National Treasure

So I've ben told by my many thousands of readers that they always skip my book reviews. And that's just fine; as a mater of fact I didn't write reviews for my last two reads to spare you all from having to read more praise for Robert Jordan.

However, I could not go without writing a review for this most recent movie I watched because I haven't felt so strongly about a film since the time Phantom Menace came along and destroyed George Lucas' dignity.

But the real reason I am writing to you about this movie is two-fold. The first being that if any of you out there read this post in time I might be able to give you the gift of an hour and a half of your life gone un-wasted. Do not watch this movie. But I also write because there are some people out there who honestly enjoy this movie and therefore I must express to the rest of your my resulting disillusionment with humanity.

When I saw this movie it made me think that there was some county wide contest among fifth grade social studies classes to write a screen play for a movie loosely related to vocabulary words in their text books and the class who submitted "National Treasure" came in third.*+

In case you wanted to know, yes, Nicholas Cage (who for some reason continues to find work) does discover a city made entirely of gold buried under Mount Rushmore after following a series of clues found in a secret presidential book to which he is allowed access after kidnapping the president--and in doing so simultaneously clears his great grandfather's name of any wrong-doing in the Lincoln assassination by uncovering a secret involving several monarchs, three countries, and every president the United States has ever had. I hope that the fact that more gold than could possibly exist in the world was recently discovered by one man does not have any far flung implications on the economy.

If you could imagine the most far fetched episode of 24 you have ever seen, and subtract the excitement, the swearing, the killing, the lovable characters, the plot-line, and any of the negative consequences ensuing from failure (terrorism/death-as opposed to history books remaining the same as they currently are)...then you would have National Treasure

I intend to make one intelligent comment in this post, and it is this: mixing historical fact with far fetched fiction is a bad move because grounding a movie in reality does not require the audience to suspend its disbelief. And the rest of the fantastical stuff that makes up this "movie" is way out of context. For example: "Gandalf rides unicorn." Not true, but plausible. "Adolf Hitler rides a Unicorn." Funny, but if the movie is NOT a comedy, but rather something that is supposed to be taken more or less as a legitimate piece of writing...well you've lost me.

*The first place class denied Hollywood the rights to make their screenplay into a movie because they have a healthy distaste for Nicholas Cage. The second place was later disqualified when it was discovered that they just cut and pasted the wikipedia article about the toledo war

+ There were five entries.