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The Core

428 statements
83 feature instances
53 referencing feature instances

The Core	type	TVTItem
The Core	label	The Core
The Core	page	TheCore
The Core	comment	The Core is a 2003 Disaster Movie (or possibly a Stealth Parody of same) directed by Jon Amiel, with a cast including Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, and Stanley Tucci.The film is about a group of scientists who must travel to the center of the Earth to restart the faltering core of the planet. The government gets a group of four scientists to find a way to make the Earth's core continue to spin, since it's winding down and with it goes the Earth's magnetic field, and without it the entire surface will be melted by cosmic winds. Using literal Unobtanium to build a ship hull that grows stronger the more pressure is put on it, they set off to deploy a set of five 200 megaton nuclear bombs in the core with the idea to restart it spinning.Not to be confused with the 2000 film Deep Core.
The Core	fetched	2024-04-24T11:30:19Z
The Core	parsed	2024-04-24T11:30:19Z
The Core	processingComment	Dropped link to OneHitKO: Not a Feature - UNKNOWN
The Core	processingComment	Dropped link to SummerBlockbuster: Not a Feature - ITEM
The Core	processingComment	Dropped link to TheDivineComedy: Not a Feature - ITEM
The Core	processingComment	Dropped link to XenaWarriorPrincess: Not a Feature - ITEM
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The Core	isPartOf	DBTropes
The Core / int_10a262e4	type	Headphones Equal Isolation
The Core / int_10a262e4	comment	Headphones Equal Isolation: The LA canal bridge worker who only notices the space shuttle sliding up behind him when he turns round - and that's only to see what his workmates are running away from.
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The Core / int_1282bf4f	type	No Celebrities Were Harmed
The Core / int_1282bf4f	comment	No Celebrities Were Harmed: Zimsky is basically a perverse mix of Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins.
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The Core / int_14848fa3	type	Multinational Team
The Core / int_14848fa3	comment	Multinational Team: Subverted. It should have been an entire world effort, since everyone would die if it failed, yet it seems to be an almost 100% American project with French meddling (Serge Leveque brought from his government nukes stamped with the French flag). And maybe Dr. Conrad Zimsky had been Polish by his name and mannerisms (Poles have among Europeans, though not among Anglophones, the reputation to be insanely proud).
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The Core / int_18aff462	type	Artistic License â€“ Biology
The Core / int_18aff462	comment	Artistic License â€“ Biology: One of the first signs that something is going wrong is when pigeons suddenly go completely mental and start smashing into everything. This is explained by the changes to the Earth's electromagnetic field messing with their natural navigation systems. While it is true that many birds such as pigeons use electromagnetics to navigate, it is for long-distance travel only. It would be more like if your car's GPS went on the fritz: instead of flying to London, they'd end up in Norway. They still have eyes, they wouldn't just whack into anything in their way! It may, however, work this way if the field is fluctuating wildly and causing the pigeons to get confused and panic; however, that does not appear to be what's happening. In its defense, the movie also lampshades it; when the hero asks "How do birds navigate?", one of his grad students replies, "By sight." Apparently, a bunch of orcas felt like singing humpback songs to the Virgil when it re-emerged into the ocean. Even though orcas don't sing and would scare off any humpbacks that did come near the vehicle.
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The Core / int_1a3a91dd	type	Say My Name
The Core / int_1a3a91dd	comment	Say My Name: Keyes to Leveque as Leveque is being crushed inside of a compartment.
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The Core / int_1a5bba2b	type	Artistic License â€“ Geology
The Core / int_1a5bba2b	comment	Artistic License â€“ Geology: More examples than any human being can list, but we're going to try: Let's start with the fact that in Real Life, the Earth's core spins because the rest of the Earth is spinning. It rotates once every 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds, just like the rest of the Earth does. Relative to somebody standing on the Earth's surface, the core doesn't appear to move at all. If the core "stopped spinning", it would appear to spin in the opposite direction relative to the Earth's surface. (And where would all that angular momentum go? At the very least, the rest of the Earth would have to speed up.) A planet's interior and exterior rotating at different rates is a real phenomenon called Differentiated Differential Rotation, but the only planet known to have this particular quirk is Neptune, and it is most likely impossible for a terrestrial planet to experience this. The Earth's outer core weighs in at 1.8 sextillion metric tons. You'd have to throw one hell of a monkey wrench into the path of that spinning freight train to brake it from one-rotation-every-24-hours to a dead stop. Not to mention we haven't developed a single nuclear warhead powerful enough to even break 6.0 on the Moment Magnitude scale. Krakatoa laughs at our most powerful nuke. So how can you expect a nuke to even give so much as a nudge to all that molten iron? On the subject of the core's weight (and thus, density), at some point they get the surprise that the core is supposedly of a different density than they thought (emphasis added) it had. The movie handwaves it with a variant of "hey, nobody has ever been down there to measure the core's density" (again, emphasis added). Never mind that said density has been accurately measured by how it affects the propagation seismic waves (from earthquakes of known origin), a measurement that has been verified by how it's used to accurately calculate back the position of new quakes by their seismic waves' propagation through the core. The Virgil encounters an underground equivalent of an asteroid belt composed of gigantic diamonds. Diamonds cannot form as deep at the ship's level, since carbon could not possibly crystallize in those kinds of temperatures; the crystals would be constantly breaking down before they could fully form. Plus, carbon is far too light to remain below the mantle for very long; it would be like popping a balloon at ground level and expecting the helium to remain where it was. When the Virgil descends through the Earth's crust and into the mantle (and, later, when it has to travel upward