The Core is the sort of film where you know, from the start, without doubt, that it has no bloody hope whatsoever. It’s the sort of film where some cocky idiots (probably exaggerating the sizes of their genitals) will do something incredibly predictable and yet physically impossible, get a lot of praise, a lot of money and a lot of sex, and the only half-likeable character will get killed partway through. It’s formulaic film-making at its worst.
Intuitor gave The Core an XP rating. That’s its (albeit terse) way of saying ‘it’s crap’. Now we’ll just look at the computers we see in the film - covered briefly by Intuitor, but we’ll go deeper.
Put simply, at the University of Chicago, some implausibly young and handsome university professor (looking a bit like Duncan James) is giving a lecture about physics - it’s basically jargon, poorly thrown together to form a barely comprehendable sentence. When not spouting poorly-remembered primary school physics, he appears to try chatting up members of the class. He spouts some utter nonsense about sound waves losing frequency when they pass through rock, and then demonstrates this by blowing a trumpet at a piece of limestone.
Somewhat predictably, the students are saved from this boredom as he is plucked out by - yes, you guessed it - US Government agents before he completes the demo, and is whisked off, in a chatered aeroplane, to a mortuary in Washington DC. Where the bodies from thirty-two unexplained deaths are stored. From Boston.
I’m sure the Bostonians understand the need to store bodies before a post-mortem is carried out, so why not put them in Boston? Because, apparently, the thirty-two deaths were hushed up. By the military. Not a single journalist saw it, and not a single person phoned up a news station. Presumably they’ve all been shot to protect federal security.
These people all, miraculously, died within ten blocks of each other. Nice round number, eh? It takes Duncan James (and another scientist he’s met up with, a Russian man called Serge) a couple of seconds and no examination to surmise to the military general, Thomas Purcell, that the deaths were caused by malfunctioning pacemakers caused by some magnetic force in some form. The general takes this (unfounded) explanation without doubt. And dismisses them.
Our Duncan James lookalike is frustrated by the fact that the General is only interested in it not being an actual war, and so withdraws to do some of what all good scientists do. Some detailed analysis.
Meanwhile, we see pigeons getting confused in Trafalgar Square, and crashing into Nelson’s Column, apparently very disorientated. Yeah, right. (Amusingly, a Routemaster bus in London is using an American number plate. Haha. Haha.) I must confess that I did find this scene somewhat hilarious - THE POSESSED PIGEONS OF DOOM!!! Presumably Alfred Hitchcock was right after all.
Prof. Duncan James spitting image (whom, we can discern, is called Dr. Keyes) watches a report on the incident. On “GBTV”. On his computer. In 2002. At nearly 3/4 screen size, in high definition.
This is almost completely implausible. There’s no way a middle-of-the-range worsktation, provided by a university, would be able to play such a video without some choppiness, or loss of quality (MPEG2, anyone?) It would be even less likely that it could be streamed: in my experience, good quality streaming requires at least a 2mb/sec connection to the outside world. The computer also uses angular fonts everywhere, and, somewhat mysteriously, the throbber is still animating in the Internet browser window behind the video (which uses non-standard controls, I might add) - meaning that even more network traffic is being produced by the browser.
Of course, Dr. Keyes imagines that the birds are incapable of navigating by sight over short distances, like Trafalgar Square - and must use their (apparently magnetic) navigation abilities. Therefore - shock horror! The Earth’s magnetic field must be collapsing. He retires to his computer to do some more analysis.
Meanwhile, the Space Shuttle Endeavour starts re-entry - and as soon as the communications blackout ends, it becomes apparent that Endeavour is off course by 129 miles, and heading for Los Angeles. Mysteriously, the Mission Controller’s computer displays this as a dialogue box - dangerously obscuring the map. Surely even NASA wouldn’t be stupid enough to succumb to this basic UI design flaw?
The re-entry sequence is also far too quick. Shuttle re-entry normally takes twelve minutes, at least, not including the glide time. It also confuses me as to why Endeavour’s commander didn’t employ her aerobrake, a parachute, when they had to make an emergency landing in Los Angeles. While it’d be remarkably cool to have a space shuttle land in the middle of LA, it is almost certainly impossible - spacecraft are fitted with remote kill switches, which will, in the event of a major course deviation, blow up the craft, killing those on board if they haven’t ejected or bailed out. It seems almost certain that they’d ask the crew to bail out and then detonate Endeavour just short of LA.
