OxfordPress.com

Verdict: Preposterous but well aware of it, a new disaster movie ideal.

By HAP ERSTEIN
(none)

If escapism from downbeat current events is what you crave, nothing can take your mind off a war between nations like the imminent destruction of the entire world.

So while "The Core" may look and sound like a summer blockbuster, its release now could be fortuitous timing for all concerned.

As threats to the planet go, meteors are surely the Hollywood peril of choice, as "Armageddon," "Deep Impact" and, uh, "Meteor" have already demonstrated.

Forced to take off in the other direction, writers Cooper Layne and John Rogers offer the paranoid thought that one day the Earth's core could stop spinning. The result would be a series of destructive electromagnetic events that are projected to keep getting worse, unless a team of intrepid souls could burrow into the globe and reenergize the core with a nuclear jump-start.

Preposterous? Absolutely, but director Jon Amiel ("Entrapment") seems to be in on the joke, pausing at regular intervals to laugh at the disaster genre in which he is engaged, then resuming the suspense and reeling us back in again. Not a bad trick when you're asking us to believe in a manned drill-bit boring its way into the Earth.

The action never gets boring, but the most interesting part of "The Core" happens before the capsule takes off — lifts down? — as mysterious manifestations of core failure begin freaking out the public.

From the consequences of pacemaker interference in Boston to a Hitchcockian epidemic of birds going haywire in London, Amiel sets us up amiably for the main events. Those arrive, as viewers of the trailer know, with the zapping of the Roman Coliseum and an even more impressive meltdown of the Golden Gate Bridge. The subterranean woes try hard, but they really cannot compete with the destruction of familiar tourist landmarks.

As in "Armageddon," the next order of business is the assembling of the dream team, starting with brilliant, good-looking professor of geophysics Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart), his French atomic weapons expert pal Sergei Leveque (Tcheky Karyo) and a rival, preening scientist with a Carl Sagan complex, Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci).

A startling, unwelcome touch of reality is provided by a core-related emergency landing of a space shuttle, saved with a nifty bit of fast-thinking navigation by young astronaut Rebecca Childs (Hillary Swank) and her less nimble commander, Robert Iverson (Bruce Greenwood), both of whom join the mission.

Fortunately and coincidentally, Zimsky knows an innovative scientist, Ed "Braz" Brazzelton (Delroy Lindo), who had been working on an underground missile. And to hold down rumors of the mission, a computer hacker with the cuddly name of Rat (D.J. Qualls) is enlisted to monitor and manipulate the Internet.

They are a heady lot, and a great deal of pseudo-science gets bandied about. A few times too many, though, they have crucial brainstorms. And when a few of them die, as they must according to the laws of disaster films, they do so with the utmost of lofty nobility, except for one over-the-top spoilsport.

Since everything else is so improbable in "The Core," why shouldn't the capsule crew encounter giant quartz crystals in the Earth's mantle, just like Pat Boone and James Mason did in 1959's "Journey to the Center of the Earth"?

Special-effects veteran Gregory L. McMurry provides terrific visuals, having been freed from the confines of science fact. The Core is pure action fantasy, an entertaining couple of hours in which the world hangs in the balance, a surprisingly worthy breather from television news and its more immediate dangers.