through the mantle to escape), the mantle shown is clearly supposed to be a liquid, thereby not requiring the use of their drilling laser. In Real Life, the lower and middle mantles are semi-liquid goop that flow like pitch (at best), and the upper mantle is most decidedly solid. A cavernous gas-filled geode, surrounded by 800,000 pounds per square inch of pressure at several thousand degrees, would never be able to form in the first place, much less endure for the years or millennia before the Virgil encountered it. This one gets Lampshaded in the movie, with two of the scientists discussing how it should be impossible. It eventually gets a Handwave that boils down to "look, it must be possible, as it's right here." When the impeller is jammed by a fallen amethyst crystal and the geode starts leaking magma from above, the team keep right on cutting through the crystal at the cost of one member's life, even as the pooled magma gets closer and closer. But amethyst melts at the kind of temperatures which liquefy magma; it's only compression that keeps such crystals intact, and the geode's open interior should give heated minerals enough space to deform freely. By all rights, the crew should have just gone back inside and waited for the magma (which their vessel is designed to withstand) to engulf the Virgil and melt the thing loose. The geomagnetic field protects the surface of the Earth from charged particles (like the solar wind and cosmic rays), but it has no effect on electromagnetic radiation such as microwaves. If the Earth was hit by an evil microwave Death Ray from the sun, like the one shown in the movie, we'd be fried whether the Earth's magnetic field was there or not. (And if space really was filled with that much microwave radiation, every one of our satellites would be fried instantly.) When the Virgil begins its journey toward the core, it begins at the Marianas Trench, which rends itself apart to form a whirlpool that sucks the ship downward. The problem: the Marianas Trench is on a convergent plate boundary.
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The Core / int_1e584efa	type	Cruel and Unusual Death
The Core / int_1e584efa	comment	Cruel and Unusual Death: Serge's death, which has the poor guy getting slowly crushed inside of a compartment. When the compartment is detached, it gets compressed into a small box.
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The Core / int_1f6f887	type	Planetary Core Manipulation
The Core / int_1f6f887	comment	Planetary Core Manipulation: The Earth's core slows down and needs to be restarted by four scientists in an Unobtainium-hulled drilling machine with five 200-megaton nukes.
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The Core / int_230d64	type	Screw the Rules, I Have Money!
The Core / int_230d64	comment	Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Brazelton hasn't built a prototype of his ship at the time the military catches up to him because he didn't manage to improve his production methods enough to build the thing without spending a ludicrous amount of money. So the military gives him a ludicrous amount of money ($50 billion to be precise).
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The Core / int_2a090d00	type	Lampshade Hanging
The Core / int_2a090d00	comment	Lampshade Hanging: After discovering that the Earth is doomed, the protagonist is summoned to a meeting at the Pentagon to explain the problem to the military. When asked what can be done about it, he dives into a passionate, in-depth explanation of why the plot of the movie they're in is impossible (in short: there's no way they could possibly get to the core in the first place). The answer he gets is "Yes, but... what if we could?" In addition, less than five minutes later in the movie, the impossible substance that makes the whole story possible is dubbed "Unobtainium".
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The Core / int_2be271c7	type	Hollywood Hacking
The Core / int_2be271c7	comment	Hollywood Hacking/It's A Small Net After All: "You want me to HACK THE PLANET??". And he does. Pushed to the extreme of the trope for Rat: he is at the same time cartoonishly thin on one side and cartoonishly junk-food engorged on the other side. Nobody seems ever to ask how film hackers are never fat, even as they eat enough pizzas and chocolate bars to feed an entire platoon and never seem to do any physical activity except typing.
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The Core / int_3126c34a	type	Insufferable Genius
The Core / int_3126c34a	comment	Insufferable Genius: Zimsky. Also highly downplayed with Rat.
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The Core / int_3e95582f	type	The Greatest Story Never Told
The Core / int_3e95582f	comment	The Greatest Story Never Told: Defied by Rat, who spreads files on the mission and Project DESTINI to all of the major news services of the world.
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The Core / int_40bb59d0	type	Blatant Lies
The Core / int_40bb59d0	comment	Blatant Lies: When Rat is being busted by the FBI, he quickly starts destroying evidence by purging it and microwaving CDs. They come in, and:
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The Core / int_40cc0c7e	type	Bittersweet Ending
The Core / int_40cc0c7e	comment	Bittersweet Ending: The core is successfully restarted, and the remnants of the Virgil crew successfully return to the crust to get stuck on the ocean floor but able to send a beacon that attracts whales that allow Rat to trace their location. Only two of the Virgil crew make it out alive, as almost all of the rest performed Heroic Sacrifices to advance the mission.
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The Core / int_443f9d8a	type	Ask a Stupid Question...
The Core / int_443f9d8a	comment	Ask a Stupid Question...: Keyes approaches Zimsky on the street after the latter finished a presentation to see if he could review Keyes' core-stopping research.
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The Core / int_51640e80	type	Bond One-Liner
The Core / int_51640e80	comment	Bond One-Liner:
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The Core / int_51a3ba7	type	We Used to Be Friends
The Core / int_51a3ba7	comment	We Used to Be Friends: Zimsky and Braz were colleagues before he claims Zimsky stole his research and paid him nothing in return. They butt heads quite a bit through the mission but reconcile shortly before Braz's Heroic Sacrifice.
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The Core / int_56ff2e35	type	Bat Deduction
The Core / int_56ff2e35	comment	Bat Deduction: Keyes manages to deduce what all the dead people have in common in less than a minute based solely on the specialties of the two people brought in to investigate.
