The People

Ben is the seventh-generation Gates born into the family obsession. His grandfather John Adams Gates — the storyteller in the prologue — handed him the legend of Charlotte the night he turned twelve. His father Patrick refused to keep handing it down, having watched it cost his own father a marriage and very nearly a sanity. Ben took the bait anyway. He is a trained cryptologist with the kind of CV that splits its time between the Smithsonian's reading room and a series of expeditions his peers would describe, charitably, as exuberant. He has degrees he doesn't list and certifications he won't talk about. He speaks a passable Castilian Spanish, reads a competent Latin, and can identify the year of an iron-gall ink batch by smell on a good day.

What sets Ben apart from a thousand other treasure-hunters is not technique. It is conviction. Ben is the rare hunter who genuinely loves the artifacts more than the gold. The defining moment of the first film, before any heist or chase, is a quiet bibliographic monologue in the National Archives rotunda about Timothy Matlack, the parchment, and the iron-gall ink. The monologue is, technically, an attempt to convince Dr. Abigail Chase that the Declaration is in danger. It is also a love letter. The Declaration, Ben says, he finds more inspirational than the actual treasure. He means it.

Ben's other distinguishing trait is the willingness to do the absurd thing if the absurd thing is the only thing that will work. "I'm gonna steal the Declaration of Independence" is delivered with the perfect sincerity of a man who has thought about it for too long. "I'm gonna kidnap the President of the United States" is delivered the same way three years later. The arc of the two films is, in some sense, the gradual realization by every other character that Ben means it.

Riley is the franchise's heart, the way most heist films' getaway driver is the heart: he says aloud what the audience is thinking, and his job is to be terrified at the speed of an audience seeing the plan for the first time. He met Ben on the Charlotte expedition and has been at his side through two films of escalating insanity. Riley does the systems: he opens vaults, fakes alarms, navigates security architecture, and drives the car. Ben does the artifacts. Riley does the everything-else.

He is a tech specialist with a very modern vocabulary set against Ben's eighteenth-century cadence. The contrast is, in its own way, the franchise's signature. Ben says "Albuquerque" because he is naming a thing; Riley says "Albuquerque! See, I can do it too. Snorkel!" because he is reminding the room that they are, in fact, mortal. After the events of the first film, Riley collects a one-percent finder's fee on the Templar treasure and buys a red Ferrari. The Ferrari appears in the second film as Riley's primary mode of transportation and primary source of complaint, since it has been recently repossessed for unpaid back taxes. The bit pays off twice.

Riley writes a book in the gap between films called The Templar Treasure: A History (working subtitle: National Treasure: Page 47). It sells poorly. He attempts a book signing in Book of Secrets at which one person buys a copy and asks for a personalization to "my dad." It is the kindest small humiliation the franchise contains. Riley still drives the Ferrari. He earns it. He just does not, technically, earn it from the book.

Abigail Chase runs the conservation side of the Charters of Freedom at the National Archives. She is not the public relations face of the Archives; she is the laboratory. Her German-accented English is the result of a Heidelberg education followed by a Smithsonian fellowship, which she earned at twenty-six and never looked away from. Abigail is the rare archivist who is also a credible field researcher. By the third act of National Treasure she is reading lemon-juice cipher off the back of the document she has been preserving for years, and the contradiction does not slow her down.

The relationship with Ben is the film's other engine, alongside the treasure. They argue about preservation versus access; they argue about what is "stealing" versus what is "borrowing"; they end the first film together, and the marriage that follows does not, eventually, hold. By the start of Book of Secrets they are separated, sharing a house and a freezer of leftovers, and Riley is sleeping on the couch keeping the peace. Abigail re-enters the active treasure-hunt during the second film and recovers her place in Ben's plans by, among other things, breaking into Buckingham Palace with him. The marriage repairs, slowly, in the closing scenes. None of this is on screen as a triumph; it is on screen as a quiet, hard-won détente.

