Hacker Cinema
The Core
2003 · Film · 136 min
Directed by Jon Amiel
Science FictionAdventureThriller
Geophysicist Dr. Josh Keyes discovers that an unknown force has caused the earth's inner core to stop rotating. With the planet's magnetic field rapidly deteriorating, our atmosphere literally starts to come apart at the seams with catastrophic consequences. To resolve the crisis, Keyes, along with a team of the world's most gifted scientists, travel into the earth's core. Their mission: detonate a device that will reactivate the core.
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38 comments on Hacker News
Check out Angela Collier discuss how "The Core" is a better science movie than Armageddon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l5KHIFIl7U
I always felt that Armageddon occupied this uncanny valley of Hollywood cheese. Too much to suspend disbelief, not enough to be making fun of itself. Always loved "The Core" for being the same sort of film but falling into the second camp.
I remember seeing reddit users recommend it as a great scifi film in 2012. I watched it and was horribly disappointed - it’s “the core” in space with a space zombie.
I guess people like sucking down wet farts for 2 hours. Who am I to stop them?
The Core - Best b-grade disaster movie of recent times!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/
It certainly couldn't be any worse or more idiotic than the scripts for probably every Hollywood natural disaster movie: The Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Deep Impact, Armageddon, etc.
This is what I got (after 2 days) :
You've found:
a cool bug a pretty leaf a secret glade a DVD of The Core (2003) a glass of heavy water a sixth lagrange point a 5G seagull a sensible cheese platter a swatch pop-out wristwatch a relativistic bowling ball $30 in Yahoo a brightly-lit billboard a hot dog a normal-sized apple a bottle of Coke Absolute Zero the gold crown Archimedes stole a necklace of element samples whose symbols spell out your name a smooth green snake an eye in the sky a dna base pair a steam calliope a sterile neutrino a secret leaf a stick a large hadron an asterisk a sunken treasure a strangely heavy subway token a podcast episode a friendly bee a spiral-cut diamond a golden radio tuned to 1.618 MHz a burrito a cool pair of shoes with flames on the side a scroll lock key a primordial black hole a tree-filled grove and a nice spot for quiet contemplation a festive but somehow unnerving holiday card from Junji Ito a single caffeine molecule two Andalites, one canonical baby shoes (and baby) a friend an icosahedral d10 a piece of pumice the Principality of Sealand a whale shark a sparkling gem some tin from the pantai remis mine a rock with neat stripes an orb wren a marsh wren a single grain of salt a holographic Charizard business card Voyager 1 a wayward Roomba full of moondust a curious humboldt squid a bathyscaphe a delicate music box a spider-silk scarf a friendly jumping spider a friendly cat a first of its kind a pair of platonic solids, not quite touching a really cool data point a block of scandium a beige electron 11 squares packed into a larger square a piece of space shuttle food the 3 million point line a sunspot Voyager 2 a baby hedgehog a tiny pteranodon a guitar pick a pair of squirrel goggles some microbial life a hydrogen ion a piece of coronium (iron) a broken smoke machine The Long Now Foundation's archive of every Animorphs book the platinum cylinder formerly used to define the kilogram
(And reached the ends)
I liked this movie. It was funny that years later they have functional harrier jets.
Another movie with poor science but more fun is The Core.
No, The Core is actually a documentary
So what you're telling me is that 1 of my favorite movies, The Core (2003), is waaaay off on Science :D
:(
I saw a documentary recently about this, its called ‘Core’ where they build a ship to dive into the mantle to spin up this ball of iron using nukes.
On a serious note, it’s amazing that we still have studies about this, and revising our knowledge!
A secret HAARP-like device that causes directed earthquakes was literally from the movie The Core. It use is what kicked off the plot.
Being able to say that the Earth's core stopped just like what happened in the movie makes the earthquake machine theory more plausible or something.
The movie The Core begs to differ.