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The Core / int_5973f24f	type	Unplanned Manual Detonation
The Core / int_5973f24f	comment	Unplanned Manual Detonation: Upon reaching the Earth's core, the crew discovers that one big nuclear explosion isn't going to cut it, so they devise a plan to split the bombs into multiple compartments, which they will then release in key locations. Unfortunately, Virgil wasn't designed to be able to jettison undamaged compartments, and the manual override switch is outside the ship. In an area exposed to magma. Braz volunteers to deactivate it, knowing it'll be a one-way trip.
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The Core / int_59bde072	type	Scientist vs. Soldier
The Core / int_59bde072	comment	Scientist vs. Soldier: The United States Government (the "soldiers") created a weapon of mass destruction meant to trigger earthquakes at will (Project DESTINI) out of sheer paranoia and when they test-fired it they caused the whole mess that drives the plot, and when things start to look belly-up they are perfectly willing and able to try to fire it again without knowing whether or not it will make things worse but believing it's not like they aren't already with their backs against the wall. The rest of the cast fulfill the scientist role, and start by telling them how brain-dead stupid the Project was, call out Zimsky for being the one to design it, and race to fix the core.
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The Core / int_5a6ccc79	type	Profane Last Words
The Core / int_5a6ccc79	comment	Profane Last Words: When Zimsky is stuck with the nuke, talking into his recorder, he wonders aloud what the fuck he's doing just before his death.
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The Core / int_5e57282b	type	Fake Video Camera View
The Core / int_5e57282b	comment	Fake Video Camera View: A man is recording video of his family in Trafalgar Square, then we see them through the viewfinder of a video camera, including blinking red dot and "REC" in the upper right corner, just before the scene of pigeons falling from the sky, dead.
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The Core / int_5f2b0457	type	Nerds Are Virgins
The Core / int_5f2b0457	comment	Nerds Are Virgins:
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The Core / int_62f9d08e	type	Freeze-Frame Bonus
The Core / int_62f9d08e	comment	Freeze-Frame Bonus: When pigeons lose their sense of navigation and are flying into plate-glass windows, one of the windows finally breaks. If you freeze-frame on this moment, you'll see that the window is broken not by a flying pigeon, but by a flying trout.
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The Core / int_6439de78	type	Heroic Sacrifice
The Core / int_6439de78	comment	Heroic Sacrifice: Braz, Leveque, and Zimsky. Leveque's death is sort of a subversion, considering that his death possibly could have been prevented had Beck flipped the override switch.
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The Core / int_6b6556ee	type	Mentor Occupational Hazard
The Core / int_6b6556ee	comment	Mentor Occupational Hazard: Granted, this is a Dwindling Party story, but Cmdr Bob Iverson's role in teaching Beck how to be a leader meant he was likely doomed anyway, forcing her to step up.
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The Core / int_6bda9a30	type	Meaningful Name
The Core / int_6bda9a30	comment	Meaningful Name: The ship is named the Virgil, after Dante's guide through Hell in The Divine Comedy.
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The Core / int_72856b70	type	Godzilla Threshold
The Core / int_72856b70	comment	Godzilla Threshold: Creating an experimental machine capable of going down to the center of the Earth and dropping multiple multi-megaton nuclear warheads is an insane idea, but considering the only other option is sitting down and waiting to die it's the best chance humanity's got. The plot becomes a Race Against the Clock because the government is going to apply their own version of the Threshold once it looks like the Virgil mission may not succeed and fire Project DESTINI again in the hopes that this will make the core stable... and taking the chance it will just accelerate the apocalypse if it doesn't.
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The Core / int_740f59b4	type	ColorCodedForYourConvenience
The Core / int_740f59b4	comment	The first is that Josh designed the ship's computer to use sound waves to determine the density of the materials ahead of them, determining what they could and couldn't pass through, which were Color-Coded for Your Convenience. He unfortunately never taught the computer how to read pockets of empty space, which is how the ship ends up crashing into a giant geode, leading to Iverson's death.
