A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

SUNDAZED TO THE CORE: I didn't bother covering the Aaron Eckhart-Hilary Swank action thriller The Core when it came out. Yes, it contains a former Academy Award winner, which is Factor #1 in locating bad movies whose trashing is worth covering, but the movie is what it is: a preposterous Blowing Shit Up movie with a sense of humor about itself. If that sort of thing is your bag, go see it, but if not, avoid. Simple enough.

Did I say preposterous? Maybe I shouldn't have.

North County (CA) Times reviewer Jeff Pack said the movie had "a preposterous plot, cliched characters, and silly special effects" in his March 27 review. Nothing that anyone else hadn't said about the film.

But according to the film's producer, David Foster, the man responsible for putting Ringo Starr in Caveman and two Short Circuit movies (with Fisher Stevens playing an Indian scientist), Pack went too far. In a Letter to the Editor of the newpaper, Foster wrote:

When I read that "The Core" suffers from "a preposterous plot, cliched characters, and silly special effects," I realized Pack didn't do his homework. If he had checked with your science editor or searched the real core online, he would have found out that many geophysicists and deep earth scientists believe we will be down there soon enough.

Two Ph.D.s from Cal Tech/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one Ph.D. from the University of California, and one Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia laid out the science for us so that it would be real. If Pack thinks our plot is preposterous, then our team of geophysicists are all wrong, which I seriously believe is not the case. If Pack was alive and well in the '50s and '60s, he probably would have said we'd never walk on the moon or land on Mars. He might even have called those two monumental events preposterous as well.

The characters in our film were shaped by the scientists referred to above. They're all well-known and highly respected in their field and helped the writers, the director, and the actors so they'd behave like real scientists do today. We also had three astronauts as technical advisors work with the rest of our cast. One was Col. Susan Helms, of the Air Force and NASA who guided Hilary Swank. In other words, we took great pains to be accurate in our technology, science, and behavior. So, I guess real scientists and real astronauts are cliched, according to Pack.

I leave it to you readers to determine how realistic a film can be if it relies on the existence of a new metal named "Unobtanium", has people walking around the earth's core with pressure coming down on them at 800,000 pounds per square inch, and casts Hillary Swank as a brilliant astronaut.

edited to add: How bad is the science in the movie? Check out this essay on BadAstronomy.com, via Andy Lloyd of Pathetic Earthlings.