The Core Disaster Moviesode of 2003 | Episode 99 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey everybody. Before we begin today's presentation, it occurred to
me that the best way to indulge in today's stupidity
is in the format of video, which, as a special
thank you to you for another great year, I have
edited together and made free at patreon dot com slash
funeral Kazoo, no strings attached, just my hopes for a

(00:23):
happy holidays and a fantastic New year. Thank you again,
and on with the show. You ever watched one of
those big blockbusters sci fi action adventure movies that turns
out to be so bereft of technical and scientific merit

(00:45):
or accuracy that you almost start to like it? Me neither, Hello,

(01:05):
and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together we
are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre,
and on inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters
from throughout human history and around the world on today's

(01:26):
very special charismas Disaster Movie Sode. We'll start by joining
the shortest, worst, and probably my personal favorite business presentation
of all time. Will learn how the US government tried
to spite its enemies by giving the planet the al
Daran treatment twice, and we'll meet the man tasked with

(01:46):
fixing all of this and saving the earth and everything
on it, but who doesn't even know how to put
on a coat. We haven't done this in a while,
but it was so popular that it is my distinct
pleasure to bring you this very special presentation for today's story,
currently sitting at thirty four percent on Rotten Tomatoes. A

(02:07):
movie that critics called a modestly fun exercise and disappointment
and as aggressively loud and obnoxious as it is tiresomely stupid.
A movie I saw in the theater and spent a
good chunk of saying that's not how that works, that's
not even a thing. A movie that can't and won't
give you back your two hours and fifteen minutes which

(02:30):
I sat through so you didn't have to. It comes
with a mixture of pride and thankfulness and apologies and
a sprinkle of Christmas cheer that, without further ado, I
present to you the two thousand and three Aaron Eckhart
disaster masterpiece, The Core. Grab your popcorn and your safety

(02:54):
glasses and kick your kids out of the room, because
otherwise this is definitely going to make them stupid. And
let's begin the year is maybe two thousand and three,
maybe it's twenty thirty, it's not super clear. We begin
our day in Boston in an office tower overlooking what

(03:18):
appears to be a small street festival. It's a celebration
for Green Earth Day, with vender stands and portable carnival
rides and Harry Krishna's for some reason. Also not sure
why they just wouldn't celebrate regular Earth Day. Yes, maybe
they have some aggressive trademark lawyers or something. Anyway, I

(03:38):
think the larger point is this serves to remind us
that the Earth is our only home, using vegetarian hot
dogs and non biodegradable latex balloons. But we're not here
for the guilt and the flyers. We are here to
join a trio of youngish looking Brooks Brothers business nerds,
bumping elbows excitedly about to enter a lavishly appointed conference

(04:01):
room to give the presentation of their lives. Their leader,
Tom makes an odd observation that his watch has stopped,
which I'm sure that's fine. Besides, as they remind themselves,
thirty million dollars is on the line here, so off
they go as they enter the room before a full
panel of executives. Their leader Tom says before we begin,

(04:25):
and almost immediately the room begins to melt as he
becomes woozy and collapses into the boardroom table. Everyone is
expecting him to splash dramatically headfirst through the glass, but
the table says no. Instead, he thuds cartoonishly like a
human shaped ham, with his cheeks splayed out like an
airbag and a look on his face that says, I

(04:47):
regret nothing, but also I'm not home right now if
you include the thud. His presentation lasted all of eleven seconds. Meanwhile,
while the executives are squeaky dragging his corpse off to
make sure the table's okay. Outside, we don't immediately see
if they've accidentally rerooted highway traffic through the street festival,

(05:10):
but there is enough screeching tires and truck horns to
cover one of our traffic disaster episodes. There are at
least half a dozen unrelated fatal car accidents in this
one intersection below. To all appearances, everyone just forgot how
to drive, and not just that. It's more like they

(05:30):
forgot how to breathe. There are people on the street
doing the same face squad as tom upstairs. Apparently they
just turned off and went full paper weight. One lady
clings lifelessly to a small carousel ride, just sweeping the
sidewalk as it goes around and around while people run
for their lives. But from what, we have no idea. Meanwhile,

(05:53):
in a University of Chicago lecture hall, a man named
doctor Joshua Keys is teaching a class of students who
look so bored they look like they've auditioned to be
in a sequel to the nineteen eighty seven Mark Harmon
movie Summer School. Doctor Keys is at the front of
the room, using a trumpet to try to show them
how sound waves can help us understand the underlying architecture

(06:17):
of our planet. When two FBI agents interrupt and tell
him to come with them if he wants to live.
They're pretty humorless, and I don't know if they had
clearance to shoot him if he didn't obey, But between
the two of them, maybe one of them blinked, and
neither of them managed to eke out a smile. We
can tell doctor Keyes is nervous because as they escort

(06:39):
him away, in what has to be the strangest thing
that we have yet seen today. He evidently has completely
forgotten how coats work, and his is halfway wrapped around
him like a swayed straight jacket. This was an eighty
five million dollar movie, and this was the best take
they had. He also tells he doesn't know what not

