Jon Amiel’s 2003sci-fi disasterThe Coreis bad on every level. The movie’s plot is absurd, the direction is weirdly amateurish, the film relies too heavily on CGI that’s not yet sophisticated enough to do what the movie is asking of it, and even starsAaron EckhartandHilary Swankcan’t sell the terrible dialogue. But there’s one aspect of the movie that’s more than just bad: when it comes to science,The Coreis downright rotten. The premise of the film – that the Earth’s core has stopped rotating, causing chaos on the surface – is ridiculous, but sci-fi movies often start with an impossible premise.
However,The Core’s bad science doesn’t stop there. The film follows a group of scientists, engineers, and astronauts as they journey to the center of the planet to restart the core’s rotation, and along the way, it gets just about every scientific principle wrong that it can get wrong.The Core’s science is so bad that it inspired the creation of The Science & Entertainment Exchange, a National Academy of Sciences program that connects entertainment industry workers with scientists and engineers to promote better science in movies and television.
A team of scientists must journey to the Earth’s core to avert a global catastrophe when the planet’s electromagnetic field begins to collapse. They embark on a perilous mission aboard a specialized vessel, encountering extreme challenges and unforeseen obstacles as they strive to restore stability and save humanity.
How Inaccurate Is ‘The Core’s Science?
The Core’s scientific inaccuracies are myriad. Themovie’s scientists constantly refer to the Earth’s “electromagnetic” field when, in reality, the Earth has amagneticfield, which is quite different. This fieldwould indeed break downif the core stopped spinning, but the results seen in the movie – where people with pacemakers suddenly drop dead, and lightning strikes cause Rome’s Colosseum to explode – are laughable. Once the field has completely broken down, geophysics professor Josh Keyes (Eckhart) warns that the planet will have no protection from solar radiation, and everything on the surface will cook to death. This is true, but the method Keyes uses to illustrate this to a roomful of gaping government officials islegitimately hilarious: He grabs a peach from a bowl of fruit and uses a cigarette lighter and a can of air freshener to blast it with fire until it turns to charcoal. It’s quite the visual.
The movie’s scientists and engineers then use a magical material dubbed, of course, unobtainium, to build a ship capable of vaporizing rock. They plan to burrow thousands of miles through the Earth’s crust and mantle to the core, where the ship will somehow withstand the immense heat and pressure as its passengers deploy bombs to create a “controlled” nuclear explosion (which is not a thing) to restart the core’s rotation.This part might be the biggest piece of nonsense in a movie full of nonsense– even if nuclear explosions could be controlled enough to start trillions of tons of molten metal spinning in the direction and speed that you wanted them to, the Earth’s core is bigger than Mars. Humanity hasn’t yet invented a bomb powerful enough to nudge it an inch, let alone set it spinning.
While all of this is happening, the U.S. government, fearing widespread panic if the public finds out what’s going on, employs a single teenage hacker (D.J. Qualls) to “control the flow of information” on the internet so that word doesn’t get out (presumably, the Colosseum exploding and the Pacific Ocean boiling aren’t enough to create widespread panic on their own.) The idea that one individual could single-handedly prevent the spread of news about a given topic on the internet – even the comparatively primitive internet of 2003 – is almost assilly as the rest of the movie.
For good reason, a lot of scientists hateThe Core. It regularly shows up onlists of movies with the worst scienceand even took the number one spot in apoll of hundreds of scientistsconducted by physics professorSidney Perkowitz, one of The Exchange’s first collaborators. But perhaps the most surprising and concerning part is thatthe film’s creators apparently thought they got the science right. California Institute of Technology planetary scientistDavid J. Stevensonwas brought in to look over the script, but not until the movie had almost been completed. As he latertoldSalon, “The scientific content I thought was poor, and I said that to other journalists and people. Then I got a call from the director who was in Hollywood and was upset at me because I had said these things. That’s the point at which I realized that he thought that it was scientifically accurate!” Meanwhile,Salonreports, that the film vexed Sidney Perkowitz so badly that it inspired him to put together a collection of guidelines that studios and filmmakers could use to improve the scientific accuracy of future movies, a project that garnered widespread support within the scientific community.
Fast-forward to 2007, and then-President of the National Academy of SciencesRalph Ciceroneassigns Deputy Executive Director for the Office of CommunicationsAnn Merchantto research what else the NAS could be doing toinfluence depictions of science and scientistsin entertainment. Merchant collected ideas from a number of fellow scientists, including MIT professorNeil Gershenfeld, who had consulted onSteven Spielberg’s2002 sci-fiMinority Report. Merchant and Cicerone then sought support from Hollywood, where they found a surprising pair of allies:Airplane!directorJerry Zuckerand his wifeJanet Krausz.
