Action junkies should get set for a wild ride with the new
movie
”
The Core,
”
currently playing at Premiere Cinemas.
Action junkies should get set for a wild ride with the new movie “The Core,” currently playing at Premiere Cinemas.
Although the two-hour and 15-minute release from Paramount never really digs deep enough to be a great movie, there’s enough top-notch special effects and manufactured tension to keep the plot moving along at a pace that keeps the audience from drifting off.
Director Jon Amiel (“Entrapment,” “The Man Who knew too Little” and “Copycat”) borrows too heavily from all the action-adventure genre movies before this, with so many scenes reminiscent of so many other action movies that this one becomes a little too predictable.
The movie centers around an unexplained incident that causes the Earth’s molten core to stop spinning. Without the spinning core, the magnetic field that protects the Earth from harmful radiation starts to collapse.
To fix the problem, the government brings together a collection of the world’s top scientists, including a brilliant young geophysicist, Josh Keys, played by Aaron Eckhart; a glory-seeking scientist, Conrad Zimsky, played by the great character actor Stanley Tucci; a reclusive scientist, Edward Brazleton, played by veteran actor Delroy Lindo; the wry French Scientist Serge Leveque, played by Tcheky Karyo; a computer hacker named Rat, played by rising young actor D.J. Qualls; the square-jawed Col. Iverson, played by Bruce Greenwood; and the hot-shot young pilot, Becky Childs, played by Academy Award winner Hilary Swank. Overseeing them are actress, Alfre Woodard, as a NASA official called “Stick,” and the hard-core Gen. Purcell, played by Richard Jenkins.
The crew must journey to he center of the Earth and use four nuclear warheads to reignite the core and start it spinning again.
With the exception of some strong language and light violence and scenes of death, this film should be suitable for young teens and older.
The movie was supposed to be released Nov. 1, 2002, but was pushed back to March to give the special effects team time to add scenes of destruction from earthquakes and storms.
On Feb.10, news of the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy put the film’s release into serious question because one of the first big special effects sequences in the movie is about a space shuttle that has a crash landing. Although the movie scene is different from the Columbia crash, studio heads were sensitive to the perception of having such a scene in their movie so close to the Columbia tragedy.
In the movie, the problem comes from navigation errors that cause the shuttle to aim for a landing in downtown Los Angeles rather than Edwards Air Force Base, whereas the Columbia’s problems were apparently not related to navigation.
The same day, Paramount ordered the latest trailer, which shows the space shuttle in jeopardy, pulled from theaters.