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The Core / int_7582930a	type	Hollywood Science
The Core / int_7582930a	comment	Hollywood Science: The Movie. Seeing how this is what The Core is most known for, the examples are put in their own section here. Artistic License â€“ Biology: One of the first signs that something is going wrong is when pigeons suddenly go completely mental and start smashing into everything. This is explained by the changes to the Earth's electromagnetic field messing with their natural navigation systems. While it is true that many birds such as pigeons use electromagnetics to navigate, it is for long-distance travel only. It would be more like if your car's GPS went on the fritz: instead of flying to London, they'd end up in Norway. They still have eyes, they wouldn't just whack into anything in their way! It may, however, work this way if the field is fluctuating wildly and causing the pigeons to get confused and panic; however, that does not appear to be what's happening. In its defense, the movie also lampshades it; when the hero asks "How do birds navigate?", one of his grad students replies, "By sight." Apparently, a bunch of orcas felt like singing humpback songs to the Virgil when it re-emerged into the ocean. Even though orcas don't sing and would scare off any humpbacks that did come near the vehicle. Artistic License â€“ Geology: More examples than any human being can list, but we're going to try: Let's start with the fact that in Real Life, the Earth's core spins because the rest of the Earth is spinning. It rotates once every 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds, just like the rest of the Earth does. Relative to somebody standing on the Earth's surface, the core doesn't appear to move at all. If the core "stopped spinning", it would appear to spin in the opposite direction relative to the Earth's surface. (And where would all that angular momentum go? At the very least, the rest of the Earth would have to speed up.) A planet's interior and exterior rotating at different rates is a real phenomenon called Differentiated Differential Rotation, but the only planet known to have this particular quirk is Neptune, and it is most likely impossible for a terrestrial planet to experience this. The Earth's outer core weighs in at 1.8 sextillion metric tons. You'd have to throw one hell of a monkey wrench into the path of that spinning freight train to brake it from one-rotation-every-24-hours to a dead stop. Not to mention we haven't developed a single nuclear warhead powerful enough to even break 6.0 on the Moment Magnitude scale. Krakatoa laughs at our most powerful nuke. So how can you expect a nuke to even give so much as a nudge to all that molten iron? On the subject of the core's weight (and thus, density), at some point they get the surprise that the core is supposedly of a different density than they thought (emphasis added) it had. The movie handwaves it with a variant of "hey, nobody has ever been down there to measure the core's density" (again, emphasis added). Never mind that said density has been accurately measured by how it affects the propagation seismic waves (from earthquakes of known origin), a measurement that has been verified by how it's used to accurately calculate back the position of new quakes by their seismic waves' propagation through the core. The Virgil encounters an underground equivalent of an asteroid belt composed of gigantic diamonds. Diamonds cannot form as deep at the ship's level, since carbon could not possibly crystallize in those kinds of temperatures; the crystals would be constantly breaking down before they could fully form. Plus, carbon is far too light to remain below the mantle for very long; it would be like popping a balloon at ground level and expecting the helium to remain where it was. When the Virgil descends through the Earth's crust and into the mantle (and, later, when it has to travel upward through the mantle to escape), the mantle shown is clearly supposed to be a liquid, thereby not requiring the use of their drilling laser. In Real Life, the lower and middle mantles are semi-liquid goop that flow like pitch (at best), and the upper mantle is most decidedly solid. A cavernous gas-filled geode, surrounded by 800,000 pounds per square inch of pressure at several thousand degrees, would never be able to form in the first place, much less endure for the years or millennia before the Virgil encountered it. This one gets Lampshaded in the movie, with two of the scientists discussing how it should be impossible. It eventually gets a Handwave that boils down to "look, it must be possible, as it's right here." When the impeller is jammed by a fallen amethyst crystal and the geode starts leaking magma from above, the team keep right on cutting through the crystal at the cost of one member's life, even as the pooled magma gets closer and closer. But amethyst melts at the kind of temperatures which liquefy magma; it's only compression that keeps such crystals intact, and the geode's open interior should give heated minerals enough space to deform freely. By all rights, the crew should have just gone back inside and waited for the magma (which their vessel is designed to withstand) to engulf the Virgil and melt the thing loose. The geomagnetic field protects the surface of the Earth from charged particles (like the solar wind and cosmic rays), but it has no effect on electromagnetic radiation such as microwaves. If the Earth was hit by an evil microwave Death Ray from the sun, like the one shown in the movie, we'd be fried whether the Earth's magnetic field was there or not. (And if space really was filled with that much microwave radiation, every one of our satellites would be fried instantly.) When the Virgil begins its journey toward the core, it begins at the Marianas Trench, which rends itself apart to form a whirlpool that sucks the ship downward. The problem: the Marianas Trench is on a convergent plate boundary. Artistic License â€“ Medicine: A failure of the Earth's magnetic field isn't going to stop a pacemaker (or a wristwatch, for that matter), and even if it did, the heart the pacemaker is attached to wouldn't suddenly stop beating entirely. Pacemakers are given to patients with irregular or erratic heartbeats. A failed pacemaker may be a medical emergency, but it's not a guaranteed instant death sentence. note There is one possible justification: the shifting magnetic field induced electrical current into the wiring and electrodes around the heart. The pacemaker isn't the killer, it's simply the means. Accidental minor electrical shock via current generated by shifting magnetic fields that puts the patient into ventricular fibrillation. At least it's a shorter stretch than everything else in this flick. Artistic License â€“ Nuclear Physics: The 5 bombs in the movie have a yield of 200 megatons each. No Real Life nuclear weapon larger than 50 megatons has ever been detonated, and no weapon larger than a theoretical 100 megatons has ever even been built. Even using the most compact bang-for-your-buck nuclear weapons technology available, a single 200 megaton device would be larger than a whole compartment on the Virgil. Our hero has to boost the warhead yield of the last bomb by 30%. How does he do this? By taking 6 pounds of plutonium from the Virgil's nuclear reactor and placing it next to the bomb. It's doubtful the writers were aware that multimegaton nuclear devices use the nuclear fusion of heavy-hydrogen isotopes as their primary energy source, and only use the nuclear fission of plutonium-239 (which has to be weapons grade, not reactor grade) to set the fusion reaction off. Now, fission-fusion-fission bombs do employ a uranium-238 tamper around the outside, which absorbs the neutrons generated