‘The Core’ is hollow but stimulating

A secret military weapon that causes earthquakes has undesired side

effects that have caused the Earth’s core to stop spinning. This

results in huge “natural” disasters and could mean the end of all

life. Therefore, a team of “terranauts” (Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart,

Delroy Lindo, Stanley Tucci, Tcheky Karyo and Bruce Greenwood) set

out to travel to the center of the Earth to jump start the core with

weapons of mass destruction.

Originally planned for release last November, the film was

retooled with additional special effects resulting in its delay.

Complicating this was the space shuttle Columbia tragedy, as

producers pondered removing a segment of the film that shows an

unexpected Los Angeles landing of the Endeavor. Jon Amiel directs

this stretch of imagination supplied by screenwriters Cooper Layne

(who is also a producer) and John Rogers. What results is a film that

lacks a coherent vision. This is evidenced by the powers that

controlled the publicity of the film. Anyone who has seen the

advertisements for this story knows that a government weapon is to

blame for the crisis in the story, yet this is not revealed to the

heroes of the film until two thirds of the way into it. The audience

might have been as surprised as the cast if the film had not been

poorly publicized. This disconnect extends into every facet of

production.

The writing is borderline cornball mixed with techno babble, while

the actors are directed in epic fashion. Eckhart and Swank shine in

scenes together, while Tucci’s character annoys. Lindo and Karyo are

effective and believable, Richard Jenkins seems like an amalgamation

of different characters as an Army General, Alfre Woodard and Bruce

Greenwood are underused, and DJ Qualls’ character is miswritten and

almost as annoying as Tucci. Part of what makes Qualls and Tucci’s

characters fatiguing is their cookie cutter stereotypes.

The special effects are where the true strengths of this film lie.

Many truly brilliant moments with only a few failures include an

emergency landing of the space shuttle, an attack sequence of “birds

gone wild,” and, of course, the journey to the center of the earth.

Unfortunately, character subplots and relationships are not

wrapped up satisfactorily and certain tweaks that could have been

made to increase the plausibility of some of the film’s events were

not made. In addition, there is no clear definition of a theme or

moral to this story even though creating one would have been fairly

simple. Despite the incredible leaps of faith one must make to

temporarily pretend to believe this film, some of the performances

and most of the effects provide enough eye candy to make this film a

worthwhile diversion.

* RAY BUFFER, 33, is a professional singer, actor and voice-over

artist.