Crack in the World (1965) Dana Andrews, Janette Scott, Kieron Moore, Alexander Knox, Peter Damon, Jim Gillen Movie Review

Crack in the World (1965)   3/53/53/53/53/5


Crack in the World (1965)

Crack in the Core

Dr. Stephen Sorenson (Dana Andrews) has been working on an idea for several months which involves drilling down to the Earth's core to tap the massive energy which is at the Earth's core. But to complete this he needs to drop an atomic missile down the hole to break through the final layer, something which Dr. Ted Rampion (Kieron Moore) fears could have disastrous consequences. It leads to increased tension between the men as Stephen knows that his younger wife Maggie (Janette Scott) and Ted are close. And it turns out that Ted's fears were well founded when a fissure starts forming which could end up splitting the planet in two unless they can find some way of stopping it. What no one else knows is that Dr. Sorenson is dying which is why he has rebuffed Maggie's mentions of starting a family.

So the mad scientist puts the world in danger again thanks to their desire to try things without fully taking in to account the risks that may out weigh the positives. Yes "Crack in the World" is another one of those disaster movies where after the threat of the world being torn in to two thanks to a scientist's experiment we then have another scientist coming up with another risky, explosive way of hopefully stopping the disaster, Let me put "Crack in the World" into context as the main disaster storyline wouldn't be out of place in a modern made for TV disaster movie.

But "Crack in the World" has a couple of other things including a subplot surrounding not only Dr, Sorenson dying but his jealousy as he believes that Maggie has feelings for Ted. And then there are the special effects where we have miniature volcanoes which shoot out flames and so on. In truth both sides of this are typical of the era but they do add something to the movie and as such add to that aspect of this being cliche, well when you have a group of politicians asking what they can do you can bet the answer will be pray.

What this all boils down to is that "Crack in the World" is entertaining in an old disaster movie sort of way but it is also only ever cliche when it comes to the actions, effects and storyline.


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