The Core
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The Core (2003) is a science fiction disaster film 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.
Despite being a big budget sci-fi flick in the vein of Armageddon, The Core tanked at the box office, earning only US$74 million worldwide. It failed to recoup production costs.
Characters
| Actor | Role | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 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 Endeavour in Los Angeles, California |
| Delroy Lindo | Dr. Ed "Brazz" Brazzelton | Designer of Virgil and the ultrasonic laser |
| 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 a 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.
Ultimately, the world is saved by the terranauts, who restart the core's rotation and stop DESTINI. All but two of the terranauts die.
Deaths
- Commander Robert Iverson: While inside the geode (an air pocket in the mantle formes by crystals), trying to get The Virgil out of the geode, the top of the geode starts to leak magma, and some of it falls on him and causes him to die.
- Dr. Serge Leveque: One of the modules on The Virgil gets damaged and loses its ability to withstand the core's enormus pressure and is crushed, with Serge in it.
- Dr. Ed "Brazz" Brazzleton: He goes on a suicide mission to try to disengage the master hydraulic controller for the compartments emergency release mechanism, accessible only through the ship's impeller "crawl" space trough where the magma flows for propulsion, which also doubles as the access way for The Virgil. He dies when he finishes the mission, not being able to return inside, too weakened by the extreme heat, the magma flow engulfs him, once the impeller is restarted.
- Dr. Conrad Zimsky: When the remaing terranauts choose to launch the nukes by placing one in each module on The Virgil, Zimsky gets trapped in one of the modules and is killed when the nuke explodes.
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.
- Several signs in the Alaskan base spell D.E.S.T.I.N.I. as DESTINY.
- After General Purcell authorizes the initiation of D.E.S.T.I.N.I., Rat sends Keyes an image that, when processed correctly, would reveal a message - "DESTINY SOUNDS BAD. CAN I HELP?" When he sends the image, he says "Here's the E-M data you're primed for," which signals to Keyes that he should use prime numbers as the processing parameters when viewing the image. The adjustment parameters Keyes inputs are "1, 2, 3, 5, 7,..."; however, the number one, by definition, is not a prime number.
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 a few inaccuracies that occur in The Core.- Much of the Earth from the mantle inward is shown as liquid in the movie; however, the only wholly liquid layer of the Earth's interior is the outer core. Everything else is solid, except for magma that 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.
- Moving closer to the center of the Earth should result in a decrease in the force of 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 are 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. (Reader edit: Since this deals with inaccuraciew it is safe to say that they didn't really use a camera inside lava, it was computer graphics)
- 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 can 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. Such an amount of plutonium could not 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 placed 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 was shaped perfectly and was within the explosive "crush sphere" in the bomb's physics package, there would be no effect on yield. The reactor core 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 as it would be 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 its rotation.
- 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 say 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 hits the water, the water boils almost instantaneously. While water does capture microwave energy relatively efficiently, 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.
- Heat was used to form the hull together, even though the ship is supposed to be heat-resistant.
- As the ship is approaching the crust from the mantle, a NASA officer says that it has "found a space between some tectonic plates, somewhere near Hawaii". This is impossible because Hawaii is not situated near a position which is "between tectonic plates" - it sits right in the centre of the Pacific Plate.
- The connection between ship's crew and the mission control center is maintained almost instant throughout the entire operation by unknown means, though electromagnetic radiation that could be used for real-time transmission at relatively short distances (all around the Earth) would not reach the ship. Transmitting the signals using sonic waves would require much greater time. The control center keeps tracking the ship in the same real-time manner, though losing it in final stage of the operation when it seems to be captured between tectonic plates.
External links
- [}}}] at Rotten Tomatoes
- [Critics' reviews of The Core]
- [Review from allmovie.com]
- [A review of The Core
' s physics] - [Another review of the movie's physics], by Philip Plait
- [}}}] at Box Office Mojo
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