THE CORE

From the archives

From my old website, Feb. 2006

Last year was bad news for the film industry, perhaps fatally so. American box office sales have dropped nine percent in twelve months. Teenagers, seduced by portable gaming and cell phones and their own budding physiques, are finding less and less time for the rituals of the silver screen. Adults, beset by teenagers playing video games and talking on phones and having sex in their theaters, are staying away from the movies in droves. Barring some sort of self-referential Hollywood comeback, the cinema of the early aughties—Analyze That and Freddy Vs. Jason and Scooby Doo—will be remembered as swan songs of the Talkies Era.

The Core, from 2003, holds an extra distinction, being the first film after 9/11 to resume pummeling American cities (although Manhattan and DC are tenderly left offscreen). Its story reflects the fragile state of the union in the early days of this century. Spurred by a rash of baffling magnetic mishaps, scientists discover that the core of the Earth has stopped rotating. Inertia below means death from above; soon, the planet will shed its electromagnetic skin, leaving humanity to roast by microwave. Against a backdrop of ominous skies and blasted national monuments, the U.S. government commissions a $15 billion laser-drilling super-subway named The Virgil, capable of leading the team of ‘terranauts’ down into the world’s bowels to shock the core back into action with a boiler room full of atomic weapons. Time is running out!

This film was not loved. Critics scoffed, audiences sniffed, and the American public showed scant gratitude for the saving of humanity. Reviewers railed against The Core’s dopey implausibility without noting the script’s nods to a half century of disparate pop culture (Journey To The Center Of the Earth, Das Boot, Silver Streak, the opening salvo of TV’s Soul Train), or its status as a time capsule of the best of American stagecraft in 2003. We may never again see Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Alfre Woodard, Stanley Tucci, and Delroy Lindo on the same screen. Tongues wagged at Eckhart’s Bush-like mangling of the word ‘nuclear,’ but stayed strangely silent at Stanley Tucci’s delicious enunciation of ‘cook’ (a precise homage to Delbert Grady of The Shining). The majesty of Delroy Lindo’s face was worth four regular admissions, plus drinks and Twizzlers. Lindo is one of those rare actors who can play amoral thug or doddering, lovable scientist with equal ease. He justifies any film he touches.