(07:01):
knowing means. He doesn't know what security clearance is, and
he doesn't even know what a jet is. He looks
and sounds insane, and we are forced to wonder if
they're removing him because it has become apparent he is
too dangerously underqualified to teach well. They jet him off
to Washington, DC and force them into the secret underground

(07:23):
tunnels beneath the US Government Publishing office, just down the
street from the Capitol Building. The passages are filled with
military personnel, and by this point he has corrected his
coat and looks like an adult. He finds himself unexpectedly
reunited with an old friend, a biochemist named Serge Leveck,
who is kicking the absolute mared out of a vending machine,

(07:45):
and without explanation, they are put in a large room
full of vehicles and military equipment, including armored personnel carriers
and what appears to be some kind of anti aircraft gun,
none of which makes sense, and none of which they noticed,
including all of the tables with the dead bodies under tarps.
They're just so into glad handing and carrying on about

(08:07):
how bonable Surge's wife is, and they don't even take
notice of what should have been the overpowering stench of
corpses off gassing all around them. And our view is
from above, and a few of them appear to have urinated,
and they nearly track through a giant puddle apiss as
they reminisce. Devoid of all senses, they are caught completely

(08:28):
unaware until one of the corpses, so fresh that rigor
hasn't even set in, swings its arm and pats Doctor
Keys on the bum, at which point Doctor Keys definitely
tracks through and stands in a large puddle of urine
without comment, just shock. At this point, a man with
a wallpaper of badges on his chest and insignia from

(08:50):
the military subtly threatens them with death, then introduces himself
as General Tom Purcell, and then tells them that at
ten thirty that morning, thirty five two people inside a
ten block radius in Boston, all dropped dead for whatever reason,
thirty two bodies were immediately squeegeed off the street, packed
into an airplane, flown four hundred and fifty miles to DC,

(09:14):
snuck into this building and arranged on tables just so
that these two people could take guesses on what happened.
This could have been an email. And I can't help
but feel for the poor families who are all, what
do you mean you don't know where my husband's body is.
Doctor Keys almost immediately guesses that, because they weren't sneezing
or anything first, that clearly they must have all had

(09:36):
pacemakers and were attacked by an empulse from an electromagnetic weapon.
It's a hell of a guess, and perself seems to
like it. At that same time, on the other side
of the ocean, in Trafalgar Square in London, thousands of
squeaky birds begin running into the ground, into statues, buildings, tourists,

(09:57):
you name it. Glass is falling, some one loses an eye,
people forget how to drive. A double decker bus flips
onto its side, and these do not sound like any
kind of pigeon I've ever heard before. But as quickly
as it begins, it stops. They just fly off, and
I don't know, maybe they go attack Bristol. We just
don't know. So back in Chicago, with a seeming emp

(10:21):
attack on pacemakers and the one hand, and a bird
demic in London in the other, the gears in doctor
Key's head start spinning. He tells his subordinates that he
will illegally sign off on any PhD thesis they can
scribble as long as they help him with two quick things. First,
plot every example of every living creature that followed or

(10:45):
traveled along the Earth's magnetic field lines in the last
two years, along with every strange atmospheric condition, every plane crash, everything,
that's all. And second, they need to create a three
D model of the planet with all of those historical
field lines laid over it. Oh, I guess three things. Really,

(11:05):
They then just need to map out every anomaly and
quantify it all into computer code. Whatever he's after, it's
obviously worth his breach of academic integrity, pending conviction for
professional misconduct, and of course the destruction of the institutional
reputation of the University of Chicago. And I need to
point out that sixty seconds before making this grand request

(11:28):
he had to ask how birds fly. This same man
who couldn't figure out how to button up a code
but also somehow correctly guessed the pacemaker correlation in Boston.
His intelligence is at best wildly inconsistent, and now he
has a theory about what's been happening, and he quietly
prays that he's wrong. He does this by literally saying

(11:50):
be wrong, over and over to keep things interesting. Let
us now travel several hundred miles above the Earth's surface
and join the crew of the u u US space
shuttle Endeavor as they appear to do a few carefully
plotted spinny spins over Australia in preparation for re entry
into Earth's atmosphere for a landing at Edward's Air Force

(12:13):
Base in California. Commander Robert Iverson is floating feet first
from the space toilet, kind of crop dusting everyone before
taking control of the shuttle from Major Rebecca Childs, who,
as it turns out, is the youngest person to ever
be in space. And we're just gonna call her Beck
or Beck's from now on. Anyway, it's time to land,

(12:35):
and they're gliding their way in, pressing all the appropriate
buttons and switches, skimming along the atmosphere, whipping up all
kinds of plasma trails behind them, which makes everyone pretty
happy at Houston. When the coms drop out, they're interrupted
as they enter the atmosphere, and when they are restored,
some intern at Capcom notices they are all of a

(12:55):
sudden weigh the hell off their expected flight line. Not
sure if Iverson nudged the stick while reaching over to
scratch something or the earth just sped up underneath them
when no one was looking, but a Microsoft alert pops up,
saying they are now one hundred and twenty miles off course.
This means they are now headed straight for downtown Los Angeles.