Mysteriously, the NASA machines also display that old cliche, hundreds of scrolling lines of hexadecimal and binary code! Yipee! This, however, is nowhere near as mysterious as how no-one else in the world, apart from Dr. Keyes, has worked out that the Earth’s magnetic field is deteriorating because the core has stopped rotating. Does no-one else in the world own a compass? As Inuitor rightly put it, no Boy Scouts?
So, it’s quite boring for the next bit. Put simply, another scientist, called Zimsky-something, becomes involved, and The Wonderful US Government finally listens. They use some implausible ship, called Virgil, created out of some implausible metal, throwing several billion dollars at it to get it done in three months (rather than ten years). Of course, the ’ship’ will head down to the core of the Earth and get things moving again. In the only way they know how.
Yes, again, when in doubt, throw a nuke at it. Yeah. Right.
Meanwhile, the FBI knock on the door of some Script Kiddie. With a long nose, stupidly high voice, and around three computers. He runs a ‘core purge’ command on all three, presumably wiping the hard disks, sticks his CDs in a toaster and microwave, and then tries to wipe the computers double by running a magnet down the front of the tower.
However, this is highly unlikely. One would have to reboot into an external OS to purge all data on the hard disks. It would be possible to run rm -rf / from within a Unix, but it wouldn’t completely wipe the hard disk. It is also highly unlikely that such a ‘purge’ would complete before the FBI break in - so he completes the job by wiping the hard disks by waving a magnet at them. Even this wouldn’t guarantee complete security though.
Somehow, this Script Kiddie, apparently called ‘Rat’, is placed with the team of Keyes, Zippy and several others (including, yes, a beautiful girl) to help with the mission to get the Earth’s core spinning again. Sadly, he isn’t sent to his almost certain doom at the core of the planet - he’s instead told to stay on the surface. His job is to prevent anyone from precipitating worldwide panic by posing any theories about the series of bizarre events.
Yeah, right. Pigeons have flown into windscreens (very unlikely), people have died mysteriously, Rome has been completely destroyed, the Golden Gate Bridge has collapsed, the Space Shuttle Endeavour has mysteriously crashed in LA, and thunderstorms of unbelievable power have been hitting the planet. How come no news channels have invited analysts to appear, suggesting what might be going on? How come no crackpot fundie on the GOD Channel has claimed that this is the Rapture followed by the Apocalypse? How come no-one has made a link?
Nevertheless, Rat is sent to work. He seemingly does this by - you guessed it - searching the Internet.
The numbskull government launches the craft, at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. It’s all very boring.
Somehow, NASA Mission Control is qualified to run a mission beneath the Earth’s surface. This is completely impossible. The operating environment is completely different, and while it might be possible to have a similar terminal, every single member of staff would have to be retrained.
Even more irritatingly, the terranauts run a ’simulation’ of how the density of the core is less than they’d expected: therefore, the nukes will be useless. However, in typical US military style, evil General Purcell has spent all that money on a nuke, and wants to use it.
So Rat tries to save the team - by, yes, you guessed it, searching the Internet. Apparently, the US Government has special (unsecured) web pages just for this sort of emergency. I mean, there’s no need to write a robots.txt file. No reason for them to put even a simple .htaccess password gate on it. The whole thing strikes me as completely unrealistic.
Rat somehow uses this to divert power from the weapon, meaning that the crew is saved. The film, at this point, became so boring I just switched it off.
However, there is a minor glimmer of hope at the end. Rat hijacks a computer network - and turns it into a spam botnet. It spams hundreds of thousands of E-mail addresses with the news that the ‘terranauts’ have saved the world.
However, this light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of a fast approaching train. Firstly, for some reason, Rat makes the computers on the network display cutesy graphics. Yeah, right. Secondly, Rat, of all people, should know that only real suckers believe everything they see in an E-mail. Presumably that includes the film-makers.
I found the film so boring that I almost can’t be bothered to rate it on the Crashed Pips Irritatingly Implausible IT Classification System. However, after little consideration, I decided that it fits the ‘18′ rating quite nicely. It must have been hallucinated by a drunk student on LSD. In other words… it’s crap. It’s so predictable I didn’t even put a spoiler warning on it.
Occasionally, one will run into a nerd who’s sufficiently old to remember logging into Usenet, probably from the the Bourne shell on their (massive) UNIX System V workstation. A good indication of whether someone is old enough to remember this is whether or not said nerd has a beard that is at least two inches long and smells strongly of alcohol.