Brainless popcorn fodder is what this mess of bad science and inference amounts to. Essentially, it’s an attempt to create an American version of The Da Vinci Code. It even succumbs to America’s greatest vice- greed. Instead of a controversial, well-sought after relic like the grail in Da Vinci, the heroes and villains of National Treasure are after, well, treasure. It’s a meaningless search for something that has no radical impact on anything profound (okay, so some bad guys would get rich- whoop-dee-doo).
It pretends to be smarter than Tomb Raider, and at least manages to be a quest involving real historical stuff. But it is strung together like a Michael Moore ‘documentary’- there’s so much inference and dotted line dangling between each phase of the plot that you have to either believe that (as the filmmakers hope) these characters truly are geniuses for figuring all this out in only a few days time (in the movie), OR (as your brain should tell you) this is one ginormous festering mess of a film.
Case in point: The opening scene leads us to believe that a century-plus old wooden ship can survive (hull perfectly intact no less) the constant melting and refreezing of the arctic ice cap, would only be a few feet under the ice surface, and that gunpowder (at least 100 years old to boot) explodes in a giant fireball. No. Just…no. And besides, didn’t anyone in the casting department remember from GoldenEye that Sean Bean isn’t believable as a mastermind villain?
Brainless popcorn fodder is what this mess of bad science and inference amounts to. Essentially, it’s an attempt to create an American version of The Da Vinci Code. It even succumbs to America’s greatest vice- greed. Instead of a controversial, well-sought after relic like the grail in Da Vinci, the heroes and villains of National Treasure are after, well, treasure. It’s a meaningless search for something that has no radical impact on anything profound (okay, so some bad guys would get rich- whoop-dee-doo).
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