And Darwin said, “Let there be light!” And there was light.

When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.
– Mark Twain, Feb 1907.

The battle between Good (intelligence) and Evil (the church) is ramped up when Charles Darwin arrives at the epiphany that evolution is driven by natural selection, thereby connecting all organisms on Earth in a mutating relay race of survival.

Mother Church, of course, knows we were really put here by magic.

CREATION is a small slice of the storied life of Charles Darwin (played by the excellently English Paul Bettany, who played Russell Crowe’s naturalist/surgeon in MASTER AND COMMANDER (2003), in a role which reminded us coincidentally of Darwin), covering a period after he had traveled the world with The Beagle (and with Russell Crowe) and before he published his masterwork On The Origin Of Species in 1859, the movie speculating on the decisions and motivations that stayed his hand on publishing his world-breaking and faith-shaking scientific tome.

Because the name Darwin has become shorthand for evolution and all its attendant conjectures, many would not be aware that the man himself did not simply write his theory down in a linear fashion with a twinkle in his eye and a spring in his quill. It was physical and mental torture for Charles Darwin to reconcile his hard-won knowledge with that of his inculcated “faith”; he lived in a society “bound together by the church,” a society whose fabric he would risk unraveling were he to publish his renegade theories, even though he would spend decades researching them to ensure he was not spouting emotional guff (like all Born-Agains, Creationists and Intelligent Designists are wont to do 100-percent of the time).

Yet the greatest obstacle in his path was not the almighty close-minded Church. It was, in a word: his puritanical, Unitarian-indoctrinated wife. Jennifer Connelly (Bettany’s real-life wife) is Emma Darwin, the Original Dreamkiller, staunchly siding with Mother Church on all issues, social and scientific, and it is his devotion to her that drives his ultimate decisions.

CREATION seems to get it all right, inserting many minute details into Darwin’s life that only a prior knowledge can appreciate, which means that if the film piques your interest in discovering more about the man, you can always come back to the film and appreciate it even more.

We see the garden path he would take regular walks on while contemplating his theories, we meet his closest allies in the battle for evolutionary theory, Joseph Hooker (Benedict Cumberbatch) and “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Huxley (Toby Jones), we see his experiments breeding pigeons, learn of his work on barnacles, and in the best manner of an objective biopic, we are made aware of Alfred Russell Wallace – the man who inadvertently lost the crown as the discoverer of the theory of evolution.

As a prominent naturalist, Darwin’s favor was courted by young upstarts from around the globe – one of the many naturalists who sent him a letter of an audacious theory of organic interconnectedness was Alfred Russell Wallace. The movie shows us Charles’s despondency over Wallace clearly outlining Darwin’s unfinished, unpublished 1,200-page theory in only 20 pages. (What the movie does NOT show us is Hooker and Huxley exploiting their veteran status in scientific circles to ensure their pal Darwin was credited as the Father of Evolution, relegating Wallace to a footnote.)

The Darwins sired ten children, seven surviving to adulthood; CREATION shows us the period where there were only four, and it is wonderful that they are portrayed as smart, eager to learn, wide-eyed listeners, Darwin’s best and brightest, his beloved ten-year-old Annie (articulate, beautiful and talented Martha West). When Darwin shows his kids a fox catching a rabbit, daughter Etty cries; Annie consoles her by explaining the balance of nature, “If the fox didn’t catch the rabbit then her babies will die of starvation.” I can’t help thinking that Annie speaks to most of the viewers as well, who have been inculcated to believe that in nature documentaries the meat-eating predators are “evil” and the prey are innately “good.”

Annie’s death would devastate Darwin, and the movie utilizes Annie’s influence on Darwin and his undying love for her in a very heart-rending manner.

Though it is well-documented Emma was Charles’s boon and simultaneous bane, one of the best explorations of this dynamic is in Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. Only Wright’s book dares to postulate what this movie and other Darwin media is scared to – that Charles’s mysterious, chronic “ill-health” was psychosomatic, brought about because he was scared of shattering not only society’s religious illusions, but those of his wife as well, thereby falling out of grace with her (in other words, losing her sexual favors). For brevity, I have made an oversimplification, but throw in the scientific community either drooling for Darwin’s publication to shore up their credibility or to tear it down with elitist criticism, and Darwin’s bowels were bound to be roiling like primordial lava, with Alka-Seltzer a century away.