This is literally the plot of The Core -- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/
This is discussed at length in this film:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Core
Trash disaster movies have their place, 2012, Day After Tomorrow, The Core, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Moonfall, etc. They are all entertaining in their own right, and are usually very self-aware of how stupid they are. Ben Affleck's commentary on Armageddon is gold. Though, I think that film was a higher tier than most of the list here, the Aerosmith song made for that film dominated the summer radio that year and the soundtrack flew off the shelves. I wish things like that still happened, you'll get a bump on Spotify but its cultural impact is much less.
General Thomas Percell: How do we fix it?
Dr. Josh Keyes: We can't.
General Thomas Percell: Not in my vocabulary.
(possibly the greatest burn in movie history)
Dr. Josh Keyes: Then you might want to get one of those word-a-day calendars, General, because it's impossible. The core is the size of Mars. You're talking about jump-starting a planet. This is a superheated hyper-fluid of molten iron and nickel at 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And the deepest we've ever been is... 7 miles, with a two-inch drill bit.
General Thomas Percell: If we can go into space, we certainly...
Dr. Josh Keyes: Space is easy. It's empty. We're talking about millions of pounds of pressure per square inch. Even if we somehow came up with a brilliant plan to fix the core, we just can't get there.
> Topic reminds of film The Core in which the core has stopped rotating initiating a series of apocalyptic phenomena. (And in a Hollywoodian fashion the solution is to release a few nukes in it to restart it.)
They should use it in public schools to teach earth science.
Really bad, but I absolutely love trash like this for some reason. I can watch movies like The Core over and over.
Topic reminds of film The Core in which the core has stopped rotating initiating a series of apocalyptic phenomena. (And in a Hollywoodian fashion the solution is to release a few nukes in it to restart it.)
I, and the director of the movie "The Core", agree completely.
The Core movie had a gatling laser miner to get to the core of the Earth.
They tried that in the excellent documentary The Core (2003) but as I recall they didn't all survive.
I completely agree with you regarding Interstellar. I think it’s all about expectations. It was advertised to be this hard sci-fi with plausible physics and it wasn’t, as you say.
On the other hand, I remember enjoying watching the Core. It’s a stupid kind of sci-fi that allows you to suspend your disbelief and have fun. What else can you do with a movie that literally calls the metal the ship is made of unobtanium?
I tell everyone that The Core is the science community's most derided movie, and yet it is in fact an excellent science movie for an important reason, which is simply that it puts science and scientists on a world-saving pedestal. The fact that just about everything that is in the film is in fact unscientific doesn't detract for a moment for the deep implicit respect for the value of science to humanity that the film promotes. This script would likely never have been given the kind of budget it got when it was made and so we need to count ourselves lucky that something so entertaining also offers so much to those looking for a scientific stick with which to beat the Hollywood studio system.
It's probably been in a lot of movies, but I've always loved this scene in THE CORE where they land a space shuttle in the LA river: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG1RwE_x6Vg
Cool! I've thought of doing this as well.
One idea I've had is to stagger the post based on how the site's traffic gradually drops.
If you have ever seen the end of the movie The Core, they use the energy of the bombs and create a chain reaction to keep the earths core moving. I'm sure the science is sound...
In doing this you could keep the project moving over a longer period of time rather than a big bang which might fizzle out.
The Wandering Earth is China’s _The Core_ but not as fun. Maybe similar to that movie where they restart the Sun with a fission bomb :)
As a geologist, your favorite movie is still "The Core" right?
Its a fun question on a Friday, with two possible avenues; "How much heat drain would it take to freeze the Earth's core?", and "What would freezing the earth's core do to life on the planet?"
For me, the more interesting one, which was the 'bad guy' in the forgettable movie "The Core". The earth's magnetic field is created by the motion of the fluid iron (which is conductive) surrounding the solid core[1]. That it is moving and carries charge creates a dynamic dynamo which determines the strength of the magnetic field. Changes in the fluid are why the magnetic poles move around and sometimes change places.
The number 1 feature of the magnetic field (for me at least) is that it deflects the solar wind (those charged particles racing out from the Sun) which would otherwise collide with the gases surrounding our planet and accelerate them outward. Eventually stripping the planet of most of its atmosphere.
One of the less well known ways the solar system could wipe out humanity.
