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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Schmackboy" data-source="post: 805034" data-attributes="member: 1738">CORE SCIENCEStaggering to me that jonrog1, just trying to do a good job, could take so much guff from our RPG compadres.  Sheesh, the guy worked his d20 off to entertain you with the most accurate science the studio system would allow him.  Cut the man and the movie some slack.  No one gets worked up over the science in that movie about the giant monkey discovered on an uncharted island or the other one where they shrink a submarine down and inject it into the President's bloodstream.  Holy mackeral.Now, for the know-it-alls, here's a little bit of vindication for Mr. Rogers:From <a href="http://www.aintitcoolnews.com/" target="_blank">http://www.aintitcoolnews.com/</a>  A big brained Geologist type examines the science and the story of THE CORE! Hey Harry, long-time site visitor, first time poster. Call me Ted. Never felt I had a valid reason to share my opinions with you and your readership, but after seeing The Core, felt compelled to say something about this movie. I'm a talk radio co-host for a science news show, my academic background is in geology/oceanography (UC Berkeley). Love disaster movies, and am a nut for geophysics; needless to say I was long anticipating this movie. How often do you get to see geology itself as an antagonist? However, I wasn't expecting to see an even remotely accurate depiction of earth science in this film. It's a movie, and I'm more than willing to suspend disbelief in such matters. Armageddon, Independence Day, you name it -- if you're into that kind of thing, you can enjoy them for storytelling value even if you like to nitpick scientific points of wild inaccuracy (Volcano notwithstanding that movie is a geologic and cinematic travesty). From a science standpoint, The Core is pleasantly surprising. Regarding presentation of the facts, it's actually not too bad. This is not to say it doesn't take huge liberties for the sake of cinematic license - it does, naturally. But it does do a pretty good job, with some nice surprises in the way of geology. It may be the film's producers actually consulted some experts in the field, if that can be believed. I'll try to keep this spoiler free. Not that there's much to spoil - I mean, anyone who's seen any disaster movie will know the general formula going in, and this movie doesnít screw with that time-honored tradition by throwing in 'twists' or having our heroes, god forbid, not save the earth in the end. The biggest surprise is the hefty running time of 145 minutes. I was expecting around 90 minutes, but no. Pretty much, this movie can be broken down into 1) figure out there's a problem with the core, 2) travel to the core, and 3) fix the core. No surprises there. 30 minutes for each segment would be standard treatment, but the movie didn't suffer for the length and I found myself enjoying it enough that I didn't get up to pee, even though the theater was so empty I wouldn't have had to crawl over 20 sets of toes to do so. So, the core has stopped spinning due to a lightly-touched-on and little-explained secret weapon project designed to produce earthquakes in enemy countries. 'Somehow' this has stopped the core, and since stopping the core is the only purpose of this plot device, it is left at that, which is fine. Geniuses are called in to address the problem, a rogue scientist who just happens to have been designing a ship to travel into the earth is recruited, and bang, we're off to the core. Once there, nuclear weapons will be set off to get the core spinning again, and all will be right with the world. As per usual these days, we know this all from the trailers. I came for the disaster, but I stayed for the science. As I said earlier, it's surprisingly not that bad. Depicting the interior of the earth, for long periods of screen time, is a daunting challenge I imagine if one wants to keep it fairly accurate while not boring the audience to tears. Rocks, even molten rocks, are not the most exciting of villains, and that's all we get in the way of bad guys. There's no-evil-people-trying-to- sabotage-our-heroes-only-to-get-thwarted-in-the-end in this film (which I did expect to see - they even set one of the characters up for it, but he turns out to be a hero too, which was another pleasantly surprising aspect). Rocks, and just rocks, are what we have to contend with here. And there are a lot of exterior (interior?) shots of the ship moving through various layers of the earth. They give you just enough Geology 101 to explain the different layers the ship is moving through, and make it good eye-candy while still sticking to what we know about geomorphology at these depths (which, as the characters often point out, 'we just don't know for sure what it's like down there' which is true, to a point). The biggest complaint I overheard grumbled by fellow theater-goers on my way out, as well as voiced by my wife (who I at least got the opportunity to geek out with and explain things to afterward) was that the ship they used was just totally impossible. Not true. In fact, if we really wanted to, we could probably have built a ship similar to the one shown in the film about twenty years ago. Temperatures and pressures much higher than those encountered in the earth's core are regularly contained, and have been for some time, in experimental fusion reactors (like the ones at Lawrence Livermore Labs) for some decades now. It could be done, there's just no good reason to go to all the expense to do so in reality. And while such a ship could, and I stress could (it would be prohibitively expensive and would require not-insubstantial materials research and development), it was amusing that they just came out and said that the ship was made from a material called 'unobtanium.' Yes, unobtanium. The old sci-fi put-down, they just came out and said it. I chuckled. Sure, using nuclear weapons to jump-start the core was a cop-out, but I can't think of a better one as far as telling a story goes. The 1,000 megatons they used in this movie would in reality be just another drop in the bucket in the naturally-occurring whitenoise of magma displacement in the earth's interior. 1,000 megatons is nothing on a planetary scale. (Read up on the Yellowstone supervolcano if you're interested in not going to sleep tonight. This puppy is set to blow real soon and take out most of North America with it - yes, really.) --------------------------------------------------------------But then again, what does a Berkeley geologist know?</blockquote>

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