Fusion (movie)

Synopsis

In Boston , on a global day of ecology, a businessman is about to start a meeting when he collapses on the table. In the street, a dozen accidents occur and several people collapse at the same time.

Professor Joshua “Josh” Keyes, Professor of Geophysics at the University of Chicago , is taken to Washington DC . In a hangar, Keyes finds a friend: Serge Leveque, specialist in high energy weapons. He advances to a large room with thirty-two corpses covered with shrouds . General Thomas Purcell explains to the two scientists that these thirty-two corpses come from Boston and died instantly. Keyes guesses that these people had pacemakers but were not killed by an electromagnetic pulse weapon.

In London , a boy sees a dead pigeon . But suddenly, many other birds begin to rush on the buildings, the vehicles … They break the windows, overturn the vehicles. In Chicago, Keyes discovers that repeated bird attacks have occurred in Japan and Australia . He asks two of his students how birds move: thanks to the Earth’s magnetic field , their brains line up along the field. He asks these two students to research disturbing events (bird attacks, whale strandings, aircraft accidents, atmospheric phenomena …)

In an American shuttle, Major Iverson and Major Rebecca “Beck” Childs must land in disaster in a Los Angeles river without casualties. In Washington DC, Keyes is waiting for Dr. Conrad Zimsky, an experienced geophysicist to confirm his results: the end of the world . Initially, Zimsky does not believe in Keyes’ results, but when he leaves, he consults the scientific records. He calls Purcell when outside, bright auroras appear in the sky.

In a bar, Keyes gets drunk with his friend when men from the White House take him to a scientific meeting in the presence of General Purcell and Professor Zimsky. He explains to them that the Earth’s magnetic field , which surrounds the Earth and protects it from microwaves and radiation from the Sun , is starting to disappear, which is the cause of these accidents. The cause of the destruction of the magnetic field: the Earth’s core has stopped turning. The next steps will no longer be accidents, but planetary catastrophes, and next year the surface of the Earth will be charred.

Purcell, Zimsky, Keyes and Leveque travel to Utah to meet Dr. Ed Braz, “Braz” Brazzleton, who is working on a “terra nef” with an impossiblium hull (diamond with tungsten-titanium alloy at a super temperature low, depending on the film) that can move underground and withstand the heat and pressure it turns into energy to reinforce itself. They buy his project for the sum of fifty billion dollars to have it in three months. These four people also recruit Taz “Rat” Finch, a hacker, to control information on the Internet to avoid panic and chaos. They recruit Commander Iverson and Major Rebecca “Beck” Childs.

Their mission will be to cross the earth’s crust , then the Earth’s mantle to the nucleus with Virgil (Braz’s ship) and launch a heavy load of nuclear explosions to revive the nucleus.

At the end of the tests, the first electrostatic lightning strikes the world. In Rome , the sky is covered and the electrical systems no longer work, an instant later, the impacts of lightning strike all the corners of Rome, disintegrating the Colosseum , the old Senate and other ancient monuments. In the end, Rome is no more than a field of ruins.

That same evening, Keyes, Iverson, Childs, Braz, Leveque and Zimsky board Virgil , launch into the Pacific Ocean and sink into the depths of an underwater earthquake. After various difficulties, Virgil manages to enter the earth’s crust, crosses it without difficulty and enters the mantle.

Moments later, Virgil enters a geode , a giant ball of crystals . One of them stuck Virgil . Zimsky, Braz, Keyes, and Iverson come out of the ship with combinations, and Braz begins cutting the crystal. Bad luck: Molten lava enters the geode and begins to fill it. Braz can no longer cut the crystals for lack of oxygenKeyes removes his suit to allow him to finish cutting the crystals. Moments later, Keyes fainted for lack of oxygen. Braz releases the crystals from the ship and helps Zimsky and Leveque, who have been out of the room a short time ago to reconnect Keyes’ oxygen and bring him back into the ship. Iverson stays outside to make sure the ship is working again. As is the case, Iverson goes to the ship, but unluckily, a piece of molten crystal passes through the helmet of his suit, penetrating his cranial box: he dies on the spot. The ship leaves and crosses the lava successfully.

In the middle of the coat, Braz, Keyes and Leveque are in the ship’s module to arm the missiles, but gigantic diamonds strike this module, and the doors of this one close automatically. At the last minute, Leveque passes the counters and his notebook to his friend and stays in the module, it will be ground in followed by the module that is ejected. Keyes mourns his friend and blames Childs for not having disabled the ejection of the damaged module.

Upon entering the core, mission members discover that the core is less dense than expected, and that the explosive charges will be insufficient to restart. Zimsky calls Purcell to launch the DESTINI project (Endogenous Triggering of Earthquakes INItial), a weapon capable of causing earthquakes . But the crew prefers to continue.

Meanwhile, microwaves have found a hole in the magnetic field : over the San Francisco Bay , the intense microwave beam darkens on the congested Golden Gate Bridge . The bridge begins to heat, static electricity appears on the cables and breaks them, the wheels of the cars melt, the last cables give way, the bridge is cut in two, throwing all the vehicles in the bay.

At the mission’s monitoring center, Purcell discovers that San Francisco is practically extinct and that the West side is plunged into darkness. Purcell does not wait for Virgil to come back to launch DESTINI. Keyes asks Finch to find DESTINI and slow him down.

Braz and Keyes try in vain to find a “solution” to restart the nucleus, Zimsky explains to them that to launch several small detonations in the recesses of the nucleus could revive the nucleus: it supposes that the waves emitted by the detonations will reinforce some of the others by the theory of the dynamics of elementary fluids.

