MichaelMedved.com
Movie Review
"The Core" and "Head of State" Undermined by Real World Events
Ah, for the good old days when all we had to worry about was the End of The World!
In the relatively innocent era before 9/11/01, Hollywood focused considerable attention on far-fetched cataclysms like asteroid collisions ("Armageddon," "Deep Impact") or alien invasions (Independence Day, Mars Attacks), creating disaster films that could thrill audiences without frightening them. The destruction displayed on screen might look horrifying in its own terms (remember the explosion of the White House in "Independence Day," or the massive tidal wave in "Deep Impact"?) but it bore so little connection to real world threats that viewers never needed to feel lasting discomfort.
"The Core" represents a competent contribution to this old fashioned school of filmmaking; at early pitch meetings for the project, the writers (Cooper Layne and John Rogers) probably described it as "?Armageddon" meets "Journey to the Center of the Earth." In order to prevent the total destruction of the planet, an intrepid group of high-tech adventurers must make their way into the earth's molten core and explode a series of high yield nuclear bombs.
Since my geology education came to an end in the eighth grade, I'm in no position to evaluate the science behind the plot but it all sounds sophisticated and logical enough for entertainment purposes. The earth's electromagnetic field has begun to deteriorate, creating massive disasters in Boston, London, Rome, and (most appropriately), San Francisco, where the Golden Gate Bridge collapses with massive loss of life. Aaron Eckhart plays a brilliant but perpetually unshaven geophysicist at the University of Illinois who soon figures out that the cause of all these terrifying calamities is that the earth's core has somehow stopped rotating, and unless it is jump-started then microwave radiation will literally cook the planet.
The U.S. government cooperates with the U.N. (there's a science fiction premise!) to launch a crash program to send an all-star crew toward the center of the earth to detonate their nukes in the hope of forcing The Core back into its proper groove. The mobilization of the "terranauts" follows the time-honored movie tradition of assembling "The Magnificent Seven," yielding an arrogant, suave celebrity scientist (Stanley Tucci in a very elegant silver wig), an eccentric but obsessively ingenious inventor (Delroy Lindo), a Frenchman passionately devoted to his family (there's another science fiction premise!) and played by the earthy Tcheky Karyo, and two veteran astronauts from the Space Shuttle program (Hilary Swank and Bruce Greenwood). The sequence introducing the astronauts features a chilling dramatization of their shuttle facing dire problems during atmospheric re-entry - problems generated by the dissolution of the earth's electromagnetic field - and requiring a spectacularly well-staged emergency landing. Unfortunately for the film, the fresh experience of the Columbia disaster (obviously unanticipated by the producers) gives this plot point an unpleasantly intense impact and produces a significant squirm factor.
The rest of the adventure provides a rollicking good time, as the high tech craft designed by the Delroy Lindo character penetrates the planet's thin crust and plunges past soupy magma and giant crystals toward its fateful destination. Is it a persuasive rendering of geological reality? Probably not, but the colors look great (with echoes of the final journey in "2001: A Space Odyssey") and the human interaction in a group of highly accomplished actors keeps the momentum hurtling forward. The special effects count as highly ambitious, occasionally imaginative, frequently hokey, but never downright cheesy or embarrassing. An obligatory bit of leftwing propaganda (suggesting that a secret U.S. weapons program actually provoked the appalling problems in the center of the earth) detracts only temporarily from the uncontroversial excitement.
English director Jon Amiel (best known for quieter, quirkier character studies like "The Singing Detective" series, "Sommersby" and the superb, under-appreciated "Queen of Hearts") demonstrates surprising flair for this traditional, straight-ahead disaster format. He never condescends to his audience or his screen-writers, treating the loony elements of the story without tongue-in-cheek indulgence or semi-comic asides.
The result is a film I unequivocally liked, and my 10-year-old son, Danny, unreservedly loved. The PG-13 rating comes from some brief, utterly unnecessary strong language and some moderately gruesome deaths to some members of the mission. THREE STARS for "THE CORE."
The awkward timing of this release in the midst of a riveting war in the real world may undermine the box office potential of "The Core." The life-and-death dramas that have dominated our imagination since 9/11 give a quaint, out-of-date tinge to the proceedings on screen, despite their high-tech trappings. The current threats of terror attacks disturb us far more deeply than the prospect of any natural disasters not only because of their vastly greater likelihood but due to their origins in purely human evil - always a scarier, more intimate, and more immediate menace than the implacable forces of the cosmos.