(13:17):
Commander Iverson says, we are not going to crash into
Los Angeles, and literally two seconds later, Capcom says, these
dudes are definitely going to crash into Los Angeles and
they're going to do it at three hundred knots. They're
all losing their ship, and becks improvises a plan to
land in the Los Angeles River, which, if you're familiar,
is a river in name only. It's actually just a

(13:40):
concrete floodplain covered in bridge stanchions and old grocery carts. Thankfully,
somehow the shuttle turns out to be an incredibly maneuverable
and awesome air and ground vehicle, which kind of goes
against everything I know about the Space Shuttle. But boy,
am I glad I'm wrong, because they whip around over
Dodger's Stadium and make a straight line towards the river.

(14:03):
They nosedive the thing right into the river basin, hit
all the brakes they've got, slalom around pillars and pylons,
drop the landing gear, which amazingly just whips back up
into the belly of the shuttle in less than two seconds,
which drops them hard onto the ground, where they then
spin uncontrollably before finally coming to a stop, not in
flames and pieces, but instead mere feet away from some

(14:27):
comically unaware bridge worker who could not hear the sound
of one hundred and sixty five thousand pounds of skidding
metal over the sound of an angle grinder. Later that
same day, with all doctor Key's impossible requests completed and
the computer code compiled, Doctor Keys ambushes a man named
doctor Conrad Simsky outside but appears to be the Vancouver

(14:49):
Art Gallery, and convinces him into reviewing his theory. Why
he agrees to this I cannot say. Anyway, After reviewing
his cryptically awful dissertation, Simsky's all nah, but Keys is
all Johan and leaves saying that she is about to
hit the fan. Next thing you know, Doctor Keys and
Serge are now drunk in a bar when guess who

(15:11):
drops by. It's those same two FBI agents. And I
don't know what their impression of him was the first time,
but this time they tell him that they have no
sense of humor and are in fact willing to shoot him.
This time. They dragged him to Virginia, to the Pentagon,
where a roundtable of vice admirals and intelligence officials are
there to hear how doctor Zimski discovered an earth shattering problem.

(15:35):
He just wanted doctor Keys there in case anyone needed
water or anything. They described how the Earth is basically
a whole lot of dirt surrounding a core of trillions
and trillions of tons of hot liquid iron spinning at
one thousand miles per hour, and how we are just
insects living on the skin of it all physics one
oh one hot metal moving fast makes an electro magnetic field,

(15:59):
which on Earth we used to deflect all kinds of
radiation from space and the Sun from unwinding our DNA
and cooking us where we stand. And then because reasons,
they explained that the outer core has stopped spinning. I'd
explain how this happened or how they even know this
to be true, but that information was not made available

(16:21):
as part of the source material. It was just sort
of glossed over, hoping maybe no one would notice. They
said the results would start with a plane or two
flipping out of the sky, followed by the death of
every electronic on Earth, followed by crazy static lightning superstorms
with hundreds of lightning strikes per square mile every minute.

(16:41):
And after that it gets bad. Once the field collapses,
the Sun's radiation and solar winds would fry them like
an aerosol soaked apple. They say they have three months
until they're living in the Stone Age, and a year
before the entire surface and all life on it are
barbecue away into dust and blown into space. Doctor Keys

(17:03):
then invites them to throw up, but the Lee General
keeps his barf to himself and challenges them to restart
the core. Sure, it's the size of Mars, and it's
a superheated hyperfluid of molten iron and nickel at nine
thousand degrees fahrenheit, two thousand miles down and a thousand
miles thick. And sure the pressures involved are in the

(17:26):
millions of pounds per square inch, but see what you
can do. It is worth pointing out the deepest humanity
has ever dug or drilled into the earth was seven
miles using a two inch drill head. So the big
issue is, even if they knew how to do it,
they can't actually get there. Now, this is the point

(17:47):
in the film where I start to squirm in my
seat a little. Having watched this a few times now,
I have a theory that the field dropped early and
they all died mid sentence, and the rest of the
film is some kind of after life dream. You are
going to need to suspend your disbelief for the rest
of the story. It'll be worth it, though. The next
thing we know, we are choppering to a massive, rusted

(18:10):
over warehouse somewhere on the Utah Salt Flats. It's at
this point I should mention every time we see doctor Zimsky,
he will be lighting a cigarette. He has literally done
this every time we have seen him on screen so far.
We are here to visit doctor Braselton, and I'm just
gonna end up calling him Bras at some point. Well,

(18:31):
braz hates doctor Zimsky for stealing his research. They have
a little back and forth about it, and doctor Keys
is like, yeah, I get you. Doctor Brazlton is the
man to meet and skipping right into it. He has
taken the concept of using the same kind of ultrasonics
we use to blow up kidney stones and turned it
into a rickety old back to the future three looking

(18:52):
device that uses high frequency pulse lasers to melt a
perfectly cylindrical hole right through a mountain. And because reasons
that we don't understand, doctor Brazleton has not been swooped
up in a global bidding war with every scientific and
political powerhouse on the planet. He's just a guy in
the desert creating miracles of science by himself for the

(19:14):
last twenty years. And he didn't have a long beard
or clean xboxes on his feet, he doesn't talk to
himself in the third or fourth person, and he has
managed to invent, for no good reason whatsoever, every single
item that they are going to need to get their
mission under way. Whatever that is. He then goes on
to unveil a new super material he whipped up in

