Friday,
April 4, 2003
Hooray for cheesy movies!
Back
on Wednesday, I was still feeling relatively perky when I left work, so I called
up Lyndon and asked him if he wanted to go see some cheesy science fiction.
"Yeah, I'd love to see THE CORE," he replied.
So we did, and it was a worthwhile experience. Now, you don't go to movies like this for scientific accuracy -- of course you can drive a Mack truck through the raw, bleeding holes in the science (space suits that can withstand thousands of pounds of pressure and insanely high heat? Restarting a stalled core with nuclear explosions? I particularly liked the magic lasers, myself).
No, you go for the special effects, to see a major city trashed, and for the dialogue, either because it's so damn bad that you can't help MSTing it right there in the theater or because it's witty and clever (see OUTBREAK). In this case, I'm pleased to report that THE CORE falls into the latter category -- the characters are stereotypical but extremely entertaining, the dialogue is sharp and original (when one character punches another one whom he's loathed for decades, I expected him to say, "I've been wanting to do that for twenty years." What he DID say was just so much better), and the depiction of the interior of the earth is extremely pretty.
Of course, watching
Rome get flattened by lightning strikes was rather impressive, too (not as cool
as watching Paris get taken out by an asteroid chunk in ARMAGEDDON, but still
not bad at all). So if you have a hankering for big badaboom explosions and
sharp dialogue, leave your brain at home and go see THE CORE. And keep an eye
out for the geode.