Rewind Files: Why Do We Love National Treasure?
Rewind Files is when we take a second look at a piece of media to gain a better sense of its greatness, its awfulness, or its place in the cultural landscape.
There is probably little question of this, but National Treasure holds up pretty well. It was a goofball adventure-chase movie back in 2004 and it’s a really goofball adventure-chase movie now. The puzzles are maybe a little less clever than you remember, but the premise is still a blast and the key players all buy in. Rest easy; we’re not about to poop all over the Declaration of Independence, as it were.
A lot of things made National Treasure dope. First off, we had Whispery Nicholas Cage (not as funny as Shouty Nicholas Cage, but still fun) facing off against Treacherous Sean Bean (way better than Regal Sean Bean) while Crafty Harvey Keitel (the only kind of Harvey Keitel) tried to stop them. The “we have to steal the Declaration of Independence” heist scene is no-joke the entire first half of the movie, and it precludes a lot of snappy on-location chase scenes where our heroes pump their arms a lot and hide from their classically eastern European adversaries. To top it all off, the final discovery of the treasure room actually pays off—it’s still wonderful and stirring and patriotic. These are the kind of cheap thrills you buy at a thrift shop and end up keeping around for years. National Treasure has value and longevity.
On the other hand, there are moments when National Treasure is a little too cute. It’s longer than you need it to be and there are a few too many unanswered questions regarding, gee, I dunno, why TF billions of dollars of treasure was left sitting around during the struggle for American independence. If the masons didn’t want the British to find it, why did they leave clues to its whereabouts? Why didn’t they ever spend the treasure? Why did they let themselves die out instead of ensuring a future line of protectors? These are all inessential cans of worms, sure, but a story as tightly-sealed as this one ironically could be benefited by some more mythology.
The other major misstep, and yeah, this needs its own paragraph, is the complete lack of romantic chemistry between Nic Cage and Diane “Just Here for the Paycheck” Kruger. Case in point: Their first moment of sexual tension comes when they’re both leaning way, way over the Declaration. They uncover the symbol that indicates the map on the back, but they don’t have enough materials, so Nic looks sideways at Diane and cocks his eyebrow and says, “We’re gonna need more juice,” and she breathes back, “We’re gonna need more heat.” Their second moment of sexual tension comes when they’re changing in adjacent stalls at an Urban Outfitters. God bless 2004.
National Treasure is silly, but its silliness makes it rewatchable. Justin Bartha’s character—he plays the comic relief, and he’s still the best thing about the movie—is self-aware enough to keep his hand on the Does-Everyone-Realize-How-Ridiculous-This-Is dial, and despite Nic Cage’s best efforts, this movie thankfully never takes itself too seriously. There are themes here of having reverence for history and commitment to country, but no one stands up and makes a big speech about American values or protecting our nation’s secrets “because it’s the right thing to do, dammit!” This is an easy, simplistic, straight-forward puzzle movie. It exists to throw out conspiracy theories and then figure out if they’re true. No one learns a valuable lesson today and no one comes out a changed individual. It’s kind of refreshing, actually.
The cultural window that housed National Treasure saw a strange resurgence of puzzles in media. The Da Vinci Code hit shelves just a year earlier in 2003 (the movie would come out in 2006), and Lost would air its eternal, never-seen-anything-like-it plane crash in September of 2004. It’s a bit contrived to say that all these things together made up a new niche of adventure-puzzle stories, because they didn’t (Raiders of the Lost Ark predates all these works by nearly a quarter-century), but it’s important to know that in the wake of Da Vinci Code and Lost and National Treasure, we now reside in a cultural moment where puzzles can take the form of movies and television shows and no one bats an eye. Westworld isn’t just popular, it was anticipated as an exciting return to this very vein of media. You can bark back-and-forth all you want about the merits of these works (most of them seem to have trouble balancing characters with plot), but most people can agree that they’re fun to watch and even more fun to talk about. If you were a little kid in 2004, your history teacher was obligated to tell you that, sorry, there was not really a map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. That’s pretty funny, and pretty neat, too. Movies don’t often spark the imagination quite like that.
More than anything, though, National Treasure is comforting and safe. It’s a little idealistic, but not too much, and it’s a little sentimental, but not too much of that, either. It’s just fun. Make this movie two years earlier or ten years later, and we’re looking at something potentially much weightier than what we have. In fact, it’s sort of interesting that, in telling a story about people directly threatening American secrets, National Treasure never acknowledges terrorism. This movie is in a bubble, and it doesn’t really matter. You don’t mind the cocoon; you just like watching it. That’s okay.
Maybe going forward, that’s going to be important. There are lot of people trying to explain the nation right now, and maybe we’re going to see some comfort find its way onto our screens. Criticism today sort of wants to buck the idea that movies and TV are escapist strategies—they should be a mirror, rather—but sometimes it’s nice to watch something that makes you feel better. It’s nice to watch a sitcom and feel like you’re catching up with old friends. It’s nice to watch an actioner and feel like a hero. It’s nice to watch National Treasure and feel like, eh, maybe you’d have a beer with Whispery Nicholas Cage.
Comfort Culture isn’t an excuse to ignore our problems—it’s not a Band-Aid solution; it isn’t even a Band-Aid—but in a state where so much of our media is asking who are we or who is the real enemy or where are we going, taking a few hours to kick back and go somewhere else is going to feel healthy. We’ll forget to worry. Instead, we’ll go somewhere and remember that, incredibly, some stories are still much stranger than the truth.