Abigail's defining trait is precision. She corrects Ben on dates, on inks, on handwriting attributions, on Mason chronology. She does so without ever seeming to enjoy it. The fan-script affection for her is largely the affection one feels for the only adult in a room of brilliant boys.

Patrick is the Gates of his generation who tried to put the legend down. His own father, John Adams Gates, was a believer; his marriage to Emily Appleton fell apart over the family obsession; he raised Ben on the kitchen of a Maryland house with a clear hope that Ben would not get pulled in. The hope failed. By the start of National Treasure Patrick has surrendered, in the gentlest way, to the fact that his son is a Gates: he is dry, sardonic, supportive in the way only an exhausted parent can be, and he has the keys to a kitchen and a basement full of family papers Ben's expedition is going to need.

Across the two films Patrick steps closer in. In the first film he reluctantly translates a faded Indian boundary script and identifies the Trinity Church marker. In the second film he reconciles with Emily, the wife he hasn't really spoken to in twenty years, and risks his life holding open the bottleneck of the Cibola flooding chamber long enough for the rest of us to escape. Voight plays the role with a Roman-history professor's diction and a father's quiet rage that takes the entire two films to subside.

The defining Patrick moment is not a heroic one. It is the moment in the first film, after Ben has stolen the Declaration of Independence, when Patrick — listening to Ben explain over the kitchen sink — pauses and says, simply, "Ben. You stole the Declaration of Independence." It is the line on which the film's entire moral seriousness pivots. Voight delivers it without theatrics. He has, after all, been waiting for this since 1974.

Emily is introduced midway through Book of Secrets as the academic capable of reading the Olmec carvings on the wooden plank. She is, in passing, also Ben's mother — Patrick's estranged wife, divorced over the family treasure obsession, working a quiet university post in Mesoamerican linguistics and not, on first impression, eager to be drawn back into Gates business. Mirren plays her with the precise authority of a senior scholar who is being polite about her son's profession but unwilling to fund any more of it.

Her translation of the plank — "noble bird, hand, sacred temple" — is the linchpin of the second film's clue chain. Without Emily, the plank is decorative. With her, it points to Mount Rushmore. By the end of the film, Patrick and Emily are reconciling, with the gentle awkwardness of a former couple who have remembered why they married in the first place. The reunion is set against the literal flooding of an Olmec chamber, which is the kind of metaphor only a Bruckheimer production allows itself.

Helen Mirren's casting is the kind of casting one watches and immediately wonders why no one thought of it sooner. Her Emily is absolutely a Gates: the same dry diction, the same patience, the same willingness to descend into a hole in a mountain in formalwear. She does not appear in the first film. She is, however, all over its retroactive subtext.

Sadusky leads the FBI's response to Ben's theft of the Declaration of Independence. Keitel plays him as exhausted, decent, and one half-step ahead of the chaos: an old hand who has seen worse and intends to handle this one with the gravity it deserves. The reveal in the third act of National Treasure is that Sadusky is himself a Freemason, raised in the same general mythology Ben grew up on, and that his loyalty splits at the moment Ben hands him not a confession but a choice: leave Ben in the chamber and the secret stays buried, or arrest Ben and the secret comes out anyway. Sadusky chooses correctly.

The character returns in Book of Secrets. The film never fully clarifies — it is a deliberate ambiguity — whether the President in the second film is President Sadusky or merely a President with whom Sadusky has a longstanding professional relationship. Fans have argued about it for two decades. The most generous reading: Sadusky has risen, in three years, into the office and is the man who hands Ben the Book of Secrets. The most conservative reading: the President is a different man and Sadusky is simply still around, still useful, still the franchise's one consistent voice of institutional sense.

We do not adjudicate. We do, however, note that Keitel's calm and the President's calm in the closing scenes are calibrated identically, and that the script, in shorthand, treats them as the same calibration of person. Read it as you will. Riley Poole reads it as Sadusky. Riley Poole, for the record, is rarely wrong about people.