by the fusion reaction and undergoes spontaneous fission. This doubles or even quadruples the warhead yield. At the 200 megaton level, it's likely that all the bombs had to be fission-fusion-fission devices. However, the uranium tamper must surround the fusion core to do this. Having a chunk of uranium (or plutonium) sitting off to one side would only create some atomized uranium (or plutonium) shrapnel. Artistic License â€“ Physics: Sound waves do not change frequency when they pass from one medium to the next. (They do change wavelength, though, since the speed of propagation always equals the frequency times the wavelength.) The Second Law of Thermodynamics, in particular, takes a mighty shellackin' in this movie. Even if unobtainium were a perfect insulator, so that no external heat could get in at all, the interior of the Virgil would still generate an enormous amount of its own waste heat from human bodies, life support systems, electronics, the motors running the impellers, and so on. Just look at how hot the nuclear reactor's core was. The only "heat sink" they brought along was some liquid nitrogen. Even if half the entire payload mass was liquid nitrogen, it would certainly have absorbed all the heat it could within the first hour. note Although here we have a case of two scientific wrongs making a right: because of gravity, any journey through the planet, regardless of the start and end points, should supposedly only take about 45 minutes with an appropriate vehicle (which they had); so enough liquid nitrogen to cool the Virgil for an hour would actually have been sufficient and even allow a decent amount of leeway. Likewise, generating electric energy simply because it's hot outside won't work. You can only generate power if there's a temperature difference, and heat is allowed to flow along that temperature difference — unobtainium or no unobtainium. Any theoretically-possible scheme for using the hull to generate impeller power would have fried the contents within seconds. Perhaps the most glaring flaw of the movie is that, if the Earth's core did somehow stop rotating, the geomagnetic field wouldn't gradually grow unstable. It would just disappear. Just Plane Wrong: Not only does the space shuttle not rely exclusively on a magnetic compass for navigation, a magnetic compass isn't even part of its navigation package. Earth's normal geomagnetic field changes not only with latitude and longitude, but also with altitude; and at the altitude for low Earth orbit, it's very different than it is down here on the surface. The shuttle determines its location partly by data fed to it from the ground — which also doesn't rely on magnetic compasses — and partly by extrapolating this data via its very limited onboard computers. (And nowadays, one would suppose, from GPS.) Writers Cannot Do Math: When a character uses prime numbers to send a secret message, the recipient starts the list of numbers with 1, which is not a prime number noteIt is mathematically classified as a unit—in fact, the only number so classified.
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The Core / int_7870735b	type	From Bad to Worse
The Core / int_7870735b	comment	From Bad to Worse: How Josh and Zimsky explain the effects of the Core stalling and the EM field failing from everything with an electronic circuit getting fried to lightning storms with a hundred strikes in every mile. "After that...it gets bad."
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The Core / int_8560c16f	type	Fatal Family Photo
The Core / int_8560c16f	comment	Fatal Family Photo: After Leveque's death, we see a book opened to a page with a drawing of Leveque labeled "PAPA" by what is presumably Leveque's child.
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The Core / int_85cad9bb	type	Earth-Shattering Poster
The Core / int_85cad9bb	comment	Earth-Shattering Poster: This◊ poster. While the image being portrayed is of the Earth slightly off center with a red line running directly through the center, the message is still pretty clear: The earth will be destroyed from within, and it's not going to be pretty.
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The Core / int_86b21114	type	Badass Boast
The Core / int_86b21114	comment	Badass Boast: This is Rat's defining characteristic, really. Bond One-Liner:
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The Core / int_8738b454	type	Signs of the End Times
The Core / int_8738b454	comment	Signs of the End Times: People with pacemakers all dying due to localized electromagnetic pulses. Birds mass suiciding because their directional sense was off, causing them to fly top speed into buildings. The ozone layer developing holes that let through unfiltered sunlight hot enough to melt the Golden Gate Bridge.
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The Core / int_87ab7f69	type	Sharp-Dressed Man
The Core / int_87ab7f69	comment	Sharp-Dressed Man: Dr. Conrad Zimsky. Not only he is always elegant like a head of state, but during the helicopter landing scene, when everyone else has a beaten-up bag, camera closes in on his Louis Vuitton bag... even as he is going to a very possible death.
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The Core / int_8d6d9535	type	Artistic License â€“ Medicine
The Core / int_8d6d9535	comment	Artistic License â€“ Medicine: A failure of the Earth's magnetic field isn't going to stop a pacemaker (or a wristwatch, for that matter), and even if it did, the heart the pacemaker is attached to wouldn't suddenly stop beating entirely. Pacemakers are given to patients with irregular or erratic heartbeats. A failed pacemaker may be a medical emergency, but it's not a guaranteed instant death sentence. note There is one possible justification: the shifting magnetic field induced electrical current into the wiring and electrodes around the heart. The pacemaker isn't the killer, it's simply the means. Accidental minor electrical shock via current generated by shifting magnetic fields that puts the patient into ventricular fibrillation. At least it's a shorter stretch than everything else in this flick.
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The Core / int_8db4988a	type	Unusual User Interface
The Core / int_8db4988a	comment	Unusual User Interface: Rat can get free long-distance on a mobile phone by dialling a certain number and then making a modem-like sound by blowing through a gum wrapper.
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The Core / int_94cc2c28	type	Exact Time to Failure
The Core / int_94cc2c28	comment	Exact Time to Failure: Zimsky summarizes how long they have during his and Keyes' Aerosol Flamethrower presentation.
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The Core / int_9d4b58ba	type	I Let Gwen Stacy Die
The Core / int_9d4b58ba	comment	I Let Gwen Stacy Die: Had Beck flipped the override switches when Keyes told her to, Leveque could've been spared the grisly death that he was subjected to. Keyes then calls her out on it.
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The Core / int_9f81bd21	type	Stealth Parody
The Core / int_9f81bd21	comment	Stealth Parody: Many believe the film to be this, some film critics and even reports from the actors acknowledging that they knew how goofy it all was (Aaron Echart said he couldn't stop laughing that he was wrestling a nuke). That there were originally going to be DINOSAURS below the Earth would support this.
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The Core / int_a3509d95	type	The Password Is Always "Swordfish"
The Core / int_a3509d95	comment	The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Serge set the nuke codes to his daughter's birthday. A justified example, as there is no possibility the nuke will be misused and the code should be something easy to remember.