Recent news stories have similarly diminished the appeal of "Head of State," the breezy political comedy from Chris Rock about a hard-luck case from the inner city who becomes a plausible candidate for president. After the vote-counting fiasco of the year 2000, presidential elections may have looked like a ripe target for comedy but it's harder to laugh at the White House with our commander-in-chief engaged every day in a desperate and deadly struggle against tyranny and terror.
Nevertheless, "Head of State" provides a few good-natured chuckles, without ever feeling the need for topicality in the tradition of other recent presidential movies like "Dave," "Primary Colors" or The American President. If a political movie counts as "topical" in today's Hollywood that means it's full of smug liberal preaching, but Chris Rock is too busy going for easy punch lines to pause for any such message-mongering. The unalloyed silliness of the plot echoes the beloved old Gershwin musical "Of Thee I Sing" in making fun of politics in general without targeting specific politicians or parties; in fact, the terms "Republican" and "Democrat" never appear in the script and Chris Rock (as director and co-writer) never specifies the partisan orientation of his hero
That hero (played by Mr. Rock, of course) is a home-boy alderman in Washington, D.C. who gets some great publicity when he rescues an old-lady from an exploding building. James Rebhorn, the leader of his (unspecified) political party wants to exploit that notoriety in the midst of a presidential election after the candidates for president and vice president die in a plane crash. Rebhorn persuades his colleagues on the National Committee to nominate Rock as a replacement candidate for two reasons: number one, it will make the party look good to nominate a black guy, and number two, because Rock is sure to lose, leaving the nomination open for Rebhorn himself in the next election.
Of course, we're in familiar "Mr. Smith" territory here, even though Mr. Rock doesn't go to Washington, but comes from the District. Once again, we've got the good-hearted nobody suddenly thrust into the center of a political maelstrom by cynical sophisticates who plan to manipulate him for their own purposes ? but soon learn that in our unassuming hero they got more than they bargained for.
The charismatic and swaggering Bernie Mac nearly steals the movie as the candidate's older brother, a tough bail bondsman from Chicago, and his surprise choice as a running mate. Robin Givens gets some of the picture's biggest laughs as Rock's gold-digger, harridan of a girlfriend, who dumps him in the movie's opening segment (with graphic comments about his inadequacies as a lover) and then makes increasingly desperate attempts to win him back as he draws closer to the White House. Easily the most enjoyable sequence in the film involves a glittering political fundraiser in the nation's capital in which the stuffy, jewels-and-tuxedos set learns some funky hip hop dance moves from the soulful standard bearer.
Rock's stump speeches and a climactic debate with his over-confident opponent (whose fatuous campaign slogan is "God Bless America, and Nowhere Else!") look clumsy and stilted by comparison. The theme of Rock's campaign involves a startlingly adolescent appeal for social justice - with the candidate observing that nurses can't afford to get treated in the hospitals where they work, or that ordinary people don't earn enough to pay for housing in the cities in which they toil. He then underlines each revelation with the angry declaration: "That Ain't Right!" There's also an unseen, voice-on-the-soundtrack right wing radio blowhard named "Big Dave" who does his best to derail Rock's campaign - given my own career in radio, I would have enjoyed an expansion of this element of the film.
The staging never feels even vaguely realistic and the re-creation of election night coverage by the major networks is so lame and far-from-the mark that one can only conclude that Chris Rock has never bothered to watch the way our quadrennial democratic drama actually unfolds.
As screenwriter, Rock also throws in the sort of absurdly misleading statistic that some poor shnook out there might accept as accurate. In describing his initial desire to nominate a person of color for the Presidency, the Rebhorn character declares that within 20 years blacks will be 20 percent of the electorate, Asians will be 20 percent, and Hispanics will be 39 percent. By predicting an America in which white Anglos comprise only 21 percent of the voting public, he goes much farther than even the most radical demographer. Actual projections for the nation at large show African-Americans with a decreasing - not rising - share of population, and whatever the gains for Hispanics and Asians (who registered as 4 percent in the 2000 census) so-called "White Anglos" will maintain a substantial majority for at least the next 50 years.
It may seem unfair to quibble with statistics in a silly, insubstantial, ideologically unfocused comedy, but many moviegoers will unfortunately glean political "lessons" from this "Head of State." It is therefore worth scolding the tendency to throw out ridiculous and irresponsible numbers; as Mr. Rock's character might appropriately observe: "That Ain't Right!"
