neumu [ cinematronic ]




	The Core
	Jon Amiel Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Stanley Tucci, Delroy Lindo, DJ Qualls, Tcheky Karyo, Richard Jenkins, Bruce Greenwood, Alfre Woodard 2003		"Journey to the Center of the Earth" meets "Deep Impact" in the sci-fi foolishness of "The Core," an amusingly daft B-movie featuring a slew of good actors slumming for fun and profit. Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart and Stanley Tucci lead a cavalcade of indie-movie luminaries wrestling with a write-itself script about global cataclysm: Something stops the earth's core from rotating, which screws up our electro-magnetic field and promises death and destruction to all civilization. Super-charged lightning storms trash major cities; big quakes open large fissures; and radiation starts to slip through holes in the atmosphere to microwave world-famous landmarks. This won't do, so a noble physics professor (Eckhart) and his French colleague (Tcheky Karyo), a space-shuttle captain (Bruce Greenwood) and his young female co-pilot (Swank), an acclaimed but arrogant scientist (Tucci), and a maverick genius (Delroy Lindo) must board a high-tech digger and burrow into Terra Not-So-Firma to get the Big Blue Marble spinning again. The character arcs and climax are predictable, the special effects are uneven, but "The Core" isn't rotten, so much as it's cracked.