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The Core
**
Cinema
Reviews - Week of March 28, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12A. USA.
133 minutes. Directed by Jon Amiel. Written by Cooper Layne, John Rogers.
Starring Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Stanley Tucci, Delroy Lindo, Tchéky
Karyo, Richard Jenkins, Alfre Woodard, DJ Quall, Bruce
Greenwood.
Everybody laughed when I said I wanted to see
this movie. And that's pretty sad. It means we've all stopped waiting for
the great ten-minutes-to-midnight disaster flick, the one where we actually
care when some major scientific catastrophe is signalling the end of the
world and only a band of wisecracking movie stars on a big expensive mission
can save us. We're entitled to that movie, but we seem to have given up
caring.
You see, for every great sci-fi idea, we usually
get one masterpiece and a whole lot of crummy copies. Nobody gets away with
making a film like "E.T." without somebody else creating "Mac and Me". The
apocalyptic disaster/action movie has been done to death in the past few
years -- think "Independence Day", "Deep Impact", "Armaggeddon". But those
all sucked, and it's as if Hollywood forgot about starting a trend with
inspiration and went straight for the recycling.
Yeah, you heard me, they sucked. "Independence
Day" felt like something for a while back there, but damn, it went on too
long, and it hasn't turned out to be as memorable or quotable as many folks
thought at the time. "Armageddon" was a huge popular success, and with growing
critical support and even a Criterion DVD to its name, seems to be going
down on record as a great film. But let's face it, that movie was bad. Sure,
all the NASA stuff was cool -- there was interesting junk science in there,
and Billy Bob Thornton was fun, and some of the imagery really did evoke
the feeling of something global going on. But all the scenes with Bruce Willis
and his team were unbearable, feeling like forced attempts to create a bunch
of cool rogues, and when that obviously wasn't working, in came a lot of
repulsive sentimentality. The very feel of Michael Bay movies requires objection
-- he's always with the camera swirling about some place, and he cuts to
a new shot every half-second, and in terms of the effect that filmmakers
have on our attention spans, this is going in the wrong direction. Some directors
are artists, others are craftsmen and many are just commercial functionaries.
Bay has his own category; he's a disease merchant.
Anyway. I got myself in a positive mood for
"The Core". This time round, the threat is not from aliens
or an asteroid -- it's the centre of our own planet. Seems that the American
government has been fooling around with all the molten iron down there, or
whatever it is down there, and the result is that it has stopped moving,
causing our electromagnetic equilibrium to be disturbed and meaning we're
all going to die through birds falling from the sky and volcanoes erupting.
(Makes sense to me, but I never did stay awake in physics
lessons.)
The first half of the movie is quite a bit of
fun -- the premise is solid enough for this kind of thing, and it's grandly
staged by Jon Amiel, who directed "Copycat", "Entrapment" and the underrated
"Sommersby". We also get fine actors populating the team that will take
super-duper machinery to the inside of the Earth: Aaron Eckhart is the science
professor leading the operation, Hilary Swank and Bruce Greenwood use their
arthouse credentials to bring some grounding to the roles of heroic U.S.
Air Force pilots, Stanley Tucci does some nice comedy weaselling in the role
of a scientist who has become taken over by his own fame, and Delroy Lindo
has enough wit and poise to disguise his status as the token black guy.
(Tchéky Karyo is in the movie too, but as good as he is, his name
is sort of becoming a tip-off for trash with a decent cast.)
The problem with "The Core" is that it ends up
going on and on -- I don't know what it is with this new breed of disaster
flicks, but they seem to think that just because their stories are full of
portentous warnings, their running times have to be equally intimidating.
This one is 133 minutes, at least half an hour too long, with a journey to
the centre of the earth that develops into a dull routine of riding along
until yet another piece of debris threatens to run the mission off course.
Actors don't have much to do in set-ups like this, and I suppose their large
pay packets are to quench protests for rewrites rather than compensate for
effort. How satisfying can it be to spend countless takes looking at digital
screens, gasping, calling the names of other characters and breathlessly
rambling paragraphs of nonsense about the ship's control
panel?
The special effects are surprisingly crummy --
at one point the, um, 'terranauts' get out of their craft to do some fixing,
and Swank marvels at how much the inside of our planet looks like "a crystal
Grand Canyon!" Seemed more like a futuristic version of Disneyworld's "Honey
I Shrunk the Kids" playground to me. Later, when we're getting closer to
the core, it's supposed to be liquid metal and heat that we see out of the
front window, but it looks like one of those little animations you get on
the side of Windows Media Player. And let us not forget all the good old
flaws in logic and sense that the screenplay offers, even on its own terms.
My favourite involves all the cutaways to DJ Qualls, who plays a computer
nerd back at the control station in Houston, and was taken onboard to "reverse
the flow of information on the internet". Does this have anything to do with
the operation's objectives? We're not supposed to ask that
question.
All this aside, "The Core" is not too bad. It's
big, colourful and dumb, with enough nuance in some of the performances and
details to keep from being actively irritating. It also manages to stay focused
on the mission, which means it has learned lessons from "Deep Impact" and
"Armageddon", and kept half-ass attempts at drama to a minimum. Maybe that
means we're one step closer to a classic in this sub-genre. I can dream,
right?
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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