You’ve seen this one before: a ragtag crew of scientists, field experts, and technicians try to save Earth from imminent obliteration. In Armageddon and Deep Impact, it was a giant meteorite; here it’s the failure of the Earth’s magnetic field. The core has stopped spinning, and within a year, our blue planet will be toast. So a team of " terranauts " must ride a rock-blasting vehicle to the center of the Earth and set off a series of nukes to jumpstart the planet’s stalled heart.

The crew includes the hunky, Indiana Jones–like scientist (Aaron Eckhart), the infallible astronaut with a great body (Hilary Swank), and the pompous intellect (a wonderfully smarmy Stanley Tucci) who threatens to throw a wrench into the works. At the heart of The Core’s problems are mass-destruction CGI effects that are some of the cheesiest ever (director Jon Amiel should stick to disasters like Entrapment). The best comes at the beginning, when the wonky magnetic field short-circuits people with pacemakers and throws a space shuttle (bad timing given the Columbia disaster) off course. After that, the movie goes off course itself. (105 minutes)