![]() Refusing to allow his ancestor's name to be tarnished, Ben sets out to prove the innocence of his great-great-great-great-grandfather.īen discovers a cipher pointing to Édouard Laboulaye hidden on the back of the diary page. Black market dealer Mitch Wilkinson, a Virginia Military Institute graduate, shows one of the 18 missing pages of John Wilkes Booth's diary, with Thomas Gates' name on it, convincing everyone that Thomas was not only a conspirator, but the grand architect of the Lincoln assassination, which tarnishes the Gates Family's reputation and Ben is disgraced. Over 140 years later, Ben Gates is telling his ancestor's story at a Civilian Heroes conference. ![]() As Thomas dies, Thomas tells his distraught son, Charles Gates, "The debt that all men pay." Thomas is shot, and the gunman attempts to retrieve the pages, but only obtains a page fragment. A fight breaks out, and Thomas rips several pages from the diary and throws them in the fireplace. Thomas solves the puzzle, a clue to a map to Cíbola, the city of gold, and realizes the men are still loyal to the South and have a sinister motive for finding the treasure. While he does so, Booth leaves for Ford's Theatre to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. Thomas recognizes the message and begins to translate it. The score, which only runs for a hair over 20 minutes, was not released in stores, and is only available as a digital download.Five days after the end of the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth and Michael O'Laughlen, both members of the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC), enter a tavern and approach Thomas Gates ( Ben Gates' ancestor), a well-known puzzle solver, to decode a message written in John Wilkes Booth's Diary. It’s just that it sounds so much like its predecessors and so many of its contemporaries, and has so little true originality, it could be any score from any movie. It’s not that the score is bad in any way – in many places it is, in fact, quite rousing and entertaining. Once or twice something interesting happens (for some reason, Rabin interjects a honky tonk piano into the middle of “Cibola”, and for less obscure reasons puts an accordion into “Spirit of Paris”), or the undulating fiddle motif reappears, but for the most part Book of Secrets is an exact replica of the original National Treasure, right down to the dance music rhythms (“Gabby’s Shuffle”) and the Thomas Newman-esque American Beauty references which were so out of place in the first film (and aren’t any less distracting here). Unfortunately, for the most part, this is where the innovation ends, and what remains is an entertaining, but another of the wholly predictable summer blockbuster Jerry Bruckheimer scores we have come to know so well. The opening cue, “”, is actually a pretty decent reworking of the main National Treasure theme, overlaid with a surging fiddle undercurrent and an interesting variation on a solo violin, which eventually gives way to a typical pseudo-Zimmer power anthem, replete with male voice choirs and crashing chords. ![]() Along for the ride this time around are Jon Voight, Ed Harris, Helen Mirren, Harvey Keitel, Justin Bartha and Diane Kruger, as is composer Trevor Rabin, who scored the original. Considering the monumental success of the original National Treasure movie, it was almost inevitable that a sequel would be made – and so here we are again, with Jon Turteltaub directing Nicolas Cage as adventurer Ben Gates – although this time he’s trying to get his hands on a mythical “book of secrets” which, if found, will uncover the truth about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and exonerate his great-great-grandfather from the accusations that he collaborated with John Wilkes Booth, the great president’s killer. ![]()
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