[1] http://www.physics.org/article-questions.asp?id=64
The movie The Core, like so many others, are only plausible if your math is really, really wrong.
Wonder if a nuclear bomb "The Core"-style would work? (Yes, I realize this is a shittt sci-fi movie, but if you are taking about smashing a dwarf planet into mars to generate a huge explosion it doesn't sound too out of the realm of workable.)
I am guilty of reading "predicting foot to meter per year seawater rise" as a satirising exaggeration for "predicting immediate, catastrophic (plausibly sea-level related) consequences" and I did not state that clearly. With that amendment, I think my comment still has merit, but it may no longer have responded to anything you wrote. Sorry about that.
That said, An Inconvenient Truth did suggest a 20-foot rise as something imminent. Did it "predict" it? No, not explicitly, it suggests and imagines and calls to action. It also doesn't specify the timescale, but there is great urgency. With that, your GP, while very much on the high end, is way closer to AIT than AIT is to IPCC.
A short note on movies and art: the difference between "The Core" and TDAT (and "regular" art and the "climate" ditto) is that the latter didn't use science as a plot device, it explicitly injected itself into a political debate, dominated by a scientific discourse.
Where are the people who said that the sea level would raise 1 foot to 1 meter per year?
You didn't answer that question. Everything you wrote is a distraction, which ends up increasing the confusion you describe and complain about.
You pointed to some artists and movies. So what? I can point to movies who have depicted meteors crashing into modern day Earth, and volcanoes erupting in Los Angeles, and even have the core of the Earth stop spinning. Artists have different goals. They are not required to only depict what science predicts +/- 1 sigma.
You point to a scientist who liked that "The Day After Tomorrow" used climate change as a plot device, even if the science was awful. So what? I'm sure some Spacewatch people like "Armageddon" and that some geologists like "The Core", even though the science is awful in both. Are you equally disdainful towards those scientists? Or do only climate scientists draw your ire? (BTW, "Water World" used global warming as a plot device, was almost 9 years before TDAT, and portrayed an equally scientifically absurd future.)
You mentioned "An Inconvenient Truth". Does Gore make a prediction that there will be 30cm or higher water rise per year? Does he even predict that the Atlantic will have reached the base of the Empire State Building by now?
How is the IPCC 2001 report not an attempt at a thorough rebuttal? What level of rebuttal would you require before you say it was sufficient? Do we all need to be like Neil deGrasse Tyson and pinpoint every single scientific flaw in a movie? Or go even further and reject every movie with a flaw?
In other words, I'm not going to get into a goalpost argument with you before you even say what the goalposts are.
Your argument of the structure of the argument is useless. It's so easily inverted. Watch: You have set up your own Motte and Bailey about what's going on in this HN thread, so nothing I say can dissuade you. You have inserted irrelevant commentary from your bailey to defend your views. Now you can ignore me because you think I'm using irrational arguments, because you have placed me in a spot where you think I can be ignored. Now you can enjoy your motte.
I argued that the OP presented a straw man argument that misrepresents what the large majority of climatologists and policymakers like Gore were making 15 years ago. Do you agree or disagree with me?
I presented the IPCC report to supports my argument. Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" also supports my argument. If you disagree, do you have an actual examples of people who predicted 30+cm/year sea rise, or even that much of Manhattan would be underwater by now?
Have you ever seen the beginning of the movie The Core? Just about the only real bit of science in it is that sound travels differently through different materials in the mantle.
To be vetted, an experiment will be peer reviewed by others for obvious mistakes, compared to existing results and mathematical models, and duplicated by others.
Would mining too much geothermal energy hurt the earths dynamo like in the movie The Core :)?
I was trying to figure out where I'd seen this before.
http://www.thecomicking.net/2012/06/25/the-core/
The (terrible) movie "The Core" has a vehicle -- the Virgil.
The Core has perhaps the highest degree of (ridiculousness times budget) of any film ever released.
I love it.
The BBC did a great Horizon documentary on The Core recently where they visited some researchers and looked at some shiny machines which attempted to replicate the conditions at the core and grow iron crystals or something. It talks about local variations in the earth's magnetic field as well. I recommend it.