cellio | The Core

We went to see The Core Sunday afternoon. I enjoyed it. Yes, you have to suspend disbelief about the premise, but I knew that going in. The premise is that strange electro-magnetic events are happening all over earth, with frequency and severity increasing, and it's because the core of the earth has stopped spinning. So, someone has to drill down there and jump-start it .

(Grumpy aside: the previews gave away a (different) plot point that was revealed only later in the movie. I suspect the impact would have been better if I hadn't seen the preview -- except that I wouldn't have gone to see the movie at all if I hadn't seen said preview. So you can't win.)

The movie was more action-focused than I'd expected; they could have included more of a look into the effects the problem was having beyond causing large things to fall down. I guess we know what demographic they were going for. :-) Still, it was a fun movie with some very funny bits tucked in among the more serious and predictable ones. Once they got the "you'll just have to accept this" premises out of the way, they stayed consistent and even had some good storytelling bits (like an apparently-trivial matter near the beginning of the adventure that factors significantly into the ending).

Some premises you have to be willing to accept (some of these are spoilers, hence the cut tag):

The basic premise about the core of the earth, as stated above.
That the same guy who developed an, err, ground-breaking laser beam also has relevant expertise in shielding and ship-building.
The timeframe. (I don't care how much money you throw at it; 3 months is impossible.)
The powers of the teenage-hacker super-type. :-)
That the military would let anyone but its own onto that mission, especially given radio contact. (And related: that they'd send both of the expert scientists they have on the same risky mission.)

There were some nice touches, including referring to a bit of plot-essential technobabble as "unobtanium". In general, I thought the writers who actually implemented the outline they were given did a very nice job. Certain plot points, such as the fates of various characters, were obvious pretty much from the start, but this didn't diminish my enjoyment of the movie.

There was one big continuity glitch that would have been trivial to fix; I wonder how it was that no one noticed it. Oops. (It involves the number of sections in the ship.)

A small point: in the previews, I'm 99.9% sure that they showed the hacker kid saying that he's going to need a steady supply of Star Trek videos and Pop Tarts. In the movie, it's Xena videos and Hot Pockets. Faulty memory, product placement, or something else? (And, the kid isn't savvy enough to ask for DVDs? :-) )

The Core

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