You know what I hate?  When a movie ignores its own logical system.  National Treasure, which is IMO a pretty good action movie if you can stand Nicholas Cage’s same old tortured character (who made this guy an action hero?).  Stop reading if you don’t want any spoilers.

The logic of the movie is a series of hidden clues ala DaVinci Code or it’s much superior predecessor Focault’s Pendulum, leading to a fabulous treasure hidden by the Knights Templar.  Each clue provides a clue, ambiguous to any objective observer but somehow obvious to the hero, which may lead closer to the final treasure or to an uncertain end.

So the part that really gets me is the clue involving a particular shadow on a particular wall at a particular time.  They make a big deal about the introduction of daylight savings time since the clue was laid, yet blithely ignore the fact that the shadow will naturally fall on different spots on different days of the year!  What seasonal progression of shadows?  Any old day will do!

Can we assume that the writer of the story was unaware of this obvious fact of nature?  That anyone could escape experiencing that in their lives?  I don’t think so.  Can we assume the director chopped this important fact for time reasons, keeping the clever but relatively unimportant daylight savings time connection?  Did they have so little imagination they couldn’t find a way to fix the problem?  Were they just lazy?  Did they think that their intended audience wouldn’t see such a celestial flaw?  I don’t know how this omission came to be, but the end result is that the viewer’s intelligence is insulted.  And that’s what I hate.