The Core Review:

THE FILM
The Core is a sci-fi B movie with major event movie aspirations. Rollicking popcorn fodder dressed up, to use the words of director Jon Amiel, as a “character-driven visual effects movie.” Another extinction level event yarn, it takes Armageddon’s heroes-plan-to-detonate-bombs-to-save-the-planet hook and rather than blasting spacewards, it burrows Earth’s corewards instead.

Wade through all the scientific mumbo-jumbo and the upshot is that the Earth’s core has stopped spinning. This is a bad thing. The planet’s last hope is a motley crew of experts who must, and stop me if you’ve heard this one before, journey to the centre of the Earth in a race against time and kickstart the planet by setting off an almighty nuclear explosion.
Traveling in a sophisticated burrowing contraption known as Virgil, geophysicist professor Aaron Eckhart, astronauts Hilary Swank and Bruce Greenwood, weapons expert Tcheky Karyo, eccentric geophysicist Stanley Tucci and brilliant scientist Delroy Lindo encounter a predictable series of problems along the way, prompting various acts of ultimate self-sacrifice. The entire mission is also top secret, need to know only, with ace hacker D.J. Qualls recruited to keep the internet in the dark.

While it’s perfectly watchable and briskly paced, there are two major things wrong with The Core. It takes itself far too seriously (despite its preposterous premise) and the special effects are no better than so-so. An emergency space shuttle landing in downtown LA is fairly impressive and a sequence where an out of control swarm of birds causes chaos in London’s Trafalgar Square works well, but the destruction of Rome and the microwaving of the Golden Gate Bridge are both decidedly average at best, while the underground scenes become increasingly underwhelming.
Tucci’s batty scientist occasionally lightens the overly-serious mood (OK the world’s going to end, but where’s the entertainment value?) but, as the deleted scenes feature reveals, many of his best moments ended up on the cutting room floor when they should quite clearly have been left in the movie.

The centre of the planet isn’t uncharted territory of course, James Mason and Doug McClure have both been there before in Journey to the Centre of the Earth and At the Earth’s Core respectively. Both these movies relied on a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek camp, not to mention the odd prehistoric monster, to ramp up the entertainment factor and that’s what Amiel’s film is lacking, just a tad more fun, a vaguely playful element to balance out all the laid-on-with-a-trowel science and over-reliance on character to drive the story.

EXTRAS
The DVD offers a series of extras that tick most of the boxes, but they actually offer significantly less literal depth than the movie itself. Director Jon Amiel’s solo commentary is informative, enthusiastic and occasionally revealing (the Trafalgar Square sequence includes a rogue trout which was inserted among the frantic birds as a joke…it’s there, I’ve seen it).

There’s also a ten-minute making of documentary which includes brief contributions from Amiel, Eckhart, Swank, Qualls and Lindo, as well as various crew members. This is fairly superficial, but arguably more interesting than the special effects feature, which has its moments but is far too backslappy and self-congratulatory.

The best extra is the deleted/extended scenes feature which, when viewed with Amiel’s accompanying commentary, is a real eye-opener. Not only does it reveal that a number of great scenes didn’t make the final cut (some of which are far better than the ones that did), but a whole plot element was also removed, namely Eckhart’s character suffering from claustrophobia.

Throw in the trailer and a scene selection option and that’s pretty much your lot. All in all it’s a reasonable package which, like the film itself, falls well short of the spectacular but could have been significantly better without putting in too much extra effort.

David Lichtneker

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