National Treasure
2-Disc Collector’s Edition
Directed by Jon Turteltaub
Starring Nicolas Cage, Diane Kruger, Justin Bartha, Jon Voight, Sean Bean
Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Available Dec. 18, 2007

During the Johnson administration… no, the other Johnson administration (that’d be Andrew Johnson, late 1860s)… a clue to the location of a mythical treasure is revealed to a young man by ailing Senator Charles Carroll. The “secret” to the location of the treasure, he is told, “lies with Charlotte.” The treasure Carroll so enigmatically refers to here is believed to be one which was amassed centuries ago by a secret order known as the Templar Knights, a legendary treasure that had been deemed too great for any one man to possess, so it was hidden away by the Knights.

Our story picks up 150 years later with Benjamin Franklin Gates (Nicolas Cage), the great-great-great-great grandson of the young man who held Carroll’s secret — a secret which has been passed down through the Gates family line ever since. Ben Gates, whose occupation (as far as we know) is full-time treasure hunter, is a character modeled in the spirit of timeless adventurers like Indiana Jones and Allan Quatermain. He’s intelligent, honorable, and strongly driven by a passion for history. In the case of National Treasure, it is his history that currently drives him, or rather, his family’s history. The legendary cache Gates is searching for in National Treasure is believed to be guarded to this day by the equally secret order of Freemasons, some of whom were proven to be among the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.

Armed with this seemingly innocuous clue, Gates and his crew locate a long derelict colonial ship named the Charlotte that has drifted undersea for a century and a half and now resides just north of the Arctic circle. Amongst the wreckage they discover a riddle engraved upon a Meerschaum pipe which has been guarded by the corpse of the Charlotte’s captain all this time. This new riddle hints at an even more unlikely clue — that an invisible treasure map had been secreted onto the back of the Declaration of Independence. Faced with the existence of this seemingly inaccessible map, Gates’s treasure hunting partner and expedition financier Ian Howe (Sean Bean) decides he will steal the Declaration and find the Templar treasure using any means necessary. He then turns on Gates and their tech-savvy partner Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) and leaves them for dead in the frozen wasteland. Don’t worry, I’m not giving away very much as this all takes place in the first few minutes of the movie.

National Treasure is a terribly fun movie that takes us on a wild ride through several historic locations from U.S. History as Ben Gates and Riley Poole attempt to uncover the mystery of the Templar’s treasure before their former partner turned baddie, Howe, beats them to it. The cast is rounded out by Diane Kruger as Abigail Chase, a curator for the National Archives who gets caught up in the adventure and two solid supporting performances from veteran actors Jon Voight as Ben’s naysaying father Patrick Gates and Harvey Keitel as the omnipresent federal agent Sadusky, as well as a cameo from Christopher Plummer as grandpa John Adams Gates.

Like the movie, the DVDs are packed with hidden gems. Disc one is by far the more interactive of the two with its ‘Bonus Treasure Hunt’ feature, which initially gives you a look at four video items:

• National Treasure on Location (11:19) - Follow the crew through from the Arctic circle, to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York city;
• Deleted Scenes (7:47) - Which contains two scenes with an introduction and commentary by director Jon Turteltaub;
• Opening Scene Animatic (2:23) - A look at an animatic storyboard that was created as an early test for the opening sequence of National Treasure; and
• Alternate Ending (1:01) - A different ending that more openly hints at the possibility of a sequel.

But the real fun begins after you finish watching each of these four special features, as you are given two bits of text that you will use to solve a puzzle that you are presented with at the end of the ‘final’ feature. If you solve it correctly you are granted access to stage two of the ‘Bonus Treasure Hunt,’ which contains two additional documentary shorts called Treasure Hunters Revealed (8:35) and The Templar Knights (5:01), as well as Riley Poole’s Decode This! which is a game of decryptology that you’re tasked to complete in order to gain access to the final bonus feature on disc one which unlocks a special viewing mode for the movie called Trivia Track.

Finishing the ‘Decode This’ game isn’t hard by any means, but it’s definitely a tedious lot to slog through using a DVD remote control. Each level of the ‘Bonus Treasure Hunt’ provides you with a key to unlock it in the future so that you don’t have to jump through hoops to access the ‘hidden’ features every time you put the disc on anew. These codes can be saved in the Collector’s Edition Logbook included with the DVDs. I’m not gonna outright spoil anyone’s fun here, but if you’d like to know the access keys leave a comment and I’ll email them to you.

The special features contained on disc two are all available straight away. They include five additional deleted scenes and four documentary shorts:

• Ciphers, Codes, & Code Breakers (11:55) - A short history of codebreaking from the discovery of Rosetta Stone to the thwarting of Germany’s WWII Enigma device;
• Exploding Charlotte (6:35) - Following the immense task of recreating a colonial ship in the Arctic circle and ultimately blowing it to smithereens with 600 lbs. of gasoline;
• To Steal a National Treasure (5:46) - How does one even conceive of a means to steal something as highly guarded as the Declaration of Independence? By consulting people who actually could steal it; and
• On The Set Of American History (6:08) - An additional look at the historic locations where the filming of National Treasure took place.

Overall this presentation of National Treasure spares no expense and is a worthwhile addition to any adventure geek’s DVD treasure trove.