The Calculations Are Off

Science fiction movies fall into one of two categories. Some, such as the Star Wars series and the first 10 Matrix films, are enjoyable. Others, such as The Core and the last 17 Matrix films were laughably bad. I’d like to examine the latter. Hopefully I can convince you to love these enjoyably awful movies as much as I do.

Movies like The Core and The Day After Tomorrow are all based on pseudoscience. Pseudoscience involves using horribly bad fake science and unnecessary metaphors to explain everything. For example, in The Day After Tomorrow, the world freezes because “the world’s oceans reached a critical desalinization point” (Tomorrow). Also, I just made an internal citation joke. Anyway, the idea of the oceans not being salty enough and causing huge ice storms is ridiculous. These cold fronts are so cold that they literally kill helicopters by freezing the engines, yet somehow Jake Gyllenhaal’s character is able to outrun a front in New York and close a wooden door behind him in order to keep safe. To reiterate: the producers personified a cold front, gave it the ability to freeze helicopters, but then also be stopped by wooden doors and somehow people can outrun it. Also, Dennis Quaid walks from Philadelphia to New York in roughly 15 minutes.

The Core is no different. The center of the earth stops spinning, so birds start flying into things. That’s basically the entire plot. Furthermore, the CG used to blow up Rome in the film’s big-budget destruction scene was terrible. They should have just had people dress up as buildings and fall over, because that probably would have looked better. To prove his point that the earth is going to explode if nuclear weapons aren’t used to restart the center of the earth (I wish I were making this stuff up), the main geophysicist uses aerosol to light a peach on fire. The term “geophysicist” is mine, because that’s what the character is; in all of these films, you’ll notice that all of the educated people are referred to as “scientists” in order to dumb it down for the audiences, a situation I’ve dubbed the “5th Grade Science Book Phenomenon”, in which all people who work with science are allowed to be called “scientists” and you don’t need to specify which field they’re in.

In order to further dumb it down for the masses, the “scientists” only use metaphors, even though they are all supposedly the best in their fields and are speaking to other expert “scientists”. In The Core, they use the peach metaphor, refer to another plan as “being a ripple in a pond effect”, and so on. Usually, there are some lame running jokes that are supposed to be funny and poignant at the same time, like that guy whose only line in Independence Day is to repeatedly say “checkmate”.

Stereotypical characters are also key. A quick recap: there’s usually one hotshot pompous new guy, a grizzled old veteran, a female love interest, a comic relief guy, a foreign guy, and a family man who dies. Inevitably, the grizzled guy and the pompous young guy become the best of friends by the end of the movie (see Armageddon, Fantastic Four, Transformers 2, etc.). The supporting cast is usually similarly one-dimensional. There are the data guys who are computer nerds (sometimes a computer nerd is elevated to the status of the main ensemble cast, like in The Core). Also, there are vague references to “the government”. “The government” is usually a bumbling, overly bureaucratic character that is too set in its ways until the rag-tag bunch of courageous “scientists” completes a dangerous mission successfully. I only used the phrase rag-tag there to emphasize how lame this is, since “rag-tag” is only used to describe a) lame things and b) Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Other stereotypical characters include the homely wife of the grizzled guy and generic generals sitting around a war room playing with models and maps.

Additional hilarity can be found in the writing and effects work. Highly educated men write scenarios such as the one found in The Core, when the ship has just enough fuel to escape the mantle on the way home but not enough to get to the top of the ocean. The crew is obviously just going to run out of air at the bottom of the ocean, right? Wrong. The navy “follows the whales” to the location of the ship, since the whales bounce sound waves off the ship and its just common knowledge that if whales are bouncing sound waves off of something, the entire U.S. Navy will follow it. The writing also has impressive-sounding technojargon exchanges like:

Character 1: The components of the cloud’s vectors changed.

Character 2: I know, I factored them into my equations last night.

Oh, I guess everything’s fine then. Interestingly, the phrase “technojargon” in and of itself is technojargon. There is more technojargon in the form of constant swirling graphics and streaming numbers on “government” computers. These numbers don’t mean anything; they’re only there to impress you.

The effects are equally generic. As a rule, you have to blow up some combination of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Empire State Building, Times Square, or the Golden Gate Bridge. It also helps if later on in the movie you show shots of people of all different races feeling scared and anxious as the now globally-known mission to save the earth reaches its terminal phases, because, damnit, we’re all in this thing together.

Every conclusion to these movies includes some variation on the theme “the surviving members of the crew (usually the young guy who now has an appreciation for the world and has matured, his love interest, and the comic relief guy) return as worldwide heroes but humbly choose to live lives of anonymity”. The only film I can recall where this doesn’t happen is The Day After Tomorrow, in which like 60% of the world dies, including all of America, Europe, and Russia that couldn’t flee south.

Since all enjoyably awful sci-fi movies have these common elements, it shouldn’t be hard to make your own. I came up with The Core 2: Back to the Mantle in which there is a problem in the earth’s mantle. In order to get back to the mantle, “scientists” use a machine that generates this heat level called “Zero Degrees Melvin” (this is my fake science thing). Zero Degrees Melvin is the hottest possible temperature an object can reach, and it is the average kinetic energy a particle has just before reaching the speed of light. Obviously, this is all garbage. But it does have lots of technojargon, a necessary requirement.

However, the problem occurs when the machine exceeds Zero Melvin and they go faster than the speed of light, which causes the crew to go back in time. This is sufficient pseudoscience, and from there we go to developing uninteresting love stories and crashing the Arch in St. Louis into the Golden Gate Bridge.

Then I would move on to crappy spin-offs like a Core animated show or maybe The Core 2½: Timon and Pumba’s Adventures. Anyway, the point is, this movie will be awesome, and you have to see it if you want any hope of understanding what’s going on in my conclusion to the awesome Core trilogy, The Core 3: CoreCorpsCorp, Inc.