DVD Extras Review:

Usually the best part of DVD extras are the commentaries. That definitely is not the case here. There is only one commentary and that’s by the director. There are two main problems with it: Jon Amiel, the director, is British. While that isn’t a problem in and of itself, unless your French, he does have a very monotone voice and tends to, how to say this without sounding too harsh, he sounds as boring as an afternoon tea with the queen. Now, aside from the director’s commentary the “making of” extra is worth watching if you’re into that sort of thing.

To be fair, many commentaries given by just one person tend to be rather boring. So lets not be too hard on the old chap. I love The Core ($11.99 at Amazon.com) even though it’s just good SciFi flick. The best reason to love this movie is that it makes heroes out of everyday scientists. Okay, these are like super-scientists but still. I love seeing geeks as heroes and it’s something that kids need to see. Yes, science is cool.

As a SciFi movie The Core is very watchable. Forget the fact that it’s off the scale unrealistic. They’re making a movie about going to the core of the earth, what’d you expect. Disliking this movie based on the plot’s implausibility would be like saying Star Trek is stupid because every scientist knows that you can’t travel faster than light. To which I would quote one of the characters from The Core, “Yes, but what if you could.”

The Core doesn’t take itself to seriously either which is important for a movie like this. They’re reference to “unobtainium” is great. (As far as I know unobtainium comes from a review that panned the movie Armageddon in which the reviewer said that the shuttles must have been made out of it in order to bounce off asteroids.)

Aside from the geek-hero this movie offers first rate acting. Tchéky Karyo, Aaron Eckhart, Stanley Tucci, Delroy Lindo and Hilary Swank among others are superb actors. This movie has a female hot-shot pilot, a genius African American, who invents the probe all by himself in the desert, and a French man who is the nuclear bombs specialist - okay, that’s the most unrealistic part of the movie. This movie isn’t about high drama but it has its moments.

The Core also has the obligatory distruction of a prime city. In this case it’s Rome. It’s about time because Paris got obliterated in Armageddon, London gets it’s fair share of abuse and the only good thing to come from 911 is that New York City can be spared from cinematic destruction for at least a few more years. Think about it: the Big Apple got munched on by Godzilla, terrorized in The Siege, laser blasted in Independence Day, smacked around in Armageddon, and sunk in Deep Impact.

The FX are okay. I like the design of the ship and aside from that they just had a bunch of scenes full of magma. (Hey, it’s not lava. Lava is magma that has reached the earth’s surface. It’s the same as the asteroid/meteorite confusion.)
If you have kids make them watch this movie. We need all the positive portrayals of scientists we can get.

The Core was also partly responsible for a geologist proposing a real probe being sent into Earth’s mantle. You can read about it at Wired Online and at Cal Tech’s website.