History Film / TheCore

* DidNotThinkThisThrough: It's understandable, given how fast they had to build the ship and were working with only estimations, but two major oversights in ''Virgil's'' design become major issues for the mission.
** The first is that Josh designed the ship's computer to use sound waves to determine the density of the materials ahead of them, determining what they could and couldn't pass through, which were ColorCodedForYourConvenience. He unfortunately never taught the computer how to read pockets of empty space, which is how the ship ends up crashing into a giant geode, leading to [[spoiler: Iverson's death]].
** The second comes after learning their original plan won't work, with the backup plan to eject ''Virgil's'' compartments manually and scatter them around the core so he explosions reinforce each other. The ship isn't designed to eject undamaged compartments, so they need to unlock the master hydraulic gear. Which is located in the crawlspace they use to get in and out of the ship, and is heated to about 9,000 degrees. Braz even lampshades this when Zimsky complains.

[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/The_Core_Poster.jpg]]

* BatDeduction: Keyes manages to deduce what all the dead people have in common in less than a minute based solely on the specialties of the two people brought in to investigate.

* ConvectionSchmonvection: [[AvertedTrope Averted]], mostly. The characters were being protected by the {{Unobtanium}} hull of the ''Virgil'', and they couldn't exit the craft without suits of the same material. [[spoiler:Braz got cooked to death]] when he went out into the magma-free, but appropriately very hot impeller compartment to [[spoiler:deactivate the safety switch holding the compartments in place]].

* MonumentalDamage: A must for this movie's genre. Complete with evil space rays melting the Golden Gate Bridge, pigeons going berserk in Trafalgar Square, and accumulated ''lightning'' exploding the Coliseum and Vittorio Emanuelle monument, neatly {{Averted}} for Paris' Eiffel Tower oddly enough [[note]]right as the core was repairing itself, a similar destructive storm was about to spawn over Paris implying that Paris' Eiffel Tower was next.[[/note]]

*** Let's start with the fact that in RealLife, the Earth's core spins ''because'' the rest of the Earth is spinning. It rotates once every 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds, just like the rest of the Earth does. Relative to somebody standing on the Earth's surface, the core doesn't appear to move at all. If the core "stopped spinning", it would appear to ''spin in the opposite direction'' relative to the Earth's surface. (And where would all that angular momentum go? At the very least, the rest of the Earth would have to ''speed up''.)

* ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney: Brazelton hasn't built a prototype of his ship at the time the military catches up to him because he didn't manage to improve his production methods enough to build the thing without spending a ludicrous amount of money. So the military gives him a ludicrous amount of money ($15 billion to be precise).

* ArtisticLicenseMilitary: Throughout the movie, Robert Iverson, the Space Shuttle pilot and later the [[spoiler:first]] pilot of ''Virgil'', is referred to as possessing the military rank of "Commander". The problem is that Commander is a Navy rank, and Iverson is Air Force, with that service's equivalent of Commander being a Lieutenant Colonel. However, the confusion possibly arose from the fact that the leader of a NASA mission is given the honorary rank of "Commander" despite their actual military rank.
** Actually, they did get this one right. Commander Iverson is in the Navy, not the Air Force. This is shown in the scene where USAF Major Beck is expecting a court martial for the space shuttle incident, but is instead assigned to the Virgil project. Iverson is there, wearing a black uniform with three stripes on the sleeve - a Navy Commander.

* MonumentalDamage: A must for this movie's genre. Complete with evil space rays melting the Golden Gate Bridge, pigeons going berserk in Trafalgar Square, and accumulated ''lightning'' exploding the Coliseum and Vittorio Emanuelle monument.

** Actually, they did get this one right. Commander Iverson is in the Navy, not the Air Force. This is shown in the scene where Beck is expecting a court martial for the space shuttle incident, but is instead assigned to the Virgil project. Iverson is there, wearing a black uniform with three stripes on the sleeve - a Navy Commander.

->'''Keyes''': The core is the size of Mars. You're talking about jump-starting a planet. This is a superheated hyper-fluid of molten iron and nickel at 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And the deepest we've ever been is seven miles, with a two-inch drill bit. [...] We're talking about millions of pounds of pressure per square inch. Even if we somehow came up with a brilliant plan to fix the core, we just can't get there!
->'''Zimsky''': Yes, but... what if we ''could''?

* HollywoodScience: Seeing how this is what the movie is most known for, the examples are put in their own section here.

* CruelAndUnusualDeath: [[spoiler:Leveque]]'s death, which has the poor guy getting ''slowly crushed'' inside of a compartment. When the compartment is detached, it gets ''compressed into a small box''.

* FakeVideoCameraView: Just before the scene of pigeons dying in Trafalgar Square, we see through the viewfinder of a video camera, including blinking red dot and "REC" in the upper right corner, as a man is taking video of his family.

* {{Indecisive Parody}}: Stanley Tucci gives us one of Richard Dawkins, which is actually [[{{NotSoDifferent}} not as much]] of a {{Flanderisation}} as you might think.

** ArtisticLicenseAstronomy: The sun does not emit evil microwave [[DeathRay death rays]] that can boil San Francisco Bay and melt the Golden Gate Bridge. (And if it did, a magnetic field wouldn't stop them.)

* ZeroesAndOnes
-->'''Rat''': Well I speak one [language] - 10100. With that I could steal your money, your secrets, your sexual fantasies, your whole life; any country, any place, any time I want. We multitask like you breathe. I couldn't think as slow as you if I tried."