(19:37):
his spare time that's strong enough to withstand even his
crazy laser device. When asked, he says it's called unobtainium
for short, because the full name has thirty seven syllables,
and unobtainium, as stupid a word as that is, is
actually a term that's been used in real engineering since
the nineteen fifties to describe a hypothetical or impossible material

(19:58):
and need to make a design work. So yeah, it's lazy,
but at least it's not unoriginal. Oh And he then
goes on to unveil the prototype for a ship he's
also been working on that has an impossibly strong and
powerful shell, strong enough to resist oh, I don't know,
a magical trip to the Earth's mantle and core. Unlike

(20:19):
everything else that is known in physics and geology, thermodynamics,
solid state physics, material sciences, metallurgy, chemistry, mechanical and structural engineering,
on optanium gets stronger the more pressure it's under, And
to celebrate his accomplishments, they hand him a check for
fifty billion dollars and tell him he has three months

(20:41):
to make all of his projects work flawlessly. Now this
is all still pretty hush hush, and we as the audience,
don't even know what we're doing yet. So they're going
to need to keep rumors off the Internet, and to
do this, we now find ourselves joining the Feds committing
a warrantless home invasion of a young computer hacker named
Theodor Finch who prefers to be called Rat. While they're

(21:04):
breaking his door down, he's running around his apartment excitedly,
shoving discs and hard drives into his microwave, his toaster,
his garbage disposal. Also that he can say nothing, they
offer him jail or a job controlling the entire world's
Internet so nobody could talk about their super secret plan
in exchange for xenotapes and hot pockets. We still don't

(21:27):
know what the plan is, so we return to Washington
once again. As it happens, Becca's heroic plan to save
the Shuttle and the people of Los Angeles got her sacked,
but on second thought, she is now re hired and
together with her former shuttle commander Bob Iverson, they are
now going to be piloting doctor Brazltan's supertrain or magic

(21:49):
bus or whatever we're gonna call it. So finally, after
doctor Keys spends full minutes fighting with a necktie, they
unveil the plan to the press, which now completely He
confuses me on why they needed a hacker to keep
it a secret, but you know writing, and here's the plan.
So doctor Brazzleton had three months to build a ship

(22:11):
strong enough to reach the center of the Earth, and
a lot of cigarettes died so doctor Zimsky could finish
the math on how to use nuclear explosives in the
core to restart the planet's interior rotation like they were
swirling water in a bathtub. They didn't want to detonate
it like Alderon. No, they wanted to carefully restart its core.

(22:32):
And at this point Bob Iverson spoke up. He did apologize,
pointing out he was not an expert in these matters,
but he did wonder out loud how it would change
things if the core ended up being thicker or thinner
than they calculated, and how it would affect how the
explosions would function in practicality. This was an important moment

(22:53):
in the film. It was as if he had stepped
in from a different movie, a more rational and way
considered film where scientists question their own assumptions to arrive
at the absolute truth of a situation. But in this film,
Zimski said yeah, yeah, yeah, and shut them down by
saying that the core could be made of cheese, and

(23:14):
science is all guesswork. It's not the kind of thing
they have etched into the walls of MIT. But here
we are, as the ship somehow came together. We realize
it is made out of magic and can do magic things.
But it did not yet have a propulsion system, so
they whipped up a small experimental nuclear reactor to help
push it along. And I don't know how long you've

(23:36):
been listening to the show, but experimental nuclear reactors have
been a problem since episode one. The ship was divided
into six compartments like cars on a train, the locomotive, navigation,
living quarters, engineering, the bomb compartment, and an entire compartment
dedicated to weapons control. Oh and if any compartment became

(23:58):
damaged in any way, it could be ejected to save
the rest of the ship. Of course, the compartments were
lined like a train, so if they lost anything forward
of the bomb compartment, the mission was over, I'm thinking,
but maybe I'm overthinking. The entire world had come together
to build this thing in utter secrecy, which frankly again

(24:19):
makes no sense because as people go, people are terrible
at keeping secrets. I guess that's why they had Rat
unethically controlling and destroying free speech around the world with
his private trojans and viruses and what not, just to
make sure no one was the wiser. Meanwhile, Becca and
the crew spent time in simulators trying to prepare for

(24:39):
what they are about to experience, which is being voluntold
to climb into an untested death machine full of nuclear
bombs and a tweaky new kind of untested nuclear reactor,
to laser their way at high speed through the entire
Earth's mantle, and fly around inside the exquisitely dense outer core,
dropping set bombs like the Easter Bunny, and then somehow

(25:02):
getting out of there before getting blown up or crushed
or incinerated. Anyway, Commander Bob gave Becks a speech about
how the fact that she was such a great pilot
made her a crappy leader because she had never had
to purposely kill someone before. Dot dot Dot. It's not
really much of a pep talk, and there wasn't much
time for her to feel sorry for herself, remember that

(25:25):
warning about the crazy static build up and the superstorms
while Rome was pretty much destroyed by lightning, starting with
the most recognizable monuments of course, and seeing this general
Purcell was all, okay, good stuff, Let's get that ship
in the mud. The plan was to drop it vertically
straight down into the Mariana's Trench, which is the deepest