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The Core / int_a8559a9f	type	RealLife
The Core / int_a8559a9f	comment	The 5 bombs in the movie have a yield of 200 megatons each. No Real Life nuclear weapon larger than 50 megatons has ever been detonated, and no weapon larger than a theoretical 100 megatons has ever even been built. Even using the most compact bang-for-your-buck nuclear weapons technology available, a single 200 megaton device would be larger than a whole compartment on the Virgil.
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The Core / int_ad22fa80	type	Apocalyptic Log
The Core / int_ad22fa80	comment	Apocalyptic Log: Lampshaded and sidestepped towards the end. Zimsky has been narrating into a handheld recorder for the entirety of the mission, presumably for his next book. Towards the end he is trapped in one of the ejected compartments of the Virgil, 4000 miles underground near the earth's core, and waxing philosophical into his recorder when he suddenly stops, realizes his situation, and realizes that his recording will be destroyed in a matter of seconds. He asks, "What the fuck am I doing?" and dies laughing seconds later.
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The Core / int_afc52a86	type	Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot
The Core / int_afc52a86	comment	Pushed to the extreme of the trope for Rat: he is at the same time cartoonishly thin on one side and cartoonishly junk-food engorged on the other side. Nobody seems ever to ask how film hackers are never fat, even as they eat enough pizzas and chocolate bars to feed an entire platoon and never seem to do any physical activity except typing.
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The Core / int_b0a91b69	type	Convection, Schmonvection
The Core / int_b0a91b69	comment	Convection, Schmonvection: Averted, mostly. The characters were being protected by the Unobtanium hull of the Virgil, and they couldn't exit the craft without suits of the same material. Braz got cooked to death when he went out into the magma-free, but appropriately very hot impeller compartment to deactivate the safety switch holding the compartments in place.
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The Core / int_b0cd3349	type	Fridge Brilliance
The Core / int_b0cd3349	comment	Either Virgil has a backup generator which allows running a small pilot light (and the welding machine in the scene where the power cables are attached to the hull after the core of the reactor had been pulled out), or the characters have a sixth sense which allows them to see in pitch black darkness. It's a perfectly sealed shell thousands of miles below Earth surface. There is no way it can get light inside once the electrical power dies.
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The Core / int_b55e8979	type	Science Hero
The Core / int_b55e8979	comment	Science Hero: Ironically, given the sloppiness of the actual science, the protagonists are quite intentionally written to be these.
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The Core / int_b5b4f019	type	The Rat
The Core / int_b5b4f019	comment	The Rat: Averted. The character of Rat wasn't an informant, he was simply a really really good hacker. And then played straight, as Rat is the one who decides to inform the world about the "Unsung Heroes" of the Core mission.
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The Core / int_b773ec0e	type	DidNotThinkThisThrough
The Core / int_b773ec0e	comment	Did Not Think This Through: It's understandable, given how fast they had to build the ship and were working with only estimations, but two major oversights in Virgil's design become major issues for the mission. The first is that Josh designed the ship's computer to use sound waves to determine the density of the materials ahead of them, determining what they could and couldn't pass through, which were Color-Coded for Your Convenience. He unfortunately never taught the computer how to read pockets of empty space, which is how the ship ends up crashing into a giant geode, leading to Iverson's death. The second comes after learning their original plan won't work, with the backup plan to eject Virgil's compartments manually and scatter them around the core so he explosions reinforce each other. The ship isn't designed to eject undamaged compartments, so they need to unlock the master hydraulic gear. Which is located in the crawlspace they use to get in and out of the ship, and is heated to about 9,000 degrees. Braz even lampshades this when Zimsky complains. The military's approach to this whole mess is not that dissimilar to that of the atom bomb: they are most definitely Not Happy about the collateral damage that Project DESTINI has brought, even chewing out Zimsky over him not telling them this was a possibility, but the genie is out of the bottle now and they won't part with their shiny new weapon.
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The Core / int_bc00493f	type	Precision F-Strike
The Core / int_bc00493f	comment	Precision F-Strike: Recording his final thoughts at his imminent demise, Zimsky realizes no one will ever hear them, and delivers the following:
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The Core / int_c01027a6	type	Better than a Bare Bulb
The Core / int_c01027a6	comment	Better than a Bare Bulb: The movie spends a bunch of time on lines that seemingly give a wink-and-a-nod to how ridiculous everything about it is, typically some variation of, "That's impossible!" "But what if it wasn't?"
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The Core / int_c145f69b	type	Subverted Trope
The Core / int_c145f69b	comment	Leveque's death is sort of a subversion, considering that his death possibly could have been prevented had Beck flipped the override switch.
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The Core / int_c3191ad7	type	Smooch of Victory
The Core / int_c3191ad7	comment	Smooch of Victory: Beck and Josh share one at the very end when they figure out how to get Virgil moving again just as the nukes go off. Interestingly, though, they bond but there is no further indication of romance or attraction between them by the time the movie ends.
