the core

the core is probably one of the biggest misfires I've seen in a long time.

It somehow manages to tread a fine line between believable science and science fiction... sorry, I should say, it manages to blunder around, stomping on the line between science and science fiction, making a general mess of everything.

The biggest crime it commits is the complete bogusness of the science it tramples over.

So the basic idea is that the magnetic field of the earth is somehow switching off.  It's not clear why it only slowly slows down instead of properly switching off, or why it's happening at all, but we can chalk that up to bad science fiction.

No, the problematic elements is what seems to happen as a result.  It's like someone has half remembered a bunch of stuff they've seen on the Discovery channel and turned it up to "11".

So pigeons are known to use the earth's magnetic field to navigate by.  If it switches off they may therefore reasonably get confused.  However, the film shows huge flocks of them all suicidally crashing into people, buildings, cars - anything and everything.  But they only use magnetic fields for long range navigation - why would that cause them to fly into a building?

Or, somehow, we're supposed to be believe the magnetic field switching off would cause huge super-storms with vast amounts of lightening.  Why isn't clear, but to demonstrate it, one hits Rome... and destroys everything.  Including somehow managing to blow up the coliseum.  You know, the big thing made out of non-conducting concrete, that, in this film, seems to act like a beacon for all the lightening ever.

And it also shows some people getting microwaved because the magnetic field protects us all against the earths microwaves.  Except that the sun puts out very little microwave radiation, only a small part of it would be in the frequency needed to do stuff like boil water (you can almost see the monkey brains ticking over - "oh yeah, microwaves, they heat stuff, don't they?") and the microwaves are absorbed by the atmosphere, not deflected by the magnetic field.

What they're thinking of is the deflection of charged particles (the "solar wind") that the sun puts out.

And think abut it - if the sun was that harmful how could anyone have gone to the moon?  (yes, yes, some idiots think we didn't, but then some people believe in fairies)  And how would satellites and other spacecraft be able to function?  Yes, if the magnetic field switched off it would not be great, but we're hardly talking the end of all life on earth within a year, as the film states.

The real problem is it also somehow manages to fail at having interesting characters, being instead stocked with paper-thin clichés and Hollywood tropes.  I mean, we get almost no back-story to any of the characters and you're not really given any reason to care about them at all.  However, they're all obviously brilliant.  Even the guy who's broadly meant to be the 'Judas' in the group is actually a genius who comes up with a brilliant solution and sacrifices himself.

So even though you can sometimes compensate for pish science and rubbish science fiction with good and interesting characters, it can't even do that right.

and on top of all that, it was way too long.  If it's a fun B-movie, like it seems to be trying to be, it shouldn't be rattling on for a chunk over two hours.