(25:46):
point on Earth, which was a plan to save them
time digging through the mantle, and it worked perfectly, no
questions asked. Even terribly cged whales came to watch as
the magic superlaser ate through the stone in bedrock and
mantle and whatever like. It wasn't even there. I mean,
their entry was met with an earthquake and falling rocks

(26:07):
and exciting music and a steering issue that threw them
into a spiral. But when it came to it, the
lasers cut through the rock at an almost magical speed,
matching their velocity the whole way. And don't ask me
how since I cannot keep a Wi Fi signal in
my bathroom because it's too far from my router. But
somehow for reasons, mission control was able to keep real

(26:29):
time radio contact and also a kind of radar that
actually allowed them to track the vehicle's position beneath the Earth.
Now my understanding is, of course you point radar at
the ground and you're going to see ground. But again,
here we are. I just have to assume doctor Razzleton
designed a special device and his off hours that allowed
them to peer through the entire planet and create a

(26:51):
full MRI quality three D visual cat scan of the
globe and everything happening inside it as they made their
way happily through the mantle on the way to the core.
It took them the next twelve hours to travel seven
hundred miles or eleven hundred and twenty kilometers. They're doing
just under highway speed, with no slowing down and no
stops along the way. And the only wirl probably had

(27:13):
to worry about is if they ran into something so
dense that the laser wouldn't let them through in time
and they would explode. And just now that they're having
this conversation for the first time, they also realized there
could be empty pockets of space somehow inside the mantle
that the computer wouldn't know what to do with because
again they're only talking about it now, so they never
programmed it for that kind of thing. And at this

(27:35):
point they barely had time to buckle their seat belts
before they hit one of those empty spaces and crash
endlessly and dramatically, finally halting in an unbelievably massive crystalline cave. Now,
as far as I know, they should have just popcanned
and crushed right where they stood, but instead they put
on spacesuits and went for a walk outside to see

(27:57):
what the hold up was. Commander Bob gave up as
well placed pragmatism and skepticism and delivered the line, well,
at least we know our suits can handle the pressure.
I might trust them to protect me from bees, but
not sharks, let alone eight hundred thousand plus pounds of
pressure per square inch. Their guess was they were inside
a geode wrapped inside cobalt. It was a little like

(28:20):
watching a space movie from the early nineteen hundreds where
humans arrive on the Moon, hit their knees with their
hats and say, smell that moon air. The laser could
cut through literally anything, except in this case, a single
shard of crystal, and at this point the roof of
the cave began dripping and then pouring lava. While everyone

(28:40):
else returned to the ship, Commander Bob decides to stay
outside and watch the laser warm up while standing right
in front of it. He is not incinerated as you
would expect. Instead, he was splorked through the brain by
a dagger sized piece of crystal that pierced his suit.
Instead of instantly condensing to the size of a soup
can or bursting into flames, he just stood there for

(29:03):
a bit before falling backwards into the lava which had
been building around them, and disappeared beneath the waves. Now
lava is melted rock. He should have spacked onto the
surface and just kind of stuck to it like a
hot dog on a flaming hot pan, and then slowly incinerated.
But nope, for whatever reason, he goes glug lug lug,
and then there's a spot waiting for him at Arlington,

(29:26):
And with that the ship started up, slid into the lava,
and they got back on their way. Rest in peace,
Commander Bob. The next part of their adventure was piloting
something with the maneuverability of a subway through a field
of diamonds the size of apartment buildings. One of those
diamonds clipped the weapons control pod and oh, no, Surge

(29:48):
is in there. The emergency door slam shut, and Keys
was all, no worries, We'll just pop right out of there.
But Becca was at the switch and she kind of
froze up. She opens the door, and maybe Surge lives,
and maybe they all die, and maybe the whole world
dies with them. And I'll save you the very teary
details of his slow and agonizing death. But they had

(30:09):
to watch as Serge got slowly crushed to death over
a video monitor. And I cannot emphasize enough how insanely
slowly this happens. There was all kinds of screaming and
crushing sounds. This was Becca's first professional kill, and Keys
did not make it easy on her. He totally lost
his ship. He even rubbed a hand drawn card from

(30:30):
Serge's kids in her face, and he totally let her
have it. We then panned a mission control where they
overheard the whole thing, and they're all doing that MM
and thinking that they would rather be evaporated by the
sun than be on that ship. Right now. And for
reasons that I am chalking up to bad editing, I'm

(30:51):
assuming that Keys went and smoked to join in the
back to try to calm down, because in the very
next scene, Keys and Becca are now friends again, bearing
a smiling look, and off they go. It is a
bizarre transition in a movie filled with bizarre choices. I
guess it doesn't really matter. A minute later, they finally
break through the mantle and we are now in the

(31:13):
core and picking up speed. Turns out the core was
a lot runnier than they had guessed, so Simsky and
Brass start doing some math. They were going way too
fast and all of their calculations were now way off. Plus,
the core material was so thin that the energy waves
from the explosion would turn out to be too wet
fart to actually work. On the plus side, at least

