I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

THE CORE (SPOILERS... first and only warning.)

I was hoping to see Bend It Like Beckham today, but it was only playing at the AMC Forum 22 (corner Sainte Catherine's and Atwater) and I just didn't feel like going downtown today, for whatever reason, so I decided to see The Core at the much less glamourous Famous Players Dorval, a non-descript 4 screen cinema that, from the looks of it, was built in the 1960s or 70s and which was closed a couple of years back when the larger, swankier Famous Players Colis�e Kirkland opened, but which reopened due to the fact that Dorval isn't that close to Kirkland. The Colis�e is actually a fair bit closer to my house, but, the Dorval Cinema is much more convenient because it's on the route of the 211 bus which goes all the way from downtown to Sainte Anne de Bellevue on the western tip of Montreal Island. Plus, it's cheaper to see movies there than at most other places these days.

The Core is a big budget disaster movie that does follow the template of Armageddon and the like. Due to an illicit, experimental weapon designed to cause earthquakes in specific localized areas, the rotation of the Earth's core slows down, causing fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field that leads to freak events like dozen's of people's pacemakers in Boston suddenly stopping, killing them, and pigeons going crazy in Trafalagar Square, not to mention a malfuncton in the Space Shuttle Endeavor's guidance computers, causing it to go off course during final approach to Edwards Air Force Base and veer towards downtown Los Angeles in a, quite frankly, pretty bloody well realized sequence (I just loved the shot of the Endeavor swooping low over a Dodgers game). Due to Major Rebecca "Beck" Child's (Hillary Swank) impressive navigational abilities and extremely quick thinking, she manages to land the shuttle on the nearly dry Los Angeles river cemented riverbed, doing relatively little damage to the shuttle itself. Meanwhile, university geology professor Dr. Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart) determines that the core will stop spinning completely, causing the magnetic field to weaken and disappear, letting in cosmic rays that will cause massive electrical storms and, eventually, microwaves that will fry everything on the surface. The military enlists Keyes as well as swarmy, egotistical government scientist Dr. Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci), and they visit Dr. Ed Brazzleton (Delroy Lindo), scientist, dreamer and engineer (who seems to have some bad blood with Zimsky) who has dreams of building the Virgil, a machine made out of a previously unknown material highly resistant to pressure and heat which will enable a crew to burrow all of the way though the crust and mantle to reach the core. He had been unable to build it because of lack of funds, but the military provides him with unlimited resources and a three month deadline to get it built, which he does (with the plot necessity of one cruicial design flaw which means, obviously, one crew member will have to sacrifice him or herself). They intend to use 5 strategically placed super nukes to create ripples within the Earth that will bounce off each other and get the core spinning again, in theory. Can they restart the core's rotation before everyone and everything on Earth gets shaken, shocked and fried?

Well, you know the drill (bad pun). 6 mostly expendible crew members go below on a ship... only one or two will come back out. You don't suppose that one of those scenes with the simulator is foeshadowing something, do you? Like which two crew members will be the only ones around to drive the ship back, at the end (if they're successful)? And will the asshole crew member selflessly sacrifice himself by the end of the film? But I wasn't expecting any major surprises, so the predictability of these scenes is only a minor shortcoming. The sole purpose of this sort of film is to show you sights you haven't seen before, and there are many scenes of the desturction of cities and major landmarks, and they're scattered throughout the film, not just at the end like in Deep Impact, the film I was consciously comparing this to, since it was on TV last weekend. For the most part, the destruction is really cool looking, especially that of the Golden Gate Bridge, with microwaves frying the suspension cords, causing the road surface to collapse and sending the exploding cars into the boiling San Francisco Bay below. The destruction of the Colosseum in Rome looked a little dodgy (I think they must have been using 3D Studio Max, for the rumbling explosion effects), but, overall, I didn't think the trailers quite did the effects in this film justice. Also, I already mentioned the shuttle landing, which was one of the most impressive special effects scenes I've seen in quite a while, and there's a breathtaking scene inside a giant geode. The actual core isn't that impressive, but there's not much to see... it's liquid magma, so it's just like bright yellow water. Been a while since I've seen a good disaster movie, and this fits the bill... I'm quite glad I didn't listen to all the naysayers on movie message boards, because I enjoyed it. Not a tremendously great film, but still quite good fun.

***1/2/*****

posted by Steve Brandon @ 8:59 AM