The Brutal History of One of the Greatest Sci-Fi Films Ever
Reshoots, lack of funding, and even health issues didn’t stop this sci-fi classic.
The Zuckers turned out to be passionate promoters of science, thanks in part to a deeply personal experience with it. As Zucker explained inan interview for The Exchange’s website, their daughterKatiewas diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at a very young age. The life-saving treatment she received at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles inspired in Zucker a deep gratitude for science and scientists; in fact, when he met DNA researcherPaul Berg, who helped create advances in insulin treatment, Zucker made it a point to personally thank the man.
And the Zuckers weren’t the only big names in Hollywood to jump at the chance to work with The Exchange. Zucker also recruited his neighbor and friendDustin Hoffman, whoworked as a chemist for Maxwell House coffeeprior to becoming an actor. AsThe Australianreported,Hoffman saw no reason that filmmakers couldn’t make entertaining, action-packed movies and employ good science at the same time.
The Science & Entertainment Exchange Has Worked on Major Movies and TV Shows
The Science & Entertainment Exchange was formally founded in November 2008, andin its first ten years of existence, researchers in theJournal of Integrative & Comparative Biologyreport that it facilitated over 2,300 consultations with creators of movies, TV, and video games.WatchmendirectorZack Snyder, along with the film’s screenwriters and producers, wereamong the group’s first patrons. Other creators who sought help from The Exchange include multiple MCU alums, such asBlack PantherwriterJoe Coleand directorRyan Coogler, who consulted with an anthropologist, an architect, and an African American studies professor to build Wakanda, andAvengers: Infinity Warexecutive producerJeremy Latcham, who met with a theoretical physicist and planetary scientists to work on the film’s depiction of space travel.According to its website, The Exchange also provided consults forThe Avengers,Thor,Doctor Strange,Ant-Man,Contagion,Prometheus,Tron: Legacy,Arrival, and, surprisingly,Green Lantern(we won’t hold that one against them).
The organization also has a lengthy list of impressive TV credits to its name, includingHouse,The Big Bang Theory,Criminal Minds,Covert Affairs,Bones, andThe Good Wife.
Why Is Accurate Science in Movies Important?
What keeps the hundreds of scientists who work with The Exchange motivated? As Exchange director Rick Loverd toldSalon, entertainment has real, tangible effects on people’s values and beliefs. The originalStar Trekinspired generations of future scientists,Top Gunsparked an uptick in Air Force enlistments, and universities had to build new forensics departments from the ground up to accommodate incoming fans ofCSI. Plenty of research shows that “facts embedded in a narrative are better retained than those learned by rote,” Exchange collaborators wrote inIntegrative & Comparative Biology. “When transported into a narrative, audiences readily absorb information from fictional characters with whom they identify.” In other words, storytelling is a better teacher than memorization.Movies, TV, and games, then, can be an incredibly effective way to communicate science to the masses. “People don’t understand how much our life today, including our survival, depends on science,” Cicerone toldForbes.“But we know we can’t go around lecturing people. We’re hoping entertainment is a better way to reach people.”
The 20 Best Hard Sci-Fi Movies, Ranked
From black holes to potato farming, these sci-fi movies at least attempt to incorporate scientific reasoning.
The Science & Entertainment Exchange doesn’t aim to simply shove facts down people’s throats. The organization understands the disparate motivations at work in the creation of a movie or TV show: some creators care more about scientific accuracy than others, but all creators care to one degree or another about good storytelling. “By not explicitly telling storytellers what to do, but instead showing them what’s on the cutting edge and introducing them to incredibly interesting people, we inspire writers to think differently,” they write inIntegrative & Comparative Biology. “And, all on their own, the writers take what we’ve given them and begin to incorporate this new knowledge into their narratives. Not because NAS said so, but because they now want to do so.”
For any creator working on a piece of media who wants to get in touch with a scientist for a consultation, The Exchange has an easy-to-remember hotline: 1-844-NEED-SCI.The Coremay have been a box office flop, and it may have left scientists and lay audiences alike groaning, but ultimately, its creation has turned out to be a net positivefor the scientific community, the entertainment industry, and the importantoverlap between the two.
The Coreis currently available to rent on Prime Video in the U.S.