(31:36):
Commander Bob was dead, so they didn't have to hear
him say I told you so, and Zimsky was all, well,
that's that, let's go home. Their commander was dead, their
payload specialist was dead, their weapons specialist and weapons control
system had been crushed into a cube like an illegally
parked car. They didn't know if they could still arm
the nuclear devices, and even if they could, their math

(31:59):
was now screwed, rude, and their plan was trash. He
hopped on the phone with General Purcell again no idea how,
and told them to warm up Plan B, Project Destiny
the hell is that you ask? It was short for
Deep Earth Seismic Trigger Initiative. It was basically a geological
superweapon that allowed the US to control seismic activity anywhere

(32:22):
in the world and trigger earthquakes wherever they like. Plan
B was to use Destiny to fix this, even though
it is just now being revealed that testing Destiny is
most likely what caused the whole problem in the first place.
The explanation for this backup plan is that you can
give someone a heart attack with electric paddles and then
turn them back on again with another jolt. So let's

(32:45):
just try that. They're basically going to whack the TV
to get better reception. I myself feel like they're trying
to hit alder On twice with the same death star beam.
And they didn't feel like they had any choice. The
world was heading for a disaster of biblical purpose, real
Wrathagod type stuff, fire and brimstone coming down from the skies,
sees boiling every volcano on the planet blowing at the

(33:08):
same time, forty years of darkness and earthquakes, the dead
rising from the grave, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. Well,
this is where Keys proposes planned sea, which to quote
is somehow we fix this. And the word somehow sets
Zimski off, probably because he hasn't had a real smoke
since they left, and he freaks out, screaming till Brazleton

(33:31):
gets up and punches his lights out. Then everyone looks
at each other and agrees it had to happen sometime
at this point to underscore how little time they had left.
Back on our side of the dirt, rat was monitoring
a heartbreakingly large tear in the Earth's electromagnetic field right
over scenic San Francisco Bay, not Buford, Wyoming, No, specifically

(33:53):
targeting easily recognizable landmark filled San Francisco. A beam of
microwave radiations slowly panned over the bay, and for reasons
it stops moving and parks itself right over the Golden
Gate Bridge, and it did some weird stuff. It gave
one guy arm cancer, then started melting holes through twenty

(34:14):
six feet of payment and steel trussing, which was somehow
more vulnerable than rubber car tires and also didn't bake
their passengers in the vehicles like cookies in an oven.
The span melts and splits, and cars burst into flames
as the careen over the edge as the bridge collapses,
and then and only then does the beam continue its

(34:34):
merry way, incinerating a path through the Bay area along
with half the city. It also fried the electrical grid
on the entire West coast, so General Purcell gets laser
happy and wants to fire Destiny asap before they potentially
lose even more power and won't have enough energy to
fire it at all. While the brass are slap fighting

(34:55):
over it, Keys quietly asks Rat to slow things down. Yes.
By now his job had ballooned from social media manager
to it for the entire and Western military infrastructure, so
he can monitor the Earth's core and control energy grids
pretty much just whatever he likes. But as he works
his magic trying to control Destiny on a desktop computer,

(35:17):
he faced repeated lockouts and failures and warnings, and in
all seriousness, we watched Commander Bob get his brain poached.
We watched Surge get slowly smushed to death while looking
at pictures his children drew, But watching Rat well up
with tears of frustration at having a bad day at
work is one hundred times more emotionally impactful. Meanwhile, a

(35:40):
low ground still in the goop, Simsky offers to help
with Plan C if they just give him a cigarette.
He gave them the idea of instead of setting all
the bombs off at the same time and watching the
blast radius peter out into the core material, they detonate
the nukes in sequence, like stones building up ripples on
a pond, letting the ripples reinforce each other through geometric progression.

(36:04):
So Plan seed became. They hot wire the nukes, which
I'm not sure how they know how to do. That,
seed them throughout the core at measurements that had to
be accurate to the inch, which doesn't sound right. Then
detonate them in a sequence that had to be accurate
to the millisecond, which also sounds unnecessary. And then they
simply had to outrun the biggest nuclear shockwave in history.

(36:25):
Sounds simple enough, but they can't just PLoP nukes out
of the back of the ship. They'd get crushed by
the pressure before they detonated, which to me says they
didn't exactly tell us how running the Earth's core supposed
to be, but the pressure down there should compress and
contain any blast they make pretty well for starts. The
core material is thicker than water, and if you set

(36:46):
off a nuke at the bottom of the Marianas where
they entered, the water would clamp around that explosion almost incompressibly.
The pressure down there is about sixteen thousand pounds per
square inch, or about eleven hundred times sea level atmospheric pressure.
And the only other place you'd find anything like that
in our Solar system would be somewhere on Jupiter. Now,

(37:07):
to belabor my point, the pressure inside the upper core
of our planet is about twenty million pounds per square inch,
or one point three million times atmospheric pressure. But again,
I'm not a Hollywood technical consultant or writer, so what
do I know anyway? To distract us from all that,
they decide to eject the bombs inside the different compartments
of the vehicle, which would by the time needed to

(37:30):
detonate with the insane precision needed before the pressure could
b loop the bombs into a condensed puck. Of course,
because the vehicle wasn't designed to just split apart like that,
they now have to reverse centipede the whole thing and
risk their lives in increasingly awful ways to manually release
the pods. To get the first one going, someone had

