The Core - the inner core

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Movie
German title The Core - the inner core
Original title The core
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2003
length 137 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Jon Amiel
script Cooper Layne
John Rogers
production Cooper Layne
David Foster
Sean Bailey
music Christopher Young
camera John Lindley
cut Terry Rawlings
occupation

The Core (Original title: The Core ) is an American science fiction film from 2003 . The film is vaguely based on the novel Company Core by the American science fiction author Paul Preuss and copies and varies the style of well-known Jules Verne stories. The film opened in German cinemas on April 3, 2003.

action

Some strange, seemingly incoherent incidents happen: people in Boston collapse dead for no apparent reason, flocks of pigeons in London suddenly go crazy, and the space shuttle " Endeavor " deviates from course on its approach and can only be accessed with difficulty by the crew in the canal bed Los Angeles River made an emergency landing.

The government commissioned General Purcell to get to the bottom of the cause and consulted two scientists who were friends: the geophysicist Keyes and the French high-energy weapons expert Leveque. Together with the luminary Dr. Conrad Zimsky gets the duo on the trail of the reason: the core of the earth has inexplicably stopped rotating, so the planet's magnetic field is slowly dissolving . As a result, solar radiation , which has been largely filtered by the ionized layers of the atmosphere , will increase so rapidly over the course of a year that all life on earth will burn up. Purcell therefore orders a rescue operation. Zimsky contacted his former partner Ed Brazzelton, who made two revolutionary inventions: a highly effective laser-ultrasonic drill and the material Unobtainium , which withstands extreme forces and high temperatures. Funded by the US government and led by Brazzelton, the team of scientists begins using all their resources to construct a drill vehicle, which they call Virgil. With the Endeavor astronauts Iverson and Childs as Virgil's pilots, the team is to penetrate into the depths and make the Earth's core rotate again using several nuclear warheads. In order to prevent a worldwide panic, the clever hacker "Rat" (German: Rat) is supposed to conceal the operation and delete any information from the worldwide data networks .

The journey for the terranauts is fraught with danger. In a gigantic underground geode made of huge amethysts , Virgil is nearly shipwrecked. As the crew disembark to get the ship afloat, Commander Iverson dies from a falling crystal. As the voyage continues, the outer hull of the ship is damaged in a diamond layer. The rear module that Leveque is in has to be abandoned and is crushed by the enormous pressure.

Ultimately, only Keyes, Childs, Brazzelton and Zimsky reach the Earth's core. When they found out through new calculations that the explosive power of the atomic bombs they were carrying was not enough, Zimsky switched to plan B. He has a secret deal with Purcell over a project called DESTINI ( D eep E arth S eismic T rigger INI tiative). It is a seismic weapon that should be used against hostile countries. It turns out that the tests with DESTINI are the real reason the Earth's core stopped spinning. In view of the failed mission, Zimsky and Purcell now want to restart the Earth's core using DESTINI. Keyes, who sees this as too high a risk with little chance of success, does not want to give up her mission and contacts Rat, who manages to paralyze DESTINI's energy supply at the last minute.

This gives Keyes and Zimsky time to come up with an alternative plan. You want to place the individual bombs around the inner core of the earth and then detonate them one after the other in a timed manner so that the shock waves reinforce each other and are ultimately sufficient to get the core going. Each bomb is to be dropped in a module by Virgil. However, this is only possible by a crew member through the turbine climbs of the ship in the back part and a mounted there lock releases, but this means that this person will not make it back in the safe capsule and thus the order a suicide mission is . Brazzelton sacrifices himself because Virgil is his life's work.

Finally, the remaining three crew members move at breakneck speed in the liquid outer core of the earth around the inner core and one after the other decouple the individual modules of Virgil with a time-controlled bomb each. Shortly before the penultimate module is about to be dropped, Zimsky realizes that the explosive force will not be enough and the plan threatens to fail. Due to a sudden evasive maneuver by the pilot Childs, Zimsky is pinched by the bomb and has to remain in the detached module. At the last moment he can give Keyes the tip to use the plutonium from the Virgil engine to reinforce the last bomb.

