National Treasure

Not Recommended. This is a boring predictable action movie. Yeah, it has a good moral: Great riches are not for one man to hoard but for sharing with the world. The hero seeks treasure but ends up giving it to the world. That’s cool. But everything else is pretty boring. I’m all for a good popcorn movie, but I like to have a secondary level that is deeper to it all. This one tries to be in that it is linked to the founding of our country, but it doesn’t work for me. One complaint: They pitch a pragmatic morality and try to link it to the founding fathers. The hero says that the founders were guilty of treason, so their founding of the country was doing wrong in order to bring about right, thus justifying his own stealing of the Declaration of Independence in order to save it. Well, sorry, but the founders were not traitors. It was a war for independence of lesser magistrates against unjust higher magistrates, it was not a revolution in the strict sense of the word. They had every moral right to withdraw from Britain, because they did it through lower magistrates, NOT through a mere populist uprising, in other words, a mob, like the French Revolution. THAT was illegal, immoral, and criminal. But the American War of Independence was both moral and legal. And these pragmatism arguments always sound good until you examine it more closely. Oh, so it’s okay to do wrong in order to accomplish right? So the ends justify the mans? Okay, then killing all poor people to get rid of poverty is justifiable on this ethic. And none of us would accept that option. Well, that’s what ends justifying the means DOES lead to. Justification of crime in the name of ultimate goodness. Pragmatic morality is criminal ethics. To be fair, the hero was in other ways, a good guy who didn’t seek to win through violence, but through his wits, and that’s good.