(37:50):
to make a one way trip into a crawl space
filled with nine thousand degrees fahrenheit or five thousand degrees
celsius core fluid. And don't ask me how, but they're
suit had been designed to withstand half that amount, which
in any other circumstance would have been a triumph of
material engineering that would have had Brazilton's face etched onto
Mount Rushmore. But no, And so they drew straws to

(38:12):
see who was dipping into this soup. And because black
people don't survive in horror movies or action movies, or
disaster movies, or science fiction movies, or thrillers or crime
dramas or monster movies or war movies, it was Brazlton.
And actually he cheated, He bent his straw and chose
to go out like a hero, speech and all, and

(38:34):
we get to listen to him whimper and grown in
agony for a full two minutes of screen time before
he finally dissolves, but at least he pressed the button
or whatever. They begin dropping the nukes in order bingo bango,
ejecting them no problem, while meanwhile, Ratt is trying to
figure out how to transfer all the power from Project
Destiny to Coney Island. I don't know why he hates

(38:57):
Coney Island so much, and there was no explanation for
what would happen when enough power to taser the Earth's
core is shunted into a neighborhood one square mile or
two and a half kilometers in size. My guess is
it would be evaporated in one giant electric blue woomph,
turning all thirty thousand residents into ozone. And then Rat
would spend the rest of the weekend scrubbing the Internet

(39:20):
of any mentions of it. Meanwhile, back aboard the ship
because drama, Before they could set off the second last nuke,
they got hit by an underground energy flare, and while
the cabin jostled around like a drunk bus, one of
the bombs broke free and they played hot potato with
it till it came to rest on Zimski's previously three

(39:40):
dimensional legs. He is superdoomed, and he goes out sucking
and blowing his beloved cigarettes and recording his final thoughts
for posterity into a portable tape recorder until he remembers
how explosions work and vaporizes with his thoughts. And now
it all came down to Keys. He didn't have enough
plutonium to make the final charge big enough, so he

(40:03):
literally pulled the core out of the engine plunked it
beside the bomb. And here's another thing. To this point,
we have watched the rest of the crew be broiled
or crushed to eject the pods. But now that it's
keys turn. For reasons, his pod just had a big
red button on the door that said eject. I mean anyway.

(40:23):
So Keys and Becca, now out of power with all
of the bombs dropped, sat and waited, most likely dying
of radiation poisoning from the reactor. I imagine when Keys
had a breakthrough the unobtainium. Yes, you would think we
would never mention it again because it's such a maguffin. Well.
Keys argued that Brazelton's unobtainium converted heat into energy, which

(40:46):
is entirely new news, or his brain was damaged from
the lack of oxygen. I'm just saying that, up until
now it has converted pressure into a magic force field,
and now all of a sudden it converts heat into energy,
and very quickly a pilot and a school teacher managed
to rewire and Jerry Rigg Braselton's technology, which I'm almost
certain at this point was smuggled here from the future.

(41:08):
Either way, there is literally no other explanation for how
gifted he was, and no greater indicator that Becca and
Keys figuring out how to turn the heat from the
outside of their ship into rocket fuel using nothing but
wires and hoses is insane. When I suggested a long
time ago that there were moments in the theater where
I pointed and just had to say that's not a thing, well,

(41:29):
this was one of those times. This whole movie has
been an exercise in proving that I don't know how
science works, and their plan works perfectly. Next thing you know,
they are riding the shockwave from the explosion like a
missile right back to the sunshine, and at this moment
the entire world was rocked by a rolling earthquake. Which
cleared the weather and repaired the sky, but did not,

(41:50):
for reasons, completely erase all buildings and monuments around the world.
And now, based on the CG on the monitors and
separately out of ship view, they found them dodging and
weaving and steering through tunnels at something like four hundred
miles an hour without touching a thing. And then a
subtitle comes up letting us know that they did this

(42:10):
impossible maneuvering for sixteen straight hours before they found a
gap between two tectonic plates near Hawaii. Four hours after that,
not dead from exhaustion, they literally popped out of a
pre existing hole in the ground and took a break
on the bottom of the sea. And for reasons, everyone
from Control HQ, the General rat, the coffee guy, well,

(42:33):
they all now find themselves on the bridge of an
aircraft carrier off the coast of Hawaii. But the ship
they're looking for is sitting at the bottom of the
cold ast ocean with no power and no communications. And
apparently the unobtainium gives them the sonar signature of a rock.
So how they were tracking them all this time in
the Earth's core. I'm not going back to that anyway,

(42:55):
Using the same level of magical intuition that allowed Keys
to figure out the pacemaker at the beginning of the film,
Rat now figures out that whales like ultrasonics, so if
they just follow whales, they're going to find the pod.
I mean, we're running out of screen time, and that
keeps it easy. Now, as a social media manager for
the government, there's no reason he should know this. And second,

(43:17):
in one of the more expensive shooting locations you can find,
Rat from way down the flight deck runs towards the
control tower yelling about the whales and how his voice
is so preposterously loud, loud enough to be heard on
the bridge from halfway down the flight deck, which is
famously one of the loudest workplaces on the planet. Again,