Keyes removes the plutonium core from Virgil, places it next to the remaining bomb in the last module, and disconnects it. One after the other, the bombs detonate as planned. The earth's core starts moving, the earth's magnetic field builds up again and the global threat is averted. The pressure wave and the hot magma hurl the command module of Virgil with Keyes and Childs up through the layers of the earth, where it finally lies on the sea floor without any energy or drive. With the very last of their energy, the two remaining terranauts can send a signal and are finally rescued by the US Navy .

All those involved are sworn to maintain secrecy about the mission and the DESTINI project. In order to inform mankind about the DESTINI project, the rescue operation and the previously unknown heroes who lost their lives to save the earth, Rat later hacked into the internet anonymously in an internet café and thus distributed the information to everyone Newsrooms in the world.

background

Physical aspects of the film

The Core simplifies and falsifies numerous natural laws. On the page "Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics", which examines the physical correctness of motion pictures, The Core takes pride of place as "worst physics film of all time".

Deviations from the novel

  • The effects of the collapsing geomagnetic field are limited in the novel to telecommunications and people who live at over 2000 meters above sea level.
  • In the novel, a tube lined with the fictional beryllium- based material hudderite is drilled towards the earth's core in order to lower an atomic explosive device on a hudderite rope through it.
  • Instead of the secret government project in the novel, it is Islamist terrorists who want to cause earthquakes under Israeli cities with the help of an inclined hole using atomic bombs.

Others

  • Director Jon Amiel tells in the audio commentary on the DVD that the trick of getting the advice from Dr. Keyes' cell phone uses, whereby Keyes gets free long distance calls on his cell phone, is actually possible (see: Phreaking ).
  • When the imminent premiere of The Core in trailers in the cinemas was announced in early 2003 , scenes from the emergency landing of the Endeavor could be seen in it. When the Columbia space shuttle crashed at the same time , the trailer was called back and revised. For the film, however, the Endeavor landing was left.
  • The channel in which the shuttle lands are flood channels and the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River . This appeared in the past in numerous episodes of American television series and several action films, especially in Terminator 2 , The Flying Eye and Just 60 Seconds .
  • Virgil , the name of the drilling vehicle, is based on the poet Virgil , who leads the traveler in the Divine Comedy through the realms within the earth.
  • Council prevents the initiation of DESTINI ( Alaska , possibly Gakona ) by diverting the required energy to Coney Island in New York, about 6,500 km away . However, this is technically not possible, as Alaska is not connected to the American continental power grid.
  • In the same scene, Rat tries to gain access to the US Department of Energy's website . However, this fails at first with the error message “ 404 - Access Denied ”. The error number "404" actually means " Page not found ", the error number of an access denial is 403.
  • There is a reference in the film to the television series Xena - The Warrior Princess , as advice requires junk food and Xena videos as a condition of its participation . In fact, Rat's video requests went through some changes during the shoot. First he ordered Star Trek episodes, later it was changed to SpongeBob and finally to Xena.
  • Towards the end of the scene with the misguided pigeons, instead of a pigeon, a trout crashes into a shop window. This is a joke from the trick engineers who created the film effects.
  • In the film, some of Rome's sights and the Golden Gate Bridge are destroyed.
  • In the cartoon series South Park , the plot of The Core is shown in the episode Die, Hippie, Die! (Episode 127) parodied. A wheeled drill is being built to break through a crowd of partying hippies . The boss of the company, Cartman , wants his team to have a "black man who sacrifices himself if something goes wrong". This is another direct nod to the movie besides the drill, as the self-sacrificing Brazzelton is African American .

Reviews

"Fantastic catastrophe film, which successfully tries to preserve the inner logic and the seriousness of the subject through a carefully structured script as well as solid directing and acting."

- Lexicon of international film

"After the rocket worm fired, the crazy company degenerated into a boring video game that, in spite of the hail of digital diamonds, never reached a real cinema format."

- Der Tagesspiegel , April 7, 2003

“If the cinema-goer embarks on this fantastic journey, they will not mind a millisecond turning a long nose at the natural sciences. The actors of this utopian disaster film do the rest to convey the journey to the inner core credibly. Even a walk through 4400 ° C hot magma becomes a serious matter. "

- Heilbronn voice , April 3, 2003

The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating "valuable".

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for The Core - The inner core . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , March 2003 (PDF; test number: 93 392 K).
  2. ↑ "Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics" (English)
  3. ↑ The Core - The inner core. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  4. ↑ The Core - The inner core. Retrieved February 22, 2020 .