Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike (2012)

 

Director: John Putch

Screenplay: Duke Sandefur, Brian Patrick O'Toole and Duncan Scott

Based on the novel by Ayn Rand

Cast: Samantha Mathis as Dagny Taggart; Jason Beghe as Henry Rearden; Esai Morales as Francisco d'Anconia; Patrick Fabian as James Taggart; Kim Rhodes as Lillian Rearden; Richard T. Jones as Eddie Willers; Paul McCrane as Wesley Mouch; John Rubinstein as Dr. Floyd Ferris

Ephemeral Waves

 

When we last left Atlas Shrugged, where now we will have to include plot spoilers, Dagny Taggart had thought she had won, building a new railway line with a new form of steel alloy for the rails, only for her main investor to be swooped away by the mysterious John Galt, screaming in anguish as his oil fields were burning. The first film that this conclusion transpired in was also not a box office success. It managed to trundle on, finally getting into the meat of this adaption's source material, a weight now gained even if still misguided. The country of the United States, in this alternative 2016, is collapsing further, the powers to be are more interested in stopping and sedating everything in a misguided attempt to save the country, and save their own skins. This franchise as a film trilogy, outside of this narrative attempting to become an epic, under co-producer John Aglialoro, has already hit a roadblock, regardless of the first film's financial success, with a new director John Putch, most well known as an actor in the likes of Jaws 3-D (1983), and the cast being replaced almost entirely. This is where some of the more rewarding work as entertainment appears, if still a guilty pleasure with vague and dubious politics, alongside many ways to soften the source is there, and also where this train is slowly about the derail off the track.

Having to recast Dagny Taggart is an immediately messy circumstance to deal with, alongside everyone else, but it does mean we get the best actress and portrait of the character if anything. I have no shame in admitting I know Samantha Mathis for Super Mario Bros. (1993), as nothing prepares you as a child or even an adult with more self awareness than seeing a Nintendo property being adapted as a Blade Runner dystopia with Bob Hoskins as an Italian plumber, Dennis Hopper as a half-dinosaur psychopath, and Lance Henriksen cameoing as talking fungus.

Mathis is also a noticeably older actress for the role and one who, in her small extensive career, comes off as a far more compelling and hardened figure even with all the problems with the sledgehammer toned dialogue and philosophy never making sense. Hers is a Dagny having to fight with incompetence, even briefly giving up and rightly going to a countryside cottage as a protest, and has learnt how to put up with it, knowing what to do in a crisis, even with her brother James Taggart (recast with Patrick Fabian). Here she is a reliable person who can think on her feet in a literal disaster and, unlike this film's philosophy, will actually get her hands dirty if she had to for her business rather than just say she strives for profit. Now more than ever, in vast contrast to what the film wants, you could have had a better film of a middle class female figure, strong headed, whose desire to succeed in business is actually noble, saving her family legacy and helping keep the railways running, when her brother just hands tasks off to the overworked staff and dines with fat cats.

Without descending into politics of the 2010s onwards, due to how tiring it was to hear being talked of over and over, this film evokes the strangeness of someone like Donald Trump, who became the 45th U.S. President for his rhetoric of "draining the swamp" and thinking for the common man, yet was from a very privilege background of wealth and born in New York City, a metropolis next to the red belt of the United States. Yes, is anyone wants to roll their eyes at that reference, go ahead, but it does reach into the back of the mind, trying to think of these films, as he was still always a businessman separate even as a human figure from those who voted from him, in spite of his promoting of himself, that this too speaks from the perspective in the film adaptation of wanting to reach a larger audience with these ideas, but feeling alien to the wider audience it may want to sway. This film was released before that sudden tide in politics from Trump, but it still shows a paradox in the text and this adaptation of wanting to speak for the common person but being very of a privilege of wealth, a bio-dome of culture alien to the working class Rand's text is turned into here. My imagined version of Dagny Taggart would be a good person, of status but from a family who earned it, yet here as well with a politics and philosophy of laissez fez business practices, but the issue grows of this material as a propaganda when, as part of the attempt at production value, a larger investment in extras means we have more shots of the working class and the poverty class which forces one to think a lot harder if you notice them more on what the film's ideals are.

This is trying now to show the stakes across the country, but from the unemployed and protestors on the streets, even interesting things like people on the streets buying what petrol they can afford on an improvised stand, here the fissure between common sense, and the philosophy this film wants to sell, is an existential crisis with the film needing to reach an audience or just contend for its Objectionist funders, as filmic language inherently suggests the protestors are the sympathetic ones, not the profit makers.

