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Earlier today, I watched a fun, silly, but (for me) deeply affecting movie called The Core. In the movie, Earth's core abruptly stops spinning, which causes our vital protective electromagnetic field to break down. This leaves Earth vulnerable to solar winds, cosmic radiation, superstorms, navigation failures, all kinds of very deadly stuff. The movie's opening scene is of people whose pacemakers abruptly stop working.
Aaron Eckhart plays the geophysics professor who first raises the alarm, and he demonstrates by splitting a peach to show its layers, then uses an improvised blowtorch to show the effects of the sun's unfettered radiation. I really like that scene.
The government believes Eckhart and his colleagues, so they work together to build a worm-shaped segmented ship that will bore into Earth's core in order to drop off a massive nuclear bomb payload. Okay. I liked the peach scene, but at this point, everything else has been just absolutely off the deep end. There is no sense in any of this.
I'm a science reporter, so this kind of thing already strikes me in almost everything I watch, and I'm annoying about it if anyone ever asks, so to me it didn't seem that outlandish by Hollywood standards. But reviewers at the time found it so offensively unscientific that it likely contributed to pretty bad reviews, and the movie was cited in different public campaigns to make sure science fiction at least had a sheen of reality.
The thing is, I don't know, this is funny and it can be fine. I liked the movie. But my feelings changed a bit when I saw Wikipedia's quote from one of the writers, taken from a thankfully archived 2003 blog post. I was going to share some of it here but I don't want to, it's defensive and nonsensical and I'm also not interested in laughing at this guy for his emotions from 23 years ago.
He's partly coming for Journey to the Centre of the Earth, though, the iconic 1864 Jules Verne novel that first showed underearth dinosaurs. At the time, Verne used his up-to-date science knowledge and then extrapolated -- exactly what science fiction should always be. His vision was bold, brave, and a lot more fun than The Core.
Here's the thing. There's no link to reality in almost anything depicted in The Core. It was never going to be realistic at all, based on the concept alone. Earth's core is so extraordinarily hot and high pressure that we can't even study it in depth. The movie winks at this in some ways, like having the ship's hull be made of "unobtainium," an exotic alloy created by Delroy Lindo's scientist character.
I think the movie likely fell into the exact area where people don't know much about science but feel they should be mad when something is unscientific. And in some ways, that can be good. The Welsh Viking on YouTube has railed against drab and colorless historical movies for their historical inaccuracy. In a recent video, he says at least some number of people will never go into a history museum but will likely see a movie. (This is also why Ryan Murphy's "true crime" fictions are harmful.)
From the remove of 2026, I just thought it was fun that anyone in any movie was talking in detail about Earth's core.
Here are some things I thought about while watching the movie.
A very deep dive
At one point, characters leave the worm ship and walk around in the magma fields of the underearth. Their suits look like regular hazmat or spacesuits made of a flexible textile. That's really silly, like, the pressure alone would crush the open doorway of the ship and everyone inside, and the heat would immediately light every person on fire.
But it made me curious. What's the deepest a human being could go under the ocean? Water pressure starts to hurt us, but it also starts to transform the gas balance inside our body. That's the real problem when you scuba dive very deep, and by very deep, I mean like 60 feet or more, not hundreds of miles. The deepest scuba dive ever is about 1,000 feet. (I'm not an expert, but I have scuba dived, and this is bewildering.)
James Cameron's trips into the Marianas Trench require one of the most robust and specialized ships ever made, and that's to go about 35,000 feet down. Cameron shows what I think is the only solution to a human being under extreme pressure: a very tiny ship that acts, almost, like an individual suit. It's rigid and reinforced, yet would still be scary to use. No thanks.
Under pressure
I recently read Christian Cantrell's 2010 novel Containment, which is about a settlement on Venus. Cantrell makes an interesting argument: We already know how to build for underwater, and we don't know how to build for no or little atmosphere, like on Mars or the Moon. In his book, that makes Venus a better candidate, and he describes the settlement as being like a bunch of interlinked nuclear submarines.
To me, this is a cool train of thought. I really liked the book. The surface of Venus has the same pressure as Earth's oceans at a depth of about 3,000 feet. (It's also very hot, but much less hot . . . than Earth's core.) Living there is an extreme challenge that I don't think we could do until the medium term future, but it's a great hook with a plausible basis.
The diamond age
Arthur C. Clarke's sequel novel 2010: Odyssey Two posits that the core of Jupiter is an unfathomably giant diamond formed by its equally unfathomable pressure. That image has stayed with me all my life, it is really cool. The book is also about Jupiter's nature as a gigantic planet that has some starlike qualities. I personally think of Jupiter as a bodyguard, part of Earth's goldilocks zone, because its gravity likely helps redirect stuff away. In ancient mythology, the god Jupiter was a gregarious protector.
Earth's core in general
I love Earth's core and am somewhat obsessed with the interior of the Earth in general. In The Core, famous scientist Stanley Tucci chooses an undersea path through Earth's crust because it's thinner there. This actually is true! Sorry, I forgot one true thing from the movie. But they go into the Pacific and I would have gone into the Atlantic, where there is a microline of brand new Earth's surface every single day due to how Earth's plates push apart along the Atlantic seabed. And it is also true that, if Earth's core did stop spinning and cooled and became solid, our planet would die. Mars is like a younger, smaller Earth with a similar core, and its atmosphere likely blew off after its core slowed and cooled.
It would be cool to know what's really in Earth's core.
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
I only read Jules Verne's novel last year, and it's really fun. I recommend it broadly to anyone. It's written as the diary of a funny, mediocre nephew who follows his more charismatic and somewhat foolish uncle. They leave their home in Germany and follow local lore to a volcano in Iceland, where people claim there are underground lava tunnels all the way to Earth's core. Again, listen, that is a really cool idea that I think makes sense based on an 1860s understanding. It still hangs together as a great story, and it's a short novel. You can find it for free because it's in the public domain.
The end
Okay, I would describe this as a longer post than I imagined, but I enjoyed this silly movie and you can probably see why now. The other thing is that the actors were good. The science was terrible, but the disaster movie emotional beats worked on me and I had a great time. I cried. The CGI was also very bad.
Thanks for reading.