 Starring: Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Delroy Lindo, Stanley Tucci
Director: Jon Amiel
Year Of Release: 2002
Plot: The Earth’s core has stopped spinning and as a result the planet’s protective electromagnetic shield is disintegrating, causing disastrous lightning storms and the pigeons in Trafalgar Square to go nuts. The only hope is the get the core spinning again, so the Americans build a machine that can go thousands of miles into the Earth’s interior, packed with nuclear bombs that will supposedly get the job done. |
The Core really is one of the stupidest movies ever made. People talk about Roland Emmerich’s films being dumb, but at least his movies are aware of it, while The Core takes itself incredibly seriously. Despite it’s almost scientific tone, this is a film where in the first 15 minutes, all the pigeons in Trafalgar Square decide to go nuts and basically devastate London in an orgy of self destruction. The reason is supposedly because the Earth’s electromagnetic field is turning off, which pigeons use to navigate long distances, although this doesn’t explain why they apparently suddenly go blind as well and cause double decker buses to crash.
Then moments later, other electromagnetic problems cause the space shuttle to accidentally end up descending into LA rather than Edwards Air Force Base. The spacecraft manages to touch down in the LA River, which is basically a giant storm drain traversed by endless bridges (it’s where the motorcycle chase ends up in Terminator 2), but miraculously everyone makes it out alive!
The film is jaw-dropping in its ridiculousness, but it seems to think it’s being incredibly clever and character driven (if you watch the making of featurette on the DVD, the cast and crew take it so seriously they seem to be talking about a completely different one to the film they made). In fact it’s almost the ultimate Bush-era movie, dumb and convinced that any problem can be solved given enough money and explosives.
However one interesting thing is the film’s use of unobtanium. The substance has become far more famous in recent months because it’s what the evil humans are after in Avatar, and why they were so keen to displace the Na’vi, because the natives’ magic tree is sitting on a giant pile of it.
Despite having a stupid name, James Cameron didn’t make it up (although it does sound like the sort of dumb thing he’d call something). It turns up in The Core too. Going to the middle of the Earth demands a ship made of something that can withstand massive pressures as well as enormous amounts of heat without cooking everyone inside. In the film, that substance is unobtanium.
The Core didn’t invent it either, as the name unobtanium has been around since the 1950s. It was first used by aerospace engineers when they were trying to work out the future of their business. In thought experiments, they would ‘invent’ materials with the properties they’d need in an ideal world, whether those materials actually existed or not (for example, an ideal material might be mass-less, even though such a thing is unlikely to exist in the real world, or able to easily withstand the heat generated when an object enters the Earth’s atmosphere). These ideal but non-existent materials became known as by the deliberately humorous name unobtanium, as did those which did exist but which were so difficult to get hold of, or were beyond the current reach of science to create, they might as well have been mythical.
For example, when America was developing the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane during the Cold War, many of the engineers used the term unobtanium for titanium. The reason it got this name because they knew they needed titanium in order to keep the plane strong despite the temperatures the shell would reach, but at the time the Soviet Union had nearly all the world’s supply of the metal, so it was literally unobtainable (the US later sneakily managed to get titanium by getting a third country to buy some from the Russians and then sell it on to them). Others have applied it to things that might be theoretically possible, but are currently beyond the limits of technology, such as room-temperature super-conductors, or getting usable sources of antimatter.
Since then it’s been used in all sorts of theoretical engineering projects, so that the absolute ideal can be worked out, with the hope that by knowing that, they’ll then be able to work backwards to find the materials that are available, which best approximate the properties needed.
Unsurprisingly unobtanium was co-opted pretty quickly by science fiction, but normally given a different name, because unlike James Cameron and the makers of The Core, most writers realise it’s a pretty dumb name and essentially an insider engineering joke. For example, dilithium in Star Trek, adamantium in X-men and the Marvel Universe, are both technically forms of unobtanium, as are the numerous other chemical substances sci-fi and fantasy have come up with, which allow the plots to work even though such materials aren’t around in the real world.
To be honest though, inventing a fictional material that can withstand the intense heat and pressure in the centre of the Earth is probably the least stupid thing about The Core. It’s dumber that they’d call it by the cringe-inducing insider joke unobtanium. But hey, I suppose if James Cameron can get away with it and make $2.5 billion in the process, perhaps I’m being a bit harsh. I suppose the other possibility is that The Core is actually a prequel to Avatar, although I'm presuming that isn't what Cameron wanted us to think.
TIM ISAAC
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