The Core

My hatred of The Core is no secret. It came out in 2003 and I don't think a week has gone by since where I didn't mention how shitty it was at least once. Today I decided to rewatch it for the first time since I wasted 5 bucks on it almost 7 years ago, thinking that maybe I was too hard on it the first time and it deserved a second chance.

Well it fucking doesn't. Holy fucking shit. This movie came out with the hopes of riding the coat tails of other disaster/end of the world films like Armageddon and Deep Impact, but falls short in every department.

One of my most constant gripes with terrible movies is their overdoing of CGI, especially when they don't have the budget or the knowhow to make it look good. Look at films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, which came out in 1991 and 1993. The computer effects in both these movies still look good today, and are almost 20 years old. The Core came out a full decade after JP and yet it still has the CGI of a made-for-TV movie.

I suppose I better explain the premise of this shit show. It is present day, and all this weird shit starts happening. It turns out that the core of the Earth has stopped spinning, and because of this, the end of the world is looming ahead of us. They gather up a bunch of scientists and shit and they build this giant turd looking digging ship that is designed to burrow into the Earth's core and deliver a nuclear payload, which when detonated, is supposed to restart the core. I mean it makes total sense, in real life when you blow shit up, it causes stuff to randomly start spinning, happens all the time. Anyway, shit goes wrong and people die, and eventually they end up restarting the core, and the world doesn't end.

Now, in order for this stupid stupid plot to even begin to work, the movie had to invent a bunch of stupid crap that it doesn't bother explaining. Now I know this is a movie and you are supposed to suspend your belief and just take it as entertainment, but this movie treats you like you are retarded and don't know you are retarded.
Let's start with the ship. It looks like an elongated version of those drilling vehicles Bee-Bop and Rocksteady always rode in from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, except more poop-like. Well this wonder ship is designed to obviously transport it's passangers to the middle of the Earth. Sounds like an amazing machine, right? Well it is. It is powered by an "experimental nuclear reactor". Wow, that sounds cool, care to explain what makes it so experimental? No? Well okay, just seems kind of irresponsable to spend "50 billion" dollars on a ship and have it be powered by something you have never tested.
It can get pretty hot in the middle of the Earth, like over 9000 degrees apparently, so naturally the ship would have to be made of something that could withstand all that heat. Good thing we have this new metal the movie made up, called "Unoptanium." That sounds really neato, and it sounds just like the word "unobtainable" which, if the name made sense, would make this a very precious metal indeed, and hard for anyone to get their hands on. Oh wait, it's not, because they built a ship the length of a football field made of nothing but this stuff.
This next point irked me, but I don't know enough about communication technology to really know if it would work or not. So in the movie, the crew of the ship stays in constant contact with the U.S. army above ground. It just seems a little unrealistic for a two-way radio to work when there is 7000 miles of rock between you and your buddies. I know they can do it in space, but that is also a wide open area with a direct sight-line and satellites to help. Just something that made me go hmmmmm.

I feel bad for the actors in this one. It's like they felt bad for being left out of all the previous disaster movies so they signed on for this one just so they could hang out with those movie's stars and be cool like them. At least it didn't end their careers. The two biggest stars in this film are Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank, and they both had the biggest roles in their careers after this came out. Eckhart played Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, and Swank played an ugly girl in all of her movies.

All in all, this movie expects you to suspend too many beliefs for it even to begin to work, and if you can do that, it relies on you forgetting that you are a human being capable of rational thought. This movie fucking blows.

Pros:
1. There is a scene, which never gets explained, in which all the birds go ape-shit and fall out of the sky and cause huge accidents. Seriously, people freak out because it rains birds...more birds than anyone has ever ever ever seen, even in the midst of a migration. For real, it rains birds for like 2 minutes straight, and people are running around losing their shit. Fucking awesome.
2. Hilary Swank was probably her least ugliest in this movie, she hasn't looked this "good" since The Next Karate Kid. Who would have thought back then that just a plain jane would grow up to be such a handsome transexual?
3. Delroy Lindo was in this, and he is the shit. He is a smooth Shaft like black guy who is in such movies as Get Shorty, Romeo Must Die, and The One. I think he dies in all of these movies, except Romeo Must Die, where he only gets shot and almost dies, but not before making a short joke about Jet Li.
4. It took my mind off of my fantasy team losing it's game, causing me to be eliminated from the playoffs.
5. Someone holds up a magazine in the movie, and on the back cover is an advertisement for "Shadow Man" which was a game that came out in like 1999 for the Playstation and N64, later ported to the Dreamcast. Anyway, that game always looked like fun, and in the movie that magazine is supposed to be current...and it has an ad for a videogame that is over 4 years old...hmmm...

Cons:
1. Hilary Swank's face, but not her sort of bangin' body. It was the only do-able female form in the whole goddamn film, how sexist, the producers must all be women.
2. The fact that I know that the next movie I watch is going to be even worse than this one.
3. The movie has really shitty looking fonts, and uses incomplete sentances. For instance, when the movie wants you to know that it is taking you to a different location, it will display it on the bottom of the screen, no biggy, pretty much all movies do this. But this one uses some dumbass Lost in Space font and does it with sentance fragments like "Off the Coast of Hawaii" Would it kill you to have it be "Somewhere off the Coast of Hawaii"?
4. Okay, so in the movie, they are drilling through thousands of miles of rocks. On the way back, their drill goes out, and they are forced to navigate at speeds three times what they went in with, with no drill, all the while dodging HUMONGOUS boulders, any of which could destroy the ship. While on the return trip, the movie actually has the balls to display "16 Hours Later" in their stupid font. With the way they were going, there is no way they would survive 16 hours of that shit, but the movie expects you to believe it.
5. DJ Qualls. I know the dude had cancer back in the day, but man, how many times can you play the same skinny nerd loser who gets no play? Roadtrip? Fine, he can have that one, it was his first. But this and The New Guy? Jigga please.