Ian appears in the early scenes of National Treasure as Ben's benefactor: charming, well-funded, in possession of an industrial sledge and a private security detail. He has been bankrolling the family research for several years, ostensibly out of academic interest. The instant the meerschaum pipe stem surfaces in the Charlotte's hold, Ian's cover slips: he reaches for the artifact, draws on Ben and Riley, and proposes — very politely — that they steal the Declaration of Independence together. Ben refuses. The Charlotte explodes shortly thereafter. Ian survives. Ben and Riley survive. The treasure-hunt becomes a chase.

Sean Bean plays Ian with the particular menace of a man who is always going to lose because he cannot, finally, see anything beyond his own profit margin. He is intelligent. He is informed. He is, on the surface, charming in a way Ben is not. But where Ben's love of the artifacts is genuine, Ian's is purely transactional. The film's third act is, in some sense, a sustained argument that the difference matters: Ben, holding a stolen Declaration, is a custodian; Ian, holding the same document, is a thief.

Ian ends the first film arrested in the Trinity Church chamber for the crimes of kidnapping, assault, attempted murder, and miscellaneous trespasses. He is not, importantly, killed. The franchise leaves Ian Howe in a federal prison and never picks him back up. Several fans have, over the years, written suggested Ian-redemption arcs for a hypothetical third film. The films themselves do not particularly need one.

Mitch is the second film's antagonist, but he is not Ian Howe. Where Ian was straightforwardly a thief, Mitch is something stranger: a man with a genuine grievance, a real treasure-hunter pedigree of his own, and a reading of American history skewed by an ancestor he believes was wronged. Wilkinson surfaces a long-suppressed page from John Wilkes Booth's diary that names Thomas Gates as a co-conspirator in Lincoln's assassination. He is, to clear his own family name in his own story, willing to publicly destroy Ben's.

Ed Harris plays Mitch with a controlled charm and a Southern softness that makes him almost genial. The set piece in the middle of Book of Secrets — Mitch kidnapping Patrick Gates as leverage — is delivered with the manners of a host explaining a logistics problem. There is a quiet aside between Patrick and Ben during the gambit that the audience does not hear, and which has been the subject of fan speculation for twenty years. We don't know what Patrick said. We are still asking.

The redemption is the third-act shift. In the flooding Cibola chamber Mitch has the opportunity to leave Ben and the others to drown. Instead, at the last moment, he holds open the stone bottleneck — the gesture Patrick will later take from him — and gives Ben the chance to escape. He drowns offscreen. The film grants him the credit for the discovery, which is the gesture Mitch was, finally, asking for. Ben gives the credit publicly. Mitch is named in the closing montage as the discoverer of Cibola. It is the franchise's only unambiguous gesture of mercy toward an antagonist. We respect it.

The President of Book of Secrets is the man Ben "kidnaps" — the technical term, since the President walks willingly into a tunnel under Mount Vernon and is then held for approximately twenty-eight minutes while Ben asks him, courteously, about Page 47. Bruce Greenwood plays the role with the kind of composed gravitas one associates with an actor who has played the part before in other films: knowing, even-keeled, with a Mason's openness toward Ben that makes the scene play less as abduction and more as a long-overdue private conversation.

The President's role in the clue chain is to confirm what Ben suspects: that the Book of Secrets is real, that it is not on Mount Vernon's grounds, that it is in the Library of Congress, and that the catalog code is one a sitting president learns on inauguration. The President does not personally retrieve the book; he gives Ben the authorization to do so by sleight of hand. By the end of the film he has hosted Ben in a private White House room, watched Ben read Page 47, and asked Ben to do something for the country. What that something is, the film does not tell us. Page 47, similarly, the film does not tell us.

Fans have proposed that the President is in fact a senior Peter Sadusky — that the FBI agent of National Treasure has, in three years, risen into the office. The film does not confirm or deny. The President's calm and Sadusky's calm are calibrated identically. We will not adjudicate.

