Director: Paul Johansson
Screenplay: John Aglialoro and
Brian Patrick O'Toole
Based on the Novel by Ayn Rand
Cast: Taylor Schilling as Dagny
Taggart; Grant Bowler as Henry "Hank" Rearden; Matthew Marsden as
James Taggart; Graham Beckel as Ellis Wyatt; Edi Gathegi as Edwin
"Eddie" Willers; Jsu Garcia as Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres
Sebastian d'Anconia; Michael Lerner as Wesley Mouch; Jack Milo as Richard
McNamara; Ethan Cohn as Owen Kellogg
Ephemeral Wave
Paul Larkin: They say you're intractable, you're
ruthless, your only goal is to make money.
Henry Rearden: My only goal is to make money.
Paul Larkin: [whisper] Yes, but you shouldn't say it.
September 2016 - the United States is in dire industrial and economic shambles. Oil costs so much, due to conflict and lack of, that the only affordable mode of transport for most North American citizens is the railway. Immediately, having to adapt the 1957 novel to the modern day, a novel both reviled and admired written by Russian emigrate to the USA Ann Rand, this has to force a work of an entirely different era to the new one. A time before airplanes became a huge mode of transport, back in the era of huge economic alliance for the United States post World War II, but with the fear of communism and the Soviet Union present, and post the economic downturn decades earlier of the Great Depression to potentially consider too. All set to a new era decades later of another economic depression in the mid-2000s, and a large scale change in both technology and even how film adaptations like this can exist.
In the midst of the new era of the 2010s, these adaptations' history as much a narrative as Rand's book on the importance of self, starting in 1992 when producer John Aglialoro first acquired the rights to this novel, which was already being considered for the moving image in the seventies. Even Rand herself, unable to finish the adaptation due to her death, worked on a script adaptation as someone who in her life also worked in screenwriting. By 2010, the rights would have been lost after eighteen years of trying to adapt it, including a version considering Angelina Jolie in a key role1, with “something in the $20 million range” spent according to Aglialoro1. With this, he finally pulled the trigger, getting the film adapted quickly in the 2010s. Considering the material - a philosophical text over a 1000 plus page monolith, intertwined in a science-fiction melodrama hybrid, which was always going to be difficult to get adapted due to its very controversial ideas and the scale - we were going to see something that, in the outcome, proved a mess. Controversial as this was just as the gestation of Objectionism, Rand's philosophy of rejecting altruism and self sacrifice in favour of maintaining one's self satisfaction, and ability to produce and make profit, even in favour of a form of selfishness, even if The Fountainhead (1943) was adapted into a 1949 film the bigger issue would be it being a large scale beast of a narrative requiring a budget. The result, even though I morbidly enjoyed this trilogy is that, not only did this trilogy not succeed technically, its telling of the tale stripped away what originally made the source material a guilty pleasure and forces you to think about the philosophy. Even if in my case, it is less condemnation but many questions, in how this version of it is told, of how actually Objectionism would actually work in a real life situation.
To set up the premise, just what transpires in Part One, the viewer is placed in the midst of this slowly collapsing version of the United States. Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), wishing to keep her family's railroad business in existence, including from her incompetent brother James Taggart (Matthew Marsden), even if it means creating her own railway line, with a new form of steel alloy created by Henry Rearden (Grant Bowler), a steel foundry businessman who, whilst he is married, has an adulterous romance with Dagny as the two sane people in this altruistically crazed world. Set up as well is the huge factor of the whole narrative, a huge collective brain drain of the best and the boldest, disappearing from the public, all with the question of "who is John Galt?" fixated on everyone's lips.
As hinted at, I have read the originally novel of Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand is a guilty pleasure in what I have read, the one case where I will actually use that term as, in the truest of senses, this is a guilty interest because of how, in spite of the fact she was a good writer, with the older novella Anthem proving so, she ended up fixating on a philosophy totally opposed to my own, which was a greater concern that the storytelling, and has actually had an influence on real society. Despite existing in a giant tome, her philosophy is reduced here to striving for freedom in business, but never explaining for what end and in the micro details.
