My friend Paul Preuss probably won't be suing the guys who made THE CORE. Still, the possibility glimmers as we stack up comparisons and things stolen from his book CORE. (Oh, and several scenes and thing clearly borrowed from EARTH.)
It makes me wonder if someone sometime should set up a whistleblower site - akin to some of the urban legends sites - that simply posts point by point comparisons between movies and books. Do any of you know of such a site already in existence?
A comparison is below. WOuld any of you care to hunt up Paul's book and do your own comparison?
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Comparing Core, a 1993 novel by Paul Preuss, with The Core, a Paramount picture released in April 2003, Directed by Jon Amiel, Produced by David Foster, screenplay by Cooper Layne et al.
In both the novel and the movie, Earth faces sudden peril because of an extraordinarily quick collapse of the planet's magnetic field.
In both book and film, plucky scientists propose to penetrate deep into Earth's core, setting off "bombs in the core" to restart the field-generating dynamo.
In both book and film, a hermit-like innovator works alone to invent the superhard, refractory material essential to withstand the heat and pressure of the deep Earth.
In both the novel and the movie, nefarious government agencies spy on these efforts because of their schemes to use earthquakes as weapons.
The producers of the film chose to make the delivery system of their nuclear bombs a deep-diving ship carrying a human crew. While this makes for colorful drama onscreen, the utter impossibility of the approach is a groaner that may have helped defeat the film at the box office. Preuss's novel is intended as plausible fiction and does not use a crewed vessel. Nevertheless the extrapolation from his deep drilling project is blatant.
Some specific points:
… The unnaturally rapid collapse of the Earth's magnetic field is original to the novel and copyrighted.
… A specific kind of hard, refractory material is original to the novel and copyrighted. The screenplay uses terms from the novel relating to this material, but takes them out of context and renders them senseless, indicating that the idea did not have a common, independent origin.
… The entire sequence of a dive into a deep trench in the Western Pacific, including underwater earthquakes, whale sightings, etc., was taken from the novel in a way that cannot plausibly have had a common, independent origin.
… The proposition that the Earth's collapsed magnetic field can be restored by setting off bombs in the liquid core is original to the novel and copyrighted.
… Both novel and screenplay have as subplots the military use of earthquakes as weapons; in both cases spies for the military are part of the drilling operations. (In both, the spies are even of Slavic origin!) This strains coincidence.
The producers of "The Core" appear to have attempted to spread out their "borrowings" in order to take the best ideas wherever they lie, and possibly to disperse any actionable similarities. Another blatant source of appropriated copyrighted material is described below.
Comparing Earth, a 1991 novel by David Brin, with The Core, a screenplay by Cooper Layne et al.
This novel and the movie share the notion of the planet's core becoming a threat because of human meddling.
In the Preuss novel, the initial calamity was natural. In the Brin novel, and in the movie The Core, catastrophe was triggered by a human-made object dropped deep into the Earth, requiring human intervention to correct and eliminate the first cause.
There are variances in The Core between the initial script, the released version of the film, and the story told by publicity previews, but all three are relevant. Previews tell of a mission to eliminate the deep manmade object object causing disaster on the surface.
The most blatant borrowing from Earth is a pivotal dramatic sequence, early in both the book and the movie, in which a woman space-shuttle pilot, pondering her failed marriage, must suddenly turn her attention to saving her ship after the vessel is crippled by the beam or field of influence of some human-triggered calamity in the core of the planet. Every last detail mentioned in the previous sentence is specific to the novel and copyrighted. Every detail appears miraculously in the script of The Core.
Also overlapping is the shuttle pilot's subsequent role as the co-protagonist, co-survivor, and love interest of the male scientist lead.
The novel Earth partly involves the unprecedented and innovative idea of interacting with the planet on the level of software. In publicity for The Core - though not in the released version of the film - a character relates that he is "going to computer-hack the Earth".
Other overlaps with Earth include the theme, at the end of both the novel and the movie, of fighting the fallacy of government secrecy by releasing all information onto the internet.
Relevant data:
Re: Cooper Layne: http://us.imdb.com/Name?Layne,%20Cooper#writer
Director Jon Amiel: http://us.imdb.com/Name?Amiel,+Jon
Prod. David Foster: http://us.imdb.com/Name?Foster,+David+(III)
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