The Core: Review By carl

Every now and then a film comes along that is able to unite mankind in a veil of universal hatred. Strange isn't it that the same is rarely said of films that people actually like, but some films are so bad that even the most popcorn addicted cinema goer will be bored to tears by it. The last time this happened was with John Travolta's Battlefield Earth the film that has found an easy spot at the top of my worst movies list, but now a film has come to try and usurp that throne. This film is The Core a film that makes Armageddon look like Shakespeare's pet project, and goes to great lengths to show it's audience how dumb it truly is.

Now I don't want to go into too much depth about the films sheer stupidity because I can accept that this type of movie is not about intelligence, it's just that the argument for switching your brain off just doesn't work in this particular film. Switch your brain off in Armageddon and it suddenly becomes a simple film about a meteor that's going to strike the earth, but switch your brain off for The Core and it remains a film about a bunch of astronauts, sorry terranauts, drilling their way through solid rock and molten lava in order to jump start the planet. I've heard the film makers saying that the idea's for the effects of The Core stopping were brought to them by scientists, but of course they are going to say that. However let's assume that the original concept is plausible for a second shall we. Then the idea is still so complex that with your brain off it seems to far fetched, meaning that you have to switch your brain back on again, and oh look they're going to try and jump start a planet using a few nuclear bombs while a spotty teenager hacks the entire internet in a few minutes.

Anyway I can already hear the grumbles at the back about how the film is not about intelligence so I'll explain how it doesn't work on a pure bang for your buck level either.

Every popular popcorn movies have 2 basic ingredients that are essential to their success. They are good humour and impressive explosions, 2 things which The Core is severely lacking in. Again I'm going to be using Armageddon as the template because that was the film that The Core was trying so hard to emulate. Armageddon had Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi and Owen Wilson who are all brilliant at pulling off action movie wisecracks. In fact I'd even go so far as saying that I've yet to see Buscemi in a film where he hasn't made me laugh, yet what does The Core offer? Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Bruce Greenwood, Delroy Lindo, DJ Qualls, Stanley Tucci. A few well respected actors there, but none of them display any of the comic timing needed to pull off a successful popcorn movie. In fact their acting was terrible throughout and while the acting isn't quite as low as that found in Battlefield Earth it does manage to come closer than any other mainstream movie in recent memory.Sadly the film is also lacking the most important ingredient, because the effects were on the whole unimpressive.

Films like this are supposed to blow the audience away with amazing special effects and ever growing action set pieces, but the action in The Core just keeps getting smaller and smaller. It starts off with a few potentially great action scenes involving chaos in major cities like London, but these scenes inevitably involve bird attacks or electrical surges and we don't even get to see a city destroyed until quite late into the film. In fact the action scene I'm going to complain about the most is a well known scene due to recent events. In the film there is a scene where a space shuttle "crashes." In this film though they couldn't even show us that because the pilots on the shuttle were main characters. What happens instead draws the film down into one of it's lower points. On realizing that they're off course the shuttle pilot flies over to the L.A river and proceeds to navigate between the bridges before everyone walks away safe. I don't even understand why they needed the river because you can apparently drive a rocket like a Ferrari anyway, so they could have just swerved in and out of traffic until they stopped.

After that the film plods along with the occasional action scene that only shows the briefest glimpses of destruction until explaining that the effects were much bigger than the little we saw.It's a real shame that the writers chose to do the film in this way because the audience, including myself, was only there for one reason and that reason had nothing to do with watching everyone walk away safe. A disaster movie should either be a very big movie with a lot of destruction, or it should be a more carefully thought out movie that shows the disaster on a few well developed characters. A film like The Core that has less intelligence than Armageddon and less impressive action than Deep Impact just should not be made. This is Hollywood proving that they don't take the audience's intelligence into consideration as long as they make money, and if this film is a success then it will truly mark the death of mainstream movies.