They arrive at the heart of the nucleus, which is a solid block of iron. Braz explains to the crew that Virgil will not eject an undamaged module. The only way is to unblock the pump, unfortunately located in the exit tunnel, where the temperature is 5000 ° C. Braz sacrifices himself to unblock the pump while Finch gets to slow down DESTINY.

Keyes and Zimsky begin to launch modules containing two hundred megatons of explosive. At the penultimate, Zimsky explains that the last charge will be insufficient (because he forgot to correct the measurements to compensate the offset), a blast effect will project the load on Keyes. Zimsky tries to remove him but tries to escape. Childs changes course, releasing Keyes and making Zimsky fall, the charge will block the foot of the latter. Keyes runs away and the module is ejected.

Keyes charges the latest explosive charge with fuel sticks from the Virgil reactor (which is quite plutonium rich and thus will serve to make the last charge more powerful) and ejects the module before joining Childs who is in the cockpit. The charges explode and with the core temperature, Virgil returns to the surface of the Earth. The mission is a success, the core of the earth turns again. Virgil emits ultra-waves, they are localized thanks to the whales who answered them.

A week later, Finch enters a cyber-cafe , with a disk taking control of the computers from his laptop and broadcasts a message that Virgil’s dead members are ” unknown heroes ” and that the world owes its survival to them. heroism. This information is broadcast on all television news channels around the world.

Technical sheet

• French title: Fusion
• Québec title: At the heart of the earth
• Original title: The Core
• Director: Jon Amiel
• Scenario: Cooper Layne and John Rogers
• Production: Sean Bailey , David Foster , David B. Householter and Cooper Layne
• Production Companies: David Foster Productions and Horsepower Films
• Music: Christopher Young
• Photography: John Lindley
• Editing: Terry Rawlings
• Sets: Philip Harrison
• Costumes: Daniel J. Lester
• Distribution: Paramount Pictures
• Budget: 60 million dollars (44 million euros) only for production (without advertising)
• Budget: 85,000,000 $ (production) – 30 million $ (promotion)
• Language: English
• Country of Origin: United Kingdom , United States
• Format: Colors – 2.35: 1 – DTS / Dolby Digital – 35 mm
• Genre: Disaster movie , Science fiction
• Duration: 135 minutes
• Release dates:
  •  United States : March 25 , 2003 (First)
  •  United States and Canada :  March 28 , 2003
  •  France and Belgium :  April 16 , 2003

Distribution

• Aaron Eckhart (VF: Guillaume Orsat and DV: Marc-André Bélanger ) : D ^Dr. Josh Keyes
• Hilary Swank (VF: Virginie Mery and VQ: Nadia Paradis) : Major Rebecca “Beck” Childs
• Delroy Lindo (VF: Pascal Renwick and DV: Hubert Gagnon ) : D ^r Edward “Braz” Brazzleton
• Stanley Tucci (VF: Bernard Alane and DV: Luis Cespedes ) : D ^r Conrad Zimsky
• Tchéky Karyo (VF: himself and DV: François Godin ) : D ^Dr. Serge Leveque
• Bruce Greenwood (VF: Julien Kramer and VQ: Jean-François Beaupré ) : Commander Iverson
• Richard Jenkins (VF: Claude Brosset and VQ: Jean-Marie Moncelet ) : General Thomas Purcell
• Alfre Woodard (VF: Pascale Vital and VQ: Claudine Chatel ) : Stickley
• DJ Qualls (VF: Donald Reignoux and VQ: Sebastien Reding ) : Taz “Rat” Finch
• Glenn Morshower : an FBI agent
• Anthony Harrison : an FBI agent
• Nathaniel DeVeaux (VF: Lucien Jean-Baptiste ) : an agent of the FBI
• Ray Galletti : Paul
• Eileen Pedde : Lynne
• Rekha Sharma : Danni
• Christopher Shyer : Dave Perry
• Matt Winston : Luke Barry

Source: Voxofilm.free.fr  [ archive ]

Around the film

• Filming began on December 10, 2001 and took place in Burnaby , Dumont Dunes , Everett , London , Reno , Rome , San Francisco , Surrey , Vancouver , Victoria , Wendover and Winnipeg .
• The stopping of the magnetic field of the Earth which is at the base of the scenario of the film corresponds to a real fear. In fact, according to Dr. Sten Odenwald of Harvard University : “If the magnetic field of the Earth suddenly deteriorates? As happens about every 250,000 years, the consequences would be spectacular. However, physicists have already begun to observe a weakening of the Earth’s magnetic field, and do not know if it is a passing phenomenon or the forerunner of much more dramatic events. “
• The film aroused great reservations about its scientific and technical aspects. For example, for Roland Lehoucq , Fusion “shows […] erroneous conceptions of the laws of physics [..] ridiculous technical exploits and pure scientific inventions” ¹ . Similarly, according to the IMDb , the course of Earth Sciences of the University of British Columbia (EOSC 310) uses film as an educational tool by analyzing scientific fanciful conceptions on which it is based ² .
• The digital effects that are very present in the film, particularly with regard to the “disaster” scenes, were made by three European countries: France, the United Kingdom, and Italy.
• In one scene, one of the characters indicates that the vehicle that will go into the depths of the Earth was built from unobtainium (“impossiblium” in the VF), literally “unobtainable”, which happens to be a fictional material invented by science fiction fans to describe anything with impossible properties.

Soundtrack

• Echelon , performed by Thirty Seconds to Mars
• Were not You the One , performed by Sherry Williams
• Sunblind , interpreted by BT and Jan Johnston

External links

• (en) Fusion [ archive ] on the Internet Movie Database

Notes and references