National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Sunday, December 30th, 2007 |
Just after the end of the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth and another man enter a bar and approach Thomas Gates (Ben Gates’ great-great grandfather). They produce a diary containing an encrypted message, and entice Thomas, a well-known puzzle solver, to decode it. Thomas recognizes the message as using the Playfair cipher and begins to translate it. While he does so, Booth leaves for the theater to assassinate President Lincoln. Thomas Gates solves the puzzle, a clue to a treasure map, and realizes the men are still loyal to the Confederate cause and have a sinister motive for finding the treasure. The Confederate man pulls a gun on him, threatening to shoot him if he doesn’t hand over the diary, however he is distracted from Gates by the chaos errupting in the bar over news of Lincoln’s assassination. Thomas rips several pages from the diary and throws them in the fireplace. The second man shoots him and attempts to retrieve the pages, only succeeding in saving a small piece. The dying Gates gasps, “The war is over,” but the man disagrees, stating, “You’re wrong about that, the war has only just begun,” and rushes from the bar. With his dying breath, Thomas Gates tells his young son Charles, “The debt that all men pay.”
The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep is a 2007 fantasy film directed by Jay Russell. The screenplay was written by Robert Nelson Jacobs, based on the novel The Water Horse by Dick King-Smith. The film stars Alex Etel as the juvenile lead, and Emily Watson and David Morrissey as the principal adult characters. The film was released in the United States on December 25, 2007 and will be released in the United Kingdom on February 1, 2008.
Giselle (Amy Adams) lives in the blissful animated world of Andalasia, where magical beings frolic freely, animals are talkative companions and musical interludes punctuate every interaction. She dreams of her true love and builds a statue wearing a blue jacket to represent him from her dream with the help of her chipmunk friend Pip and other forest animals. She sings about her true love’s kiss, and Prince Edward (James Marsden), a handsome and valiant but dimwitted prince who hears her voice in the forest and rescues her from a troll. Giselle and Edward get engaged, but her fate takes a turn for worse on her wedding day when his stepmother, the villainous Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon), throws her through a magic portal to a place where there is no happily ever after in order to keep her step son single and thus remain queen.
Lyra Belacqua (Richards) is a young orphan girl who lives in a parallel universe in which a person’s soul resides outside the body in the form of an animal called a “daemon.” The land is controlled by the Magisterium, an authoritarian organisation which restricts freedoms in order to impose its own systems of belief upon the populace. A ward of Jordan College, Lyra spends her free time with the local children and her best friend, Roger (Walker). Lyra and the others tell of the “Gobblers,” who they hold responsible for the disappearance of several local children.
Robert Neville (Will Smith) is a brilliant scientist, but even he could not contain the terrible virus that was unstoppable, incurable, and man-made. Somehow immune, Neville is now the last human survivor in what is left of New York City and maybe the world. For three years, Neville has faithfully sent out daily radio messages, desperate to find any other survivors who might be out there. But he is not alone. Mutant victims of the plague-The Infected-lurk in the shadows… watching Neville’s every move… waiting for him to make a fatal mistake. Perhaps mankind’s last, best hope, Neville is driven by only one remaining mission: to find a way to reverse the effects of the virus using his own immune blood. But he knows he is outnumbered… and quickly running out of time.