Atlas Shrugged Part 1 also has the issue that, for a narrative that could still be compelling about trade and the economy, is merely a prologue to the main book. Everything here is set-up for the main narrative, the first ball bearing in the machine as, during Dagny getting the future John Galt line working, named after the mysterious figure she sees in these chapters as an antagonist, we see merely the pieces of what will happen. By itself, a film about the struggle to get one train line created, against political corruption and corruption, is a compelling plot, but this is Atlas Shrugged. In the book, for the unintiated to the source text, Rand could cover her philosophy through her vivid melodrama, her taste in films in vast contras to this the hyper spectacles of the likes of Cecil B. DeMille, who she worked on the films of alongside her career in Hollywood screenwriting. In the film we get here, most of it is conversations in rooms, for a lower budget film, about Objectionist ideas and the two dimensional ideas of the antagonists, those on the sides of the likes of charity and nationalism, without never explaining or delving into the rhetoric points. It is not a surprise the film did not do well at the box office, not looking into the politics, but that it is a long length ninety minute narrative entire about talking about business, which does not conclude and has to end on a loose thread.
On a practical level, just also taking into consideration the film from a neutral stance, I have seen left wing political works ill-thought out and as unsubtle as Atlas Shrugged is. You can even make the credible argument Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) is as paper-thin, and cartoonish, as Atlas Shrugged in its politics, but we talk of Potemkin for other reasons. We talk of its radical composition, telling its message through visuals when you could not have length scenes of talking as Atlas Shrugged does, and its political centre is purely about revolution on a gut level, not the complexities of industry and what its purpose is.
The franchise was from the get-go with the issue too that, come the later films of the trilogy, recasting was also required. As a result, since the entire major cast in re-cast in all three films, I can actually go into the biographies of each actress playing Dagny Taggart, especially as each version has something different to them. Here Dagny feels like Rand's stand-in, a glamorous figure who is yet openly confessing to being cold and ruthless if need be. Taylor Schilling in this role has to work with what she has, but in mind that she would go on to have a key role in the series Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019), a popular show set in a women's prison, she ended up in greener pastures.
Contrasting Dagny is Grant Bowler as Henry Rearden, ultimately the character this trilogy will badly use, but for me a case where the author's work can be deliberately misinterpreted. As an autistic viewer myself, if you view him in the book as autistic, Rearden is far more interesting than the Objectionist hero he is painted as. Yes, he ignores his wife and family, which are more problematic in this stripped back version, but as I can attest to, a habit for someone to focus on a task with an obsession to the point of shutting off your environment, with the hurdles that causes, is something to consider, Rearden more interesting if you imagined him as being so fixated on making the best steel, and a new alloy, he makes mistakes. Even his one kind gesture, making a bracelet from the new alloy, in another context would actually be a sweet thing to consider, his wife even if still a problematic short hand for Ayn Rand to have walking strawmen arguments at least more openly detestable in her attitude. You can immediately raise the paradox, the elephant in the room, which Rand's philosophy for me is middle and upper class white person ideology, yet her villains include the middle and upper class with their parties and elegance, but this is something no one is going to try to overcome. Rearden in the films is less defendable eventually, especially when you factor in how Rand's politics on open sexual relationship yet mingled with championing adultery in a text like this, so I would have rather hold on my idealised flawed interpretation in a death of the author context.
The film barely scrapes through the narrative and feels dry. It sprinkles in references to what is to come - namedropping figures like Ragnar the pirate, the most pointless character when he finally appears, the growing rot of socialist influence, and some little nods to science fiction, a once lost engine powered by atmospheric energy. (Said engine is reduced to Rand's philosophy of innovation in business, not that if such an engine existed in the real world, climate change would not be a concern at all if such an engine did not damage the environment, a greater profoundness found that would be dismissed in this world as altruism rather than seeing the bigger picture.) On a base level, Atlas Shrugged Part 1, not taking in mind its politics, is a film difficult to sell because, for its set up, it never gets around to a great deal. All the actually narrative weight has to be waited for in the oncoming parts, which could have easily never been made, whilst the only narrative progression, the John Galt Line, is just the opening incentive for the later narrative turns.
This is all in mind too that, for the rest of this trilogy, very little is explained to show why our heroes of heroes, even if the politics may offend some viewers. The ghost that haunts Atlas Shrugged, and should have been the subject than trying to offer a philosophy whose content here is not practical for the messy reality of life, is communism. Whilst exaggerated and ultimate made impractical even in the real insanity of what Soviