For some reason, I was under the impression that Jerry Bruckheimer was responsible for this atrocity, as he so frequently is. Oddly enough, Bruckheimer had nothing to do with the Bruckheimer-esque film, but that doesn't save it by a long shot.

In an effort to prevent you from having to endure this movie, I'll just give away everything. I'm a nice guy, that way. Here's what happens:

The US government (the villain, of course) has secretly developed a weapon that stops the planet's core from rotating (although it was designed to disrupt magnetic waves or something. The planet core thing was just a side-effect.) The reasoning is that other countries will inevitably develop the technology to do the same, and we should get there first. They secretly test the weapon, and it works and all, and the planet core stops rotating, causing the electromagnetic field around the planet to collapse, and all hell to break loose. This is pretty much all backstory.

Lowly science professor Dr. Keyes notices the results of the core side-effect (e.g. people dropping dead, birds swarming violently, weird colors in the sky), and immediately comes to the only reasonable conclusion. The earth's core has stopped rotating. He alerts some famous scientist who works for the government and helped design the weapon and who knew the core would stop and all life would end. Unfortunately, everyone involved in the project decided to keep the inevitable end-of-the-world scenario top secret and not to worry about it.

So, Dr. Keyes, his friend Serge, and the government guy have to devise a way to fix the problem. Ultimately, they put together a team of seven to drill to the center of the earth and detonate some nukes to get it going again. The team consists of Dr. Keyes (main character), Serge (nuclear weapons specialist), Other scientist (Keyes's rival), Bob (space shuttle commander), The black guy (who designed the drill and ship it's attached to), the girl (space shuttle pilot), and the Rat (computer wiz). Everyone but Rat goes down. I'm not sure why. It would make more sense if they sent a more expendable crew so they'd have all the experts around in case the plan failed. Oh well. Anyway, they all go down and encounter several adventures on their way to the core. They encounter all the usual problems. Thing malfunction or break, people die, people fight, they discover that the plan won't work because they forgot to incorporate a bunch of variables, but they're going to try anyway, you get the idea. Thus far, the Rat has served no purpose whatsoever, aside from keeping the whole thing top secret by restricting the Internet's access to any information. He's pretty much a polt devise for later in the movie.

Later in the movie, they figure out the plan won't work for whatever reason, so the evil scientist tells the people on the surface to go ahead with Plan B. Plan B is the top secret plan to use the weapon again in hopes that it will cause the core to start rotating. It wouldn't work, though, according to Keyes, because it would just make it so the core would never be able to rotate again. At the last possible second, the Rat hacks into the government server and shuts down the operation. Keyes makes up Plan C (finding some other way to fix the problem), and they go to work with it. A few people die, there's some big explosions, a couple other people die, and the core starts rotating again. Then Keyers and the girl have to get back to the surface, but oh no, they used up all their fuel and coolant and everything, so they're stuck, except that the magical metal hull of the ship can harness the heat and turn it into energy (which is what heat is, but I guess they mean a different energy), which will propel the ship back out. So, they get out, sit at the bottom of the ocean and wait. They get found, and everyone's happy. The Rat burns all the information about this whole ordeal onto a CDR and distributes it around the world, and everyone's a hero.

So, yeah. This was bad. I was actually sort of expecting Keyes to send a heartwarming message to his class telling them he loves them while he detonates the nukes, and Aerosmith plays in the background. This was a very very bad movie.

We all had a few good laughs.