The Core
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Template:Copyedit{{Infobox Film
|name =The Core
|image =The Core poster.jpg
|caption = Promotional poster for The Core
|director =Jon Amiel
|producer =
|writer =Cooper Layne
John Rogers
|starring =Aaron Eckhart
Delroy Lindo
Hilary Swank
DJ Qualls
Stanley Tucci
|music =
|cinematography =
|editing =
|distributor =Paramount Pictures
|released =2003
|runtime =135 min
|language =English
|budget =$85,000,000 (production)
$30,000,000 (advertising)
|imdb_id =0298814
|}}
The Core (2003) is a science fiction disaster movie very loosely based on the novel Core by Paul Preuss. It concerns a team who have to drill to the center of the Earth and set off a series of nuclear explosions in order to start the Earth's core spinning again. The Core was directed by Jon Amiel, and starred Aaron Eckhart, Delroy Lindo, Hilary Swank, DJ Qualls, and Stanley Tucci.
Contents |
Characters
Aaron Eckhart - Dr. Josh Keyes; scientist who designs the navigation system for Virgil and is assigned as head of the project
Hilary Swank - Major Rebecca Childs, USAF; an astronaut who distinguished herself during an emergency crash landing of the space shuttle Endeavor in Los Angeles, California
Delroy Lindo - Dr. Ed "Brazz" Brazzelton; designer of Virgil and the laser that cuts through the layers of the Earth
Stanley Tucci - Dr. Conrad Zimsky; Earth specialist and designer of Project DESTINI
Tcheky Karyo - Dr. Serge Leveque; nuclear weapons specialist
Bruce Greenwood - Commander Robert Iverson, USN; Maj. Childs' pilot and mentor
DJ Qualls - Taz "Rat" Finch; computer hacker who is widely regarded as the best in the world, hacked the FBI's database, recruited to control the flow of information on the Internet to prevent public panic
Alfre Woodard - Dr. Talma "Stick" Stickley; mission commander for NASA space shuttle Endeavor and Virgil
Synopsis
Strange things are happening on Earth's surface: Everybody within a 10-block radius in Boston with an pacemaker simultaneously drops dead; and the pigeons in London's Trafalgar Square lose their internal navigational ability and start smashing into windscreens and breaking panes of glass.
The world soon realizes the cause of these anomalies: Earth's core has stopped rotating. Within a year, the Earth will lose its electromagnetic shield and be fried by solar radiation.
A team of "terranauts" is recruited to drill down to Earth's core and set off a series of nuclear explosions in an attempt to restart the core's rotation. Their $15 billion journey uses a transport made of an indestructible metal called "Unobtainium" equipped with a newly-developed "sonic laser" that can cut through rock.
While they are underground, the world is struck by more disasters. Huge blasts of microwave radiation from the sun break through the atmosphere, melting the Golden Gate Bridge and frying San Francisco. Gigantic lightning bolts tear up the streets of Rome and blast the Colosseum to pieces.
The base of the drilling experiments is in the Utah desert. The government also has a secret facility in Alaska with which they can start earthquakes anywhere on the planet; this weapon, called Project DESTINI (Deep Earth Seismic Trigger INItiative), is revealed to be the cause of the stalling of Earth's core.
Trivia
- While the movie may have been based on junk science, the reference to the secret government facility in Alaska is real. Project D.E.S.T.I.N.I. is a parody of the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, that conspiracy theorists believe uses the Earth's magnetic field to manipulate weather and earthquakes, broadcast signals, and even control minds.
- In one scene, Dr. Keyes needs data on why the Earth's core is suddenly changing. He frantically shouts out instructions to his assistants to immediately research all recent, unnatural physical occurrences. Acker replies, "That is going to be one huge search." Dr. Keyes, "You can use our T1 line to look up Sailor Moon crap, you're up to this!"
- Keyes is probably referring to Acker's use of the T1 Internet line for personal uses (like looking up paraphernalia for the cartoon Sailor Moon) not shown in the movie. The novelization also says that Acker is a conspiracy theorist and often researches such topics.