The PG-13 rating is also Wrong - with its street language (including frequent employment of the "S-word") and racy sexual references (focusing on a glamorous hottie who's been hired as the permanent prostitute for the candidate), "Head of State" definitely deserves an "R" - and only TWO STARS.
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© Michael Medved. All rights reserved. Website: MichaelMedved.com
Trivia about The Core:
* After the crash of the space shuttle Columbia, trailers for the film were recalled to remove a brief scene of a space shuttle making an emergency landing, but the producers stated that the sequence wouldn't be removed from the actual film.
* Rat's demands changed three times during the progression from trailers to final film. In the original trailer, he demands "I want 'Star Trek' tapes and Hot Pockets." In the recent trailer, he demands "I want 'Sponge Bob' tapes and Hot Pockets." In the final film, he settles for "I want Xena tapes and Hot Pockets."
* Unobtanium is a term used by science fiction fans (and some authors) for a substance with magical properties necessary for the plot to work.
* On 16 March 2002, some scenes were filmed on board the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) while it was in Everett, Washington.
* One of the scientific experts consulted for the making of the movie was Dr. David Stevenson of Caltech. After talking to the producers, he thought of a scientifically possible way to send an unmanned probe to the core. His idea was published in the prestigious science journal Nature on 15 May 2003.
* At almost exactly 9 minutes into the film, near the end of the "birds" scene, a trout is seen smashing into a window instead of a pigeon. This was a joke left in by the team that did the CG pigeons. At the beginning of the movie when the birds are shattering windows on Trafalgar Square in London, scared tourists are waiting in front of the "Theatre du Maurier"... which is in Toronto. This is a reference to Daphne du Maurier who wrote the story The Birds
* At the University of British Columbia, Canada, an Earth and Ocean Science course (EOSC 310) uses this film as a learning tool by showing the film to students and then analyzing the bad science behind it. Ironically, at least one of UBC's professors was consulted during the shoots that were done in Vancouver.
* When Beck is piloting Virgil around the diamonds, the control stick she's using is a Logitech Attack 3 joystick.
* We see a man quickly pull his hand into his car after it gets burnt. In the meantime, shots of other things getting fried are visible, followed shortly by the man looking terrified in the car, while outside, someone walks calmly past.
* When the Golden Gate Bridge is melting away, one of the main support wires whips back and slams into the car of the guy whose arm was burnt. The audio has him screaming, but if you look in the rear-view mirror, you can see that his mouth is only partially open in the same expression of confusion he had seconds before.
* There is no direct power link from the lower 48 to Alaska. The Continental electrical grid extends up to northern British Columbia, then stops. The Yukon (which actually is between BC and Alaska) is not "tied in to the grid", so therefore it would be impossible for them to "draw power from the rest of the US", which is silly anyway, because all the power they were drawing would actually have to go through Canadian power lines.
* To set off the explosions in the core, Keyes and Zimsky place each of the five warheads in one of Virgil's compartments, then eject the compartment. However, Virgil only had six compartments to begin with, and one of them was damaged and ejected earlier in the film, yet somehow the locomotive compartment remains after all the warheads have been placed
* When Rat is trying to "hack" his way into the DoE's "Intranet Database", on his first try to access a file he gets an error "404 - Access Denied". Actually, web server error message 404 corresponds to "File Not Found", while 403 is "Forbidden / Access Denied". Since Rat is working from a seemingly secured computer - he seems to have no trouble at all accessing the DoE's "Intranet" as clearly stated on the screen - probably the correct error message should have been "401 - Unauthorized"
Trivia about Head of State:
* While Chris Rock's character Mayes Gilliam is waiting on the results of the election, he is seen playing the video game Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2 using the character Afro Thunder. The character Afro Thunder is voiced by a Chris Rock imitator.
* Rock got the idea for this story from the 1984 Geraldine Ferraro/Walter Mondale ticket, in which the democrats thought that since they had no chance of winning against Bush/Reagan, they might as well make a historic first so they can win support for the next election. So they ran Ferraro as the first ever woman vice president (they eventually lost)
* Part of the presidential debate is a verbatim repeat of Monty Python's Argument Sketch.
* In the scene where the presidential candidates are visiting a school in Florida, the ambulance seen in the background belongs to the Pleasant Valley Volunteer Fire Department of Carroll County, Maryland
* In the opening credits, it lists many famous politicans, than in
parenthesis it says "(Are not in this movie)"
* Tagline: The only thing white is the house
Fun fact
Informal Presidential polls were taken 1880-1900 by putting pictures of candidates on cigar boxes to see which ones sold the most, according to Ripley's Believe It Or Not
