Descent

Science team leader Dr. Jake Rollins (Luke Perry) finds unusual minerals in the water. They are shocked when a waterfall turns into a lavafall. Earthquake strikes Seattle. Marsha Crawford (Mimi Kuzyk) leads the government response fearing it to be the result of Project Deep run by Dr. Palmer Drake (Rick Roberts) and General Fielding (Michael Dorn). Dr. Karen West (Marie Ward) is a member of the Project and Jake's former girlfriend. It's a deep drilling project for energy. The fix is placing a bomb deep in the earth.

This is basically a different The Core (2003) and that's not a high target to shoot for. The target isn't high and this one falls short of even that. This is a B-movie version of a B-movie with A-movie budget. I actually don't mind this movie until it starts drilling into the Earth. The story has nothing to do but wait for the inevitable success. This is no The Core and The Core is not even a good movie.

The SciFi Channel's 2005 movie "Descent" is a weak to fair reworking of the old "journey to the center of the earth" plot.

The movie appears to suffer from the classic failings of a SciFi Channel made for TV movie. Sets are limited and one gets redundant views of actors at sparse consoles intermixed with low budget animation of the vessel called "the mole." There is some action and some intrigue, but the movie gets a bit redundant with just three main sets (mole, cave, and control room) and the actors who try to twist the uninspired dialog into something entertaining.

Luke Perry does a good job as Dr. Jake Rollins, but Michael Dorn ( aka Warf from Star Trek) appears one dimensional with General Fielding's stilted dialog.

This might seem like another homage to Jules Verne's piece of classic of nineteenth century French literature "Journey to the Center of the Earth;" it is not. For that watch the 1959 classic "Journey to the Center of the Earth" with Pat Boone and James Mason. The "Descent" is another "tunnel digging vessel heading to the center of the earth movie." If you like this sci-fi theme try episode # 1.2 from "The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne" titled "Queen Victoria and the Giant Mole." If you desire the big budget modern special effects, there is 2003's "The Core" with Hilary Swank. These choices may entertain and stimulate your imagination more.

However if you love science fiction, have nothing else to watch, and want to rest your brain; "Descent" will suffice.

This movie's script is indistinguishable from others, most notably The Core, another bad movie. It's pretty clear why Luke Perry doesn't get much work, but to see the beloved Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn) resigned to something like this is just sad.

I really can't think of one plot twist that isn't seen coming a mile away. That's not an exaggeration.

Special effects are very poor, even by TV standards. The lava flow at the beginning of the movie signaling the coming global disaster, starts things off at a very amateurish level. And it gets no better from that point on.

This was pretty inevitable. This movie borrows from "The Core" and from the film it borrowed from, "Armageddon", and the films it borrowed from and so on. Except this time there's Luke Perry too. This films version of the familiar save-the-world plot involves super-earthquakes beginning in the Pacific Northwest and extending too the whole ring of fire. Its soon determined that everybody on Earth just might be doomed. So the military and some scientists build one of those high-tech drilling machines to go inside the Earth and fix things (it just wouldn't be as much fun if they didn't have to go somewhere like space or inside the planet). There's even a line the tries to make the journey into the Earth sound more impressive than the journey into space (like the one in "Armageddon"). It's a Sci-Fi Network movie, so the script is paint by numbers disaster movie. There is in-fighting between scientists and military guys, there are rock-melting lasers, people die and sacrifice themselves for the good of all, and above all, there are (weak CGI) special effects. Not original and not all that entertaining. This is a movie to watch when you have nothing to do, particularly if you've got beer.

This movie is a great movie ONLY if you need something to sit and laugh at the stupidity of it. As a geologist this movie gets most of the important facts wrong and uses actors that are too young to even be considered in the top of their fields. It is interesting how it shows spurting lava in massive caverns below the Earth's surface. It also is funny how seismically active areas are shown to have massive destruction from a 6.5 magnitude earthquake. They seem to forget the building standards in these areas would be higher needing a bigger quake to do this much damage. Also it is funny how much they make the coast line of Washington State and also Oregon to look as though they are nice beaches of Southern California. The Jelly donut analogy is very entertaining even if the way it is used is wrong. The director does a good job of adding more comic relief with the 2 "supossed" PhD's.