This was the age when all doctors were basically pure and simple quacks, bleeding you with leeches at the hint of a fever. Darwin’s treatment for his ongoing illness: sharp spinal scrubs and cold douches at 7am, and sweating by the lamp. With this madhouse treatment it’s a wonder anyone lived to old age. Spinal scrubs and douches! Reminds us of comedian Billy Connolly’s routine of British military doctors and their universal cure: “Wire brush and Dettol!”

Darwin’s wife suggests he speak to the reverend (Jeremy Northam), “a physician of souls,” never once considering it might be her and the community’s religious stupidity that keeps him in that state of irremediable distress. Darwin laments, “Suppose the whole world stopped believing that God had any sort of plan for us?” Huxley jubilantly congratulates Darwin for that very reason, “You’ve killed God, sir! And about time!”

The Church’s petty terrorism reaches a personal level when the reverend forces little Annie into knee-bleeding penance on rock salt until she recants her belief in dinosaurs, sending Darwin into a rage: “How dare he torture our children for expressing a plain and simple truth?!” Emma – oh, soul-destroying dominatrix Emma – is naturally on the reverend’s side, and entreats Darwin to calm himself “for her” – once again proving that though he might have descended from a great ape, he was still whipped by a great pussy.

Director Jon Amiel (THE CORE, THE TUDORS) and writers Amiel and John Collee, base their story on the book Annie’s Box by Randall Keynes, so devote much screentime to the admittedly wondrous Annie, and flashbacks of her death. Ghosts instead of science. And they dare a lot when they endow Darwin’s relationship with unnecessary love for the sake of dramatic arc. CREATION is sometimes billed as a great love story. Well, maybe love of a man for the truth of his origins. NOT love between a man and woman – although Emma was quite the sex machine to churn out ten offspring. Darwin and Emma would reconcile not because of love or faith in imaginary deities, but because of social circumstances and logic.

Darwin even applied that logic to Annie’s death, blaming both Emma and himself (first cousins to each other) for “the weakness that killed her.” The movie never brings it up, but this is a genetics issue, which Darwin never quite grasped, nor mentioned in Origin. (The monk Gregor Mendel – not in the movie, but a contemporary of Darwin’s – was working on and publishing his genetics experiments even whilst Origin was being assimilated into mankind’s bloodstream (it sold out on its first day), but it would be years before it was realized his work powerfully corroborated Darwin’s.)

The battle between Good and Evil rages on. That is, the battle between apes and pussies.

END

Anthropocentric Spin.

I want to hurt this movie. Like it hurt me.

THE CORE opens with a Peter Gallagher clone sans Eyebrows dropping dead at a board meeting – so begins a series of events that establish the Earth’s core has inexplicably stopped spinning, causing electromagnetic anomalies. So scientists must drill down and re-start the spin with The Universal Solvent – nukes.

Earth-hugger Poffy

But the spin begins long before they take the plunge…

Any rationalizing fools who entreat those of us with a modicum of intelligence to “sit back, relax and enjoy this entertainment” do not realize that we who rail against movies of this ilk, do so not because of bogus science per se, but because of the inconsistent bogus science. We may not boast Geophysics degrees, nor do we aspire to atom-splitting scientific accuracy – we just want consistency!

Example 1: If your movie maintains that pigeons use the Earth’s electromagnetic field for “long-distance navigation,” why show pigeons disoriented whilst tooling around the few hundred feet of Trafalgar Square.

Example 2: If your movie cites Real Science to explain the impossibility of generating enough energy to start the planet’s core re-spinning, why not establish that it takes that same impossible amount of energy to stop the core in the first place? More on this later.

This movie has less “science” in it than STAR WARS – and STAR WARS has NO science in it.

At a militia symposium, geophysicist Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart, playing your average “biscuit-thrower” college professor: disheveled hair, attire and lifestyle; upon arriving home, throws biscuit to dog which has no name – Hollywood stereotype created by Mel Gibson in LETHAL WEAPON), cites Physics 101, yet none of the generals seem to have even a sixth-grade education, as they stare dismayed at his demo of burning a peach with a spraycan, to illustrate – get this! – how the Sun would burn Earth were it to lose its electromagnetic covering. The stupidity meter could go no lower at that point.

Movies of this ilk are constructed around one or two thrilling sequences upon which the burden of the storyline is draped uncomfortably – such a scene was the introduction to Major Rebecca Childs (grotesquely gorgeous Hilary Swank) as her crew emergency-land Shuttle Endeavour in the LA Aqueduct. The movie’s pitch was all about sonic-booming over Dodger Stadium and navigating through overpass bridges like technofied T-Birds from GREASE. Magnificently-staged, the thrill meter hit climax – consequently, it was all downhill from there.