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The Core / int_c446f93c	type	Artistic License â€“ Nuclear Physics
The Core / int_c446f93c	comment	Artistic License â€“ Nuclear Physics: The 5 bombs in the movie have a yield of 200 megatons each. No Real Life nuclear weapon larger than 50 megatons has ever been detonated, and no weapon larger than a theoretical 100 megatons has ever even been built. Even using the most compact bang-for-your-buck nuclear weapons technology available, a single 200 megaton device would be larger than a whole compartment on the Virgil. Our hero has to boost the warhead yield of the last bomb by 30%. How does he do this? By taking 6 pounds of plutonium from the Virgil's nuclear reactor and placing it next to the bomb. It's doubtful the writers were aware that multimegaton nuclear devices use the nuclear fusion of heavy-hydrogen isotopes as their primary energy source, and only use the nuclear fission of plutonium-239 (which has to be weapons grade, not reactor grade) to set the fusion reaction off. Now, fission-fusion-fission bombs do employ a uranium-238 tamper around the outside, which absorbs the neutrons generated by the fusion reaction and undergoes spontaneous fission. This doubles or even quadruples the warhead yield. At the 200 megaton level, it's likely that all the bombs had to be fission-fusion-fission devices. However, the uranium tamper must surround the fusion core to do this. Having a chunk of uranium (or plutonium) sitting off to one side would only create some atomized uranium (or plutonium) shrapnel.
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The Core / int_c75df49a	type	Shout-Out
The Core / int_c75df49a	comment	Shout-Out: Oddly enough to Sailor Moon of all things. Keyes tells his grad student assistant "You can use our T1 line to look up Sailor Moon crap, you're up to this!". The Virgil. Project D.E.S.T.I.N.I. is headquartered in Alaska and the facility somewhat resembles that of HAARP.
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The Core / int_c9aea8c8	type	Armies Are Evil
The Core / int_c9aea8c8	comment	Armies Are Evil: The Earth's core got screwed up because those darn evil military sorts wanted an... earthquake gun... or something. Enforced: DESTINI was a hastily-added plot point added in reshoots, after test audiences complained that the original story of the Earth's core just stopping for no discernible reason at all was nonsensical.
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The Core / int_ca81eae7	type	Hollywood Darkness
The Core / int_ca81eae7	comment	Hollywood Darkness: Either Virgil has a backup generator which allows running a small pilot light (and the welding machine in the scene where the power cables are attached to the hull after the core of the reactor had been pulled out), or the characters have a sixth sense which allows them to see in pitch black darkness. It's a perfectly sealed shell thousands of miles below Earth surface. There is no way it can get light inside once the electrical power dies. When Braz steps out in the entrance tunnel to operate the controls which allow separation of Virgil compartments, his helmet lamp cracks instantly from heat. However, there is daylight-like light around him, they didn't even bother to simulate the darkness. (Of course, the walls were supposed to be 9000 degrees, which would mean they'd be glowing white-hot — so if anything there should have been more light.)
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The Core / int_caf8c66c	type	The Chains of Commanding
The Core / int_caf8c66c	comment	The Chains of Commanding: There's an excellent speech on this.
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The Core / int_cb12aacf	type	Deus ex Nukina
The Core / int_cb12aacf	comment	Deus ex Nukina: The Earth's outer core has stopped spinning, and nuclear weapons are the only thing that can get it started again.
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The Core / int_ce1c73e2	type	Just Plane Wrong
The Core / int_ce1c73e2	comment	Just Plane Wrong: Not only does the space shuttle not rely exclusively on a magnetic compass for navigation, a magnetic compass isn't even part of its navigation package. Earth's normal geomagnetic field changes not only with latitude and longitude, but also with altitude; and at the altitude for low Earth orbit, it's very different than it is down here on the surface. The shuttle determines its location partly by data fed to it from the ground — which also doesn't rely on magnetic compasses — and partly by extrapolating this data via its very limited onboard computers. (And nowadays, one would suppose, from GPS.)
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The Core / int_d332bf54	type	Lampshaded
The Core / int_d332bf54	comment	A cavernous gas-filled geode, surrounded by 800,000 pounds per square inch of pressure at several thousand degrees, would never be able to form in the first place, much less endure for the years or millennia before the Virgil encountered it. This one gets Lampshaded in the movie, with two of the scientists discussing how it should be impossible. It eventually gets a Handwave that boils down to "look, it must be possible, as it's right here."
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The Core / int_d7a92919	type	Indecisive Parody
The Core / int_d7a92919	comment	Indecisive Parody: Stanley Tucci gives us one of Richard Dawkins, which is actually not as much of a Flanderisation as you might think.
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The Core / int_da1c8191	type	Writers Cannot Do Math
The Core / int_da1c8191	comment	Writers Cannot Do Math: When a character uses prime numbers to send a secret message, the recipient starts the list of numbers with 1, which is not a prime number noteIt is mathematically classified as a unit—in fact, the only number so classified.
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The Core / int_da8c447e	type	Unobtainium
The Core / int_da8c447e	comment	Unobtainium: Lampshaded, the characters literally call the material "unobtainium" ironically.
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The Core / int_dddbdc26	type	Monumental Damage
The Core / int_dddbdc26	comment	Monumental Damage: A must for this movie's genre. Complete with evil space rays melting the Golden Gate Bridge (and off-screen the Transamerica Pyramid which is located in downtown San Francisco), pigeons going berserk in Trafalgar Square, and accumulated lightning exploding the Roman Coliseum and Vittorio Emanuelle monument, neatly Averted for Paris' Eiffel Tower oddly enough note right as the core was repairing itself, a similar destructive storm was about to spawn right over Paris implying that Paris' Eiffel Tower was next.
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The Core / int_e543a655	type	Light Is Not Good
The Core / int_e543a655	comment	Light Is Not Good: Without the electromagnetic field, the sun's rays will cook the Earth. Best demonstrated when a tear appears over San Francisco, which is hot enough to melt the Golden Gate Bridge in seconds.