(43:39):
no idea. I'll also say he delivers the second worst
on screen scripted run of any actor until Maggie graces
awkward flappy arms trotting in the Taken Movies. Anyways, he
yells it, and three billion dollars of military hardware jump
into action. Find a pod of whales circling and jumping
out of the water, practically pointing to the sunken craft,

(44:02):
and a chopper pilot with sonar locates the ship and
puts it about eight hundred feet below the surface. At
this point they send down frogmen to attach towing cables
to hoist it up, which again just re listen to
the absolute body horror I described in our recent Edmund
Fitzgerald episode about what happens to you just trying to

(44:22):
visit five hundred feet. We saw the divers with simple
air tanks doing backward rolls off of dinghies, so I
have no idea how they were able to do this.
Maybe the whales hooked everything up for them. Who knows.
And at this point, with our tail so close to
coming to an end, there's only one awkward thing left
to deal with. As Becca and Keys are lifted to

(44:43):
the surface, sharing their last private moments together, we have
to wait and see if they will kiss. They've been
through a lot, their adrenaline is high, and this is
a movie and some ladies got dragged to it, so
you think it might be nice if there was just
maybe even one smooth which to give the romantics in
the audience something to glom onto. Nope, Instead, they pivot

(45:07):
and plan a revenge plot to let the world at
large know about the sacrifice of all of those who
did not have a big red escape button to save
them throughout the mission. One week later, Rat walks into
a cybercafe bringing his own hot pocket, and from a
public computer uploads a document titled Unsung Heroes to every

(45:28):
news outlet on Earth, at which point they all learn
about how america secret spy laser they kept hidden in
the Alaskan Wilderness nearly destroyed all life on the planet.
And then when their magic bus could not SENTI Pete
its way through the Earth's core on time, their backup
plan was to blast this thing off again, just to
see what would happen. Remember the end of that Spider

(45:51):
Man movie where Aunt May catches Peter in the costume
and she yells, what the It's a little like that
where our movie ends on a happy note, where the
world's collective rage is just building and we smash cut
to credits. I'm guessing The Core two would have been

(46:15):
a political dystopian movie where the world as a whole
comes down hard on the American government for its crimes
against humanity. When I saw this movie back in two
thousand and three, I left thinking, well, if people are
dumb enough to buy a ticket. I'm certain that they're
dumb enough to believe this is how science works. I
do hope you enjoyed our time today, and now, with

(46:37):
this being our last episode of twenty twenty five, there's
just something quick I would like to say. Doomsday is
entering its sixth year, and there are a lot of
things that make this show unique amongst podcasts. A lot
of shows survive at the whim of production companies and
corporate sponsors. They're built from the top down. But Doomsday

(46:58):
doesn't exist because some network exist. I believed in it.
It exists because actual people do. It's just you, me
and a microphone. This show is built from the bottom up,
and it has been my honest privilege to bring you
these stories over the last six years. I don't do
this for you so much as I do this because
of you, which to my way of thinking, makes this

(47:20):
more of a collaboration. And I think because of that
it makes me the world's most grateful show host and
a lot of the time because of that, I feel
like I have a more meaningful relationship with my audience
than any other podcast host. And if anyone tries to
tell you different you can tell them to take it
up with me on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram at doomsday podcast,

(47:41):
or drop me an email to doomsday pod at gmail
dot com, and I will bark in their face like
a dog until they apologize. Together, we make something that
shouldn't even exist, but it does anyways. And because of this,
I thank you, and I ask you to thank yourselves.
But enough of that for the moment. I just wanted
to take a minute to tell you about some initiatives

(48:02):
for the new year, talking about T shirts and minisodes
and a card game and stickers and bark bags and
hugs and possibly a secondary show format and a lot more,
even a next installment of Sleep Manuals, but we'll talk
about that later. And I know every year I end
up saying, well, I'm glad that's over, but I really
don't want to do that at the end of twenty

(48:23):
twenty six, so I spent two full days working out
sound issues and figuring out how to remove ads from
the middle of the show. So I am expecting a
lot less complaints about ad placements. And if that cheers
you and you're feeling the spirit of the season and
you dream of a world with zero ads, I invite
you to check out patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo,

(48:47):
where not only are the episodes longer and early, they
are mercifully ad free. Again to this point, blame iHeartRadio.
If you're just looking to raise one corner of my
mouth before the years through a small donation through Buy
Me a Coffee dot com, slash Doomsday is always appreciated,
and of course, as always, if you can spare the

(49:09):
money and had to choose, I ask you to consider
making a donation to Global Menic. Global Medic is a
rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the
world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises.
They are often the first and sometimes only team to
get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and

(49:31):
to date they have helped over six million people across
eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate
at Globalmedic dot Ca. On the next episode, I don't
know what the worst or least favorite school field trip
you ever took was, but in our next episode we

(49:52):
will be joining one which I think you will agree
deserves two frostbitten thumbs down. It's the hood Field trip
disaster of nineteen eighty six. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off,
and thanks for listening.

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The Core Disaster Moviesode of 2003 | Episode 99

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Core Disaster Moviesode of 2003 | Episode 99