The Core

CORE, THE. Jon Amiel, dir. Cooper Layne, John Rogers, script. US/UK: Core Prods. Inc, Horsepower Films (prod) / Paramount (US dist.), 2003.

High-tech Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), done in the manner of a 1950s/1960s sci-fi disaster movie, which includes Armageddon (1998). Significant here for the imaging of technology. Technology is mostly neutral in the film, but the great threat to the film's heroes—and Earth—is the Destiny device, presented with Modernist design, while the definitely good Earth-boring vehicle Virgil looks like a postmodern vision of a segmented mutant sandworm from one of Frank Herbert's Dune novels (1965 f.). A late shot in the film shows the surviving heroes—a heterosexual couple with some "chemistry" going—safe and comfortably cocooned amid black cables and other devices in what is left of the Virgil. Atomic weapons are positive, if used to re-start the spinning of the Earth's core; and the final shots shows a computer hacker at a cyber-café getting the story out to the world. (RDE, 05/04/03)