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The Core / int_e6558beb	type	Artistic License â€“ Space
The Core / int_e6558beb	comment	Artistic License â€“ Space: The sun does not emit evil microwave death rays that can boil San Francisco Bay and melt the Golden Gate Bridge. (And if it did, a magnetic field wouldn't stop them.)
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The Core / int_e65d7f25	type	Drawing Straws
The Core / int_e65d7f25	comment	Drawing Straws: For who has to go on the suicide mission outside to release the locks holding the compartments together. It seems to be lengths of wire instead of straws, but same idea. Interestingly Subverted— All the wires are the same length. Braz intentionally rigged the drawing against himself because he didn't feel right letting someone else die for his creation. In the end, after tearful goodbyes all around, he gets his wish.
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The Core / int_ec68faa	type	Aerosol Flamethrower
The Core / int_ec68faa	comment	Aerosol Flamethrower: Used by Keyes and Zimsky on a peach to demonstrate what will happen to Earth without the geomagnetic field.
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The Core / int_ed68bcc9	type	Dwindling Party
The Core / int_ed68bcc9	comment	Dwindling Party: Once the Virgil undertakes its mission, crew members get picked off one by one by the mission itself. The Virgil itself, in a way, as every last subsidiary compartment is lost or sacrificed over the course of the film.
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The Core / int_efbb5f9c	type	Down L.A. Drain
The Core / int_efbb5f9c	comment	Down L.A. Drain: Early in the film, the crew of the space shuttle has to make an emergency landing here after Earth's collapsing magnetic field causes the shuttle's navigation systems to go haywire during reentry.
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The Core / int_f0b516b	type	Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto Us
The Core / int_f0b516b	comment	Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto Us: The explanation for the construction and deployment of DESTINI: "Someone was going to build it, so we built it first."
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The Core / int_f1492605	type	Redemption Equals Death
The Core / int_f1492605	comment	Redemption Equals Death: Zimsky finally gets over his ego after Braz punches him in the face during a tantrum. Of course that means he's pretty much the next one to die.
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The Core / int_f511ea9b	type	Product Placement
The Core / int_f511ea9b	comment	Product Placement: There's some less-than-subtle product placement of Pepsi and Mountain Dew. Amusingly, it's when someone can't get one of their vending machines to work. "I'm gonna need an unlimited supply of Xena tapes and Hot Pockets." In a deleted scene, one of the minor characters gets a Hot Pocket foisted on her. We can't tell if her reaction was "Mmm, that's good," "Mmm, that's too hot", or "Mmm, get this thing out of my face."
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The Core / int_f6507695	type	Everything Is Online
The Core / int_f6507695	comment	Everything Is Online: Rat routes a significant chunk of the U.S. electric power grid to Coney Island.
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The Core / int_f9f2c33	type	Running Gag
The Core / int_f9f2c33	comment	Running Gag: Zimsky's ego. Anytime anybody challenged him on anything, he'd ask, "Do you have any idea who I am?"
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The Core / int_fa8245fb	type	Death Ray
The Core / int_fa8245fb	comment	The geomagnetic field protects the surface of the Earth from charged particles (like the solar wind and cosmic rays), but it has no effect on electromagnetic radiation such as microwaves. If the Earth was hit by an evil microwave Death Ray from the sun, like the one shown in the movie, we'd be fried whether the Earth's magnetic field was there or not. (And if space really was filled with that much microwave radiation, every one of our satellites would be fried instantly.)
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The Core / int_fc225bec	type	Artistic License â€“ Physics
The Core / int_fc225bec	comment	Artistic License â€“ Physics: Sound waves do not change frequency when they pass from one medium to the next. (They do change wavelength, though, since the speed of propagation always equals the frequency times the wavelength.) The Second Law of Thermodynamics, in particular, takes a mighty shellackin' in this movie. Even if unobtainium were a perfect insulator, so that no external heat could get in at all, the interior of the Virgil would still generate an enormous amount of its own waste heat from human bodies, life support systems, electronics, the motors running the impellers, and so on. Just look at how hot the nuclear reactor's core was. The only "heat sink" they brought along was some liquid nitrogen. Even if half the entire payload mass was liquid nitrogen, it would certainly have absorbed all the heat it could within the first hour. note Although here we have a case of two scientific wrongs making a right: because of gravity, any journey through the planet, regardless of the start and end points, should supposedly only take about 45 minutes with an appropriate vehicle (which they had); so enough liquid nitrogen to cool the Virgil for an hour would actually have been sufficient and even allow a decent amount of leeway. Likewise, generating electric energy simply because it's hot outside won't work. You can only generate power if there's a temperature difference, and heat is allowed to flow along that temperature difference — unobtainium or no unobtainium. Any theoretically-possible scheme for using the hull to generate impeller power would have fried the contents within seconds. Perhaps the most glaring flaw of the movie is that, if the Earth's core did somehow stop rotating, the geomagnetic field wouldn't gradually grow unstable. It would just disappear.
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The Core / int_fea27091	type	Buffy Speak
The Core / int_fea27091	comment	Buffy Speak: Keyes at one point refers to himself as "Apocalypse Boy."
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The Core / int_ffb975c7	type	Third Act Stupidity
The Core / int_ffb975c7	comment	Third Act Stupidity: The death of Serge Leveque could have been easily averted. It took 2 minutes, 36 seconds of movie time before the compartment was ejected and crushed. A simple and quick manual-control opening of the doors would have easily allowed him to crawl outside before ejection could have not taken more than 4-5 seconds. The entire scene is instead Played for Drama because we're supposed to believe not saving him is the right choice.
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