the impellers, etc.. You saw how hot the nuclear reactor's core was. The only "heat sink" they brought along was some liquid nitrogen. Even if half the entire payload mass was liquid nitrogen, it would certainly have absorbed all the heat it could within the first hour.
 * Likewise, generating electric energy simply because it's hot outside won't work. You can only generate power if there's a temperature difference, and heat is allowed to flow along that temperature difference -- unobtainium or no unobtainium. Any theoretically-possible scheme for using the hull to generate impeller power would have fried the contents within seconds.
 * You Fail Nuclear Physics Forever:
 * The 5 bombs in the movie have a yield of 200 megatons each. No Real Life nuclear weapon larger than 50 megatons has ever been detonated, and no weapon larger than a theoretical 100 megatons has ever even been built. Even using the most compact bang-for-your-buck nuclear weapons technology available, a single 200 megaton device would be larger than a whole compartment on the Virgil.
 * Our hero has to boost the warhead yield of the last bomb by 20%, from 200 megatons to 240 megatons. How does he do this? By taking 6 pounds of plutonium from the Virgil's nuclear reactor and placing it next to the bomb. It's doubtful the writers were even aware that multimegaton nuclear devices use the nuclear fusion of heavy-hydrogen isotopes as their primary energy source, and only use the nuclear fission of plutonium-239 (which has to be weapons grade, not reactor grade) to set the fusion reaction off.
 * Fission-fusion-fission bombs do employ a uranium-238 tamper around the outside, which absorbs the neutrons generated by the fusion reaction and undergoes spontaneous fission. This doubles or even quadruples the warhead yield. At the 200 megaton level, it's likely that all the bombs had to be fission-fusion-fission devices. However, the uranium tamper must surround the fusion core to do this. Having a chunk of uranium (or plutonium) sitting off to one side would only create some atomized uranium(or plutonium) shrapnel.
 * Zeroes and Ones