There Are No Walls in the House of Jearl - Mystery DVD #136
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Mystery DVD #136
The Core
It's a Netflix Arranger Pattern Matching extravaganza, bringing together Aaron Eckhart from Thank You For Smoking, Stanley Tucci from Sidewalks of New York, and the half-baked pseudoscience from Deep Blue Sea. There might have been more pattern matching, the cast was pretty big. One day I'll have to make a spreadsheet or something.
Normally I try to keep these reviews pretty short and to not spoil everything, but it's really not possible with this one. I can't get into it without really getting into it. So before you wade into the great discursive spoilertacular below I will sum up my impressions in brief: Pretty, entertaining but desperately silly.
Okay, so Aaron Eckhart plays Dr. Josh Keyes, a geophysicist, who is called upon by the U.S. military to explain some bizarre electromagnetic phenomena that have suddenly started popping up all over the world. (The military, not the government, mind you, we only ever see one Army guy in command of this whole project, and never any political response to gigantic and ever-worsening worldwide disasters. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)
Josh sets his grad students to gathering data on all the bizarre shit that's happening (mostly birds going nuts and pacemakers stopping in clusters). Meanwhile, Major Rebecca Childs (Hilary Swank) is riding shotgun on the Space Shuttle when an EM disturbance wrecks their navigation data and makes them almost crash into Los Angeles. NASA decides she is the most awesome navigator ever for making them only crash into it a little bit. This seems quite fair. Generally bureaucrats and governments know what they're doing in this film, and are using their powers for good, which is a nice change of pace. Unfortunately it's a law of film that whenever something huge and bad happens it has to be either the government or the military's fault somehow, and we'll get to that in a few minutes.
So Josh consults with his friend Serge, a high-energy weapons specialist, and buttonholes Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci) who is an evil scientist (you can tell because he smokes and does not dress like he is about to join the merchant marines. What is it with scientists and giant sweaters? why do they signify 'I am a scientist and a good man, but for god's sake no woman may touch me while I wear this sweater (this was true even in Ultraviolet - vampire in a sweater == sexless science love interest.).). Okay, I digressed. Conrad Zimsky is a brilliantly polymathic geologist type and together he and Josh figure out that the earth is freaking out because the inner core has stopped spinning. They go in front of a U.S. military panel and tell them that because the earth's protective magnetic field is collapsing, everyone is going to die within a year. The military offers to throw money every which way, and off they go to the desert to dig up another mad scientist. Oh, how has the inner core stopped rotating? No one knows, but since it's 'like an engine' it must have stalled somehow. I'm glad no one in the film ever used either of the words 'angular' or 'momentum' or the DVD might have burst into flames out of pure shame.
Ed Brazzleton (Delrot Lindo) is the most awesome mad scientist, but unfortunately the film starts getting really silly right while he's demonstrating all of his inventions. Braz has done pretty much all the work needed to build a vehicle that can tunnel to the earth's core. Including a magical hull material that gets generates energy under pressure. Okay, I'm sure the military would not have wanted to stuff money in his pants before now, just for the armor. Sure. Anyway. He just needs piles of money and the brightest engineers in the world to help him build the ship. Okay here, says that one Army guy. Whee! Science montage! We're gonna save the world! By tunneling to the Earth's core and setting off a buncha nukes!
One of the plot drivers in Thank You For Smoking was the main character's project to get smoking back into films. The Core makes me suspicious that the Air Force has a similar initiative for nuclear weapons. Big huge problem we have to solve in a hurry? Nukes! Of course! They are magical weapons er I mean Items of Peace! Our awesome Peace Items, Made in America, are here to save the world again! Wooot Nukes! Okay they do blow up Stanley Tucci's character with one, so they're not all bad.
The whole world comes together to build a ship! they hire Serge to manage the nukes! they hire Major Childs to navigate! They hire her commander to pilot! I can't remember his name and we won't need it! He's not gonna be making out with Josh at any point! Remember Josh? He invents an awesome MRI/radar device that lets them see rock density, so they bring him too. Also Zimsky, because he is the best scientist in the world. Also Braz, because he built the damn thing. They also decide that the need to hack the entire internet no no one can talk about all the crazy atmospheric shit that's getting worse and worse, so they arrest the best hacker in the world, a pimply boy named Rat. He stays at mission control breaking stuff.
So they tunnel into the mantle and things start going wrong. The ship gets stuck in a big geode and the pilot dies. The ship runs into a giant diamond and Serge gets killed. The core isn't as dense as they thought so their bombs aren't going to be enough, and they can't reconfigure them without Serge. Zimsky and the Army guy decide to go to plan B, which is to use their secret earthquake weapon to poke the core until it spins again. This is where we learn that it is all the government's fault, because they made a weapon that creates earthquakes and it broke the core. For some reason poking again with the earthquake weapon would be really bad, or they'd have tried it already. Rat sabotages the weapon to give the ship more time, and the crew presses on with a new plan that involves gratuitously killing the black guy (that would be Braz, in a truly egregious example of the martyr-the-one-black-guy scene) and dropping chunks of the ship around the core with bombs in them to create a ripple effect. Zimsky gets pinned under a bomb and is left to get exploded. Josh and Major Childs start welding random chunks of what's left of the ship together and it gets them back to the surface. Where they would be trapped except that Rat figures out where they are. Yay! the earth is saved.
Man, that was a long movie. You don't wanna know how many meta-review ideas I thought up and rejected before giving up and just rambling it to death. One involved sending The Core out on a date with Deep Blue Sea. It wasn't pretty.
Tags: dvd review
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