2003's "The Core" aims to participate in the supercharged disaster movie movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, where productions such as "Armageddon" and "The Perfect Storm" offered audiences the sheer power of visual effects, making an enormous amount of money in the process. With the dangers of space, sea, and land already explored on multiple occasions, screenwriters Cooper Layne and John Rogers aim to come up with something different, conjuring a doomsday scenario involving the center of the Earth. "The Core" hopes to be sincere with its science and characterization, which is laudable, but it's much more entertaining when it ventures into ridiculousness, trying to sell a nutty concept for planetary rescue while offering up the usual in disparate personalities and sequences of destruction. It's not a picture that welcomes a deeper inspection of scientific and technological particulars, but director Jon Amiel ("Entrapment," "Sommersby") gets the whole thing up and running with impressive speed, trying to build momentum capable of plowing through the layers of weirdness this endeavor provides. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

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