Connor is the boyfriend Abigail has acquired in the gap between marriages. He is a White House protocol staffer, well-mannered and slightly nervous, and his job in Book of Secrets is to occupy the awkward middle of the dinner-party scene where Abigail introduces him to Ben. Burrell plays him with the gentle, slightly haunted comedy of a man who already suspects he has been cast in someone else's story. Connor is not the antagonist. He is barely an obstacle. He is — by the end of the second act, when Abigail joins Ben on the Buckingham Palace heist — quietly written out, with the gentle dignity the franchise extends to its smaller players.

The real role of Connor is to give the Ben-and-Abigail reunion a specific texture: she is not pining, she has moved on, and Ben must earn his way back. Connor's existence raises the stakes of the second film's romantic subplot from "will they get back together" to "she has actively chosen to be elsewhere, and Ben must give her a reason to come back." The film honors the choice. By the closing scenes Connor has been politely mentioned for the last time, Abigail has rejoined Ben's household, and the audience does not, charitably, notice that Connor has gone.

Thomas Gates is the family's founding figure. In 1832, working as a twenty-two-year-old stable boy at Charles Carroll's estate, he is summoned to drive the dying signer to the White House. Carroll never makes the journey. As his life runs out he passes Thomas a single sentence — "The secret lies with Charlotte" — and dies. Thomas spends the next thirty-three years working out what Charlotte was.

Thomas appears again in the prologue of Book of Secrets, in 1865, three days after Lincoln's assassination, in a tavern called the Whittier Hotel. Two strangers — Booth and Michael O'Laughlen, in the film's mythology — approach him with a Playfair-cipher page they need decoded. Thomas, a skilled puzzle-solver, recognizes the page partway through. He realizes the cipher points to Cibola. He realizes the strangers are conspirators in Lincoln's death. He throws the page into the fire and is shot for it. His son Charles, hidden in the room, hears Thomas's last word — the keyword he never got to give us — and carries it the rest of his life.

Joel Gretsch plays Thomas in a single concentrated scene with the gravity it deserves. The scene's purpose is to establish the moral stakes of the second film: Thomas died a patriot, on the right side of history, and Mitch Wilkinson's surfaced diary page accuses him of the opposite. Ben spends the rest of the film clearing the name. The clearing is, finally, the second film's emotional arc, more central than the gold or the kidnapping or even Page 47.

The keyword Thomas could not finish saying — DEATH — is given to us by Patrick a third of the way into the film, retrieved from the family memory in the way Gates men retrieve everything: through inherited storytelling. Thomas died for the cipher. The cipher lasts. So does the name.

Carroll is the franchise's seed. Born in 1737 in Annapolis, raised Catholic in colonial Maryland — at a time when Maryland statute barred Catholics from politics, law, and the vote — he signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 over the objections of a culture that had spent his lifetime telling him he didn't count. He was the only Catholic signatory and the longest-lived: he outlived Jefferson and Adams (both died July 4, 1826) by six years and died on November 14, 1832, age 95, on Lombard Street in Baltimore.

What the films do with Carroll is grant him the franchise's founding act: on his last day, Carroll has a stable boy named Thomas Gates summoned to his bedside and whispers, "The secret lies with Charlotte." That is the entire engine of National Treasure. Carroll is not depicted as a Mason — and historically, he was Catholic and not, in surviving record, a Freemason; the film's family mythology overlays a Mason cipher onto a Catholic signer, which is one of the franchise's larger embellishments. We accept it as embellishment.

The historical Carroll is worth knowing on his own terms. He used his fortune to bankroll the Continental Army; he served in the Continental Congress and later in the U.S. Senate; he laid the cornerstone of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1828, which is to say that the man who signed the document that made the country also helped lay the rails that connected it. His funeral lasted a full state day. He is buried at the Carroll family chapel in Doughoregan, Maryland. The bedside scene of the film is invented. The deathbed itself, the date, and the man are real.