- During the scene where Dr. Keyes is talking to his team shortly after the scene in London where the birds go crashing into everything in the city; they manage to contradict themselves. Asking how Birds navigate, the first reply by one of his assistants is "sight", then he Keyes asks about long range navigation, which the answer given is magnetic fields. However, if the birds are suddenly going crazy inside of a city, they most definitely are NOT using any type of magnetic fields and are thus using sight.
Scientific Inaccuracies
While Hollywood science fiction films tend to bend the laws of science in order to create a more compelling plot and keep the audience engaged, critics and scientists tend to point out inaccuracies in these films. The following are inaccuracies in The Core.
- Although much of the Earth from the mantle inward is shown as liquid in the movie, the only wholly liquid layer of the Earth's interior is the outer core - everything else is solid. Magma is contained in "pockets" within the lithosphere.
- The magma would have filled the giant geode seen in the movie in much less time than it did on screen because of the extreme pressures that are present at that depth.
- Although the terranaut's ship is repeatedly shown to be diving nose down toward the core, the terranauts walk horizontally through the ship, instead of climbing vertically as they should be.
- Moving closer to the center of the earth should result in a decrease in gravity, but no such effect is shown in the movie.
- In the shots viewing outside the ship, looking at it from inside the Earth, the magma and liquid metal is transparent enough to see the ship clearly from a distance of several hundred meters. Molten lava or iron is opaque and would probably glow bright enough to blind the camera with light.
- Several large H-bombs are used to restart core rotation, each with a 200 megaton yield. The largest H-bomb ever built, the Tsar Bomba, had a 50 megaton yield. It weighed 25 tons and was roughly the size of the entire ship. The bombs shown in the movie are roughly human-sized and are able to be pushed around by one or two people. The last bomb had to be 30% larger, i.e. another 60 megatons had to be added to its yield. The fuel rods from the nuclear reactor (seven kilograms of plutonium) are used as additional fissile material. This amount of plutonium cannot generate that much explosive force. The Fat Man bomb used roughly this amount of plutonium and had a 20 kiloton yield. Later improved bombs using this amount of plutonium still yielded less than 50 kilotons, less than a tenth of a percent of what was required.
- Along the same vein, Keyes's approach of just leaning the plutonium reactor core against the bomb would have done nothing for yield. For fissile material to affect yield, it must be part of the weapon's physics package, not sitting nearby. Since the weapons in the movie were ostensibly French, the implication would be that these would be implosion-type thermonuclear weapons. Ergo, unless the nuclear material were shaped perfectly, and within the explosive "crush sphere" in the bomb's physics package, there would be no effect on yield. Keyes's little atomic present would merely be vaporized.
- Even with a total yield of one gigaton, the explosions would not be powerful enough to start rotation in the outer core. It is simply too massive.
- The nuclear explosions depicted in the movie were roughly spherical. A spherical explosion would produce no torque on the Earth's core, and thus would be unable to start it rotating.
- The unobtainium hull is able to convert heat directly into usable energy, violating the second law of thermodynamics. It also remains solid at temperatures that would melt or even boil other metals and is a near-perfect thermal insulator. Even when the reactor core is removed, depriving the ship of power, the interior heats up slowly.
- In the movie scientists says that microwaves emitted by the sun will fry the earth. A yellow star like the sun emits a very small proportion of microwaves compared to its visible light output, and this radiation is unaffected by the geomagnetic field, or the "electromagnetic energy field" as it is called in the movie. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections would pose a much greater threat with the magnetic field absent, however.
- A beam of microwaves is shown wreaking havoc in San Francisco. When it shines on the water, the water boils almost instantaneously. While water does capture microwave energy rather well, it does not instantly boil. It must first be heated to its boiling point and then receive additional energy to surpass the heat of vaporization. Sunlight cannot do this, since the volume of water is too great. The entire bay would have to be heated to the boiling point before any of the water could boil.
- The same beam of microwaves destroys the Golden Gate Bridge. The main cables snap, the center span collapses, and the two towers are shown leaning inward. The towers would lean outward from the break due to the weight of the remaining cable at the ends.
- The cars on the Golden Gate bridge seem to be unaffected by the microwaves, while these same waves easily melt the bridge.
- Notice that they used heat to form the hull together when it is suppose to be a heat resistant ship