Part II does feel, in spite of being the most invested in for production value of the trilogy, more closed in, with less idyllic shots of Americana, and arguably starker and blander in look even in spite of there being more action. (An incident in Henry Rearden's factory at least bothered to have a man-on-fire stunt but is not well put together for example). The ethics of Atlas Shrugged angers people opposed to Objectionism's core ideals, but again even if you do not take sides, this is paradoxically more explicitly in pushing it to the front but with attempts to try to soften it, clearly for a larger non-Objectionist audience. All those extras hired are trying to expand the world to a wider perspective, even though they may have been used to portray the enemy next to the Objectionist heroes. This becomes more complicated when you bring in plot points like Cheryl Taggart, a character from the novel who the films will badly deal with, a working class figure James Taggart marries. Clearly in the text she is a misguided or detestable figure married by him for shameless benevolent symbolism, but here, as someone he meets in a modern cheap priced goods store called MicroBuy as he is looking at the tie rack, you have an odd but delightful sight undercutting Rand's ideas with such concepts such as the working class having to be considered for once. By now, as the narrative has John Galt cause more of a brain drain, and Henry Rearden is being attacked in court by making a back room deal with another company, the thought occurs, more so after Rearden's speech on trial, that this film that is now trying to push more of its message explicitly, but is having to watch its back in fear it may lose an audience who does not already believe the ideas, such as when that trial speech leads to the entire audience of a mix ethnicity and class background cheering Rearden on mass.

Liberal and conservative politics do not necessarily dictate whether a film is bad or not, especially as this includes the same techniques of its enemy, such as in a sombre score with violin and piano to dictate emotion, let alone the stunt casting. In Part III, you will get conservative figures of real politics in roles, even the names of Kickstarter backers in one prominent shot, but here you get recognisable faces that will only appear here never to be seen again. It is nice to see Robert Picardo in a small role, as a scientist Dagney brings in to inspect the sci-fi engine she found in the previous film. It is amusing that Ray Wise (most well known for Twin Peaks) plays the ominous giant head on a television screen who changes the course of economic politics near the end. (Raymond Joseph) Teller, the famous magician who duos with Penn Jillette, even inexplicably appears as a one scene cameo as a doorman at the railway company and has a speaking line. All of this is as much to get the message over, tricks liberal cinema use as much. It is not just politics, but the mechanics of film language and how to sell them, which influence a viewer's emotion, whether it works or not.

Rand's novel neither helps when, in stripping away the grandeur of the text, you are left with straw man villains and ideas, where what this second film leads to, in spite of a ramping up of its drama, is the initial result of a fair trade bill passed through government. The premise of forced stagnation, which this eventually leads to, is a fascinating concept even if the rules finally brought in defy logic, such as people not being forced to leave or retire from their jobs. It could have worked, even if dreamlike, if this had been a Franz Kafka-like take on the nightmares of communism, but as I have repeated endlessly, Atlas Shrugged was not that type of novel. It was a glossy spectacle. If this had been a nightmare-scape of socialism's worst results, this would have made sense.

The one good thing from all this is that, out of the entire trilogy, Part II actually has content which is entertainment. There is a brief moment of a normal film here when it gets to a severe train accident which kills many, Dagny having to actually step back in to deal with the aftermath and keep the railway running again. This still has to get over the issues of dealing with the source material, including that this deliberately ignores Rand's original writing where she paints everyone on the train as people deserving to die, but a snippet of actual engaging drama appears to appease everyone. There is a joy to this film's attempts to be an epic in one hand, this drama to Robert Picardo inexplicably appearing, but in the other hand, the rot of this production, its design and limitations in construct, are starting to appear more. Something like obvious CGI is less an issue for me, with more action to contrast the dialogue, to having to see when this film is far less fixated on actual drama, like Rearden's adulterous affair with Dagny being used to blackmail him, over the many rhetoric speeches. It is the closest in this trilogy to Objectionist kitsch, as the drop will soon come hard for this franchise in the final part. John Galt, the main figure, is not even introduced fully until the shock ending, alongside huge plot points, but the spectacle that even the source material was able to present in between its politics, and a hundred page Objectionist speech, is going to suffer a huge collapse that hurts more in hindsight to reflecting on this first sequel.