Stanley Tucci‘s suavely turtle-necked Dr. Conrad Zimsky is simply to insult Dr. Carl Sagan. Ironic that we meet Zimsky exiting his “Einstein Seminars,” even whilst this movie leaves Einstein’s most rigorous theorem (E=mc2) in a deep hole.

Tchéky Karyo, as Frenchman Serge, is the only likable character. Of the admittedly talented cast, his performance alone is so poignant that we’re truly saddened to see him die. (His end was pre-ordained; he was, after all, French.) In the grandest of hackneyed traditions, only the Attractive American White Couple survive whilst every one of the dubiously-titled “terranauts” onboard the drilling craft goes down.

Gorgeously grotesque D.J. Qualls is computer-hacker, Rat, called in by the gubmint to communicate with the drilling craft from the surface; an “unlikely hero” character who is really one of those rootless, amoral beings who make our online lives unbearable with viruses and identity theft and their wholly unnecessary existence – rather than being put on a pedestal, these people should be dumped down a deep crevasse.

There’s the Square-Jawed American Pilot (least-known of the principals, Bruce Greenwood – ergo, first to die); Delroy Lindo as Token Black Dude, Dr. “Braz”; Richard Jenkins (from SIX FEET UNDER – is that some kind of bad joke worse than the puns I’ve been making?) and Alfre Woodard as the preposterously miscast Flight Director. The actors did their best, but the blathering catastrophe of the script kept them low. In a movie this bad, one suspects that either Karyo or Tucci filled a role that F. Murray Abraham was too busy to fill because he was too busy digging himself into a hole on some other bad movie.

Braz constructs their drilling craft with a substance called Unobtainium (stop that laughing in back!), which, he tells us, converts heat and pressure to energy, so the deeper it gets, the stronger it gets….er, I think the misinformed “scientist” meant to say that energy in the form of heat and pressure is converted to mass by the Unobtainium. (Remember that “E=mc2” thingy?) Was the “science consultant” on this movie an actual scientist or a guy that read too many comicbooks? – and, more importantly, may I book some time to put him six feet under?

The script was made of Unobtainium. The deeper it got, the more energy it expended in keeping us from frying in outrage.

Note that “implausible” = fiction; “impossible” = fantasy. A drilling craft outfitted with a laser that disintegrates solid rock to nothingness: implausible. Humans sustaining diamond-crushing pressure in the Earth’s mantle – no matter what they’re wearing, let alone wafer-thin spacesuits: impossible. Throughout the film, Impossibility outweighing Implausibility makes THE CORE Science Fantasy, not Science “Fiction,” so cease associating it with a once-legitimate term.

When physics knowledge was at a groundling stage, scientifically-inept tales like JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH were acceptable, but these days, even the common rabble are well-versed in general physics, so it is inexcusable that knowledge be so denigrated, ignored and subjugated to the inadequacies of feeble-minded technicians with big budgets, who promulgate ANTI-knowledge with their idiotic product…

Deep in the plot, where everyone takes turns saying something scientifically illiterate, Zimsky reveals that a man-made device, “Destiny,” is responsible for the stalled core. I’ll say this once: nothing man-made can output the amount of energy needed to stall a planet’s core. What part of “nothing man-made” don’t the film-makers understand? If these arrogant, anthropocentric, bacterial mites were to explode every nuclear weapon the government denies possessing, it would still not affect the planet’s spin, orbit or sturdiness; it would not even wipe out “all life,” but the great percentage of larger organisms that depend on photosynthesis in their food chain (mainly plants and mammals).

Conceited humans refuse to acknowledge One True Fact: the PLANET will be fine – whether or not the core spins at all; whether or not humans exist at all. You’re only “saving” it for your own selfish ends…

As the Attractive American White Couple are rescued, Rat cries, “The earth is healing itself!” – Well, uh, it was never really “sick,” rodent – obviously jubilant that he can now stop working for The Man and go back to creating viruses and stealing identities online, like the worthless piece of excrement he always was.

But before he hacks into the World Wide Web for spiritually bereft reasons, he does it one last time “nobly” – to promulgate the biographies of the “heroes” who died whilst defying physics laws through uninformed dialog. Whilst we vainly try to clear our e-mail logjams, that’s all we need – more spam.

Can I start to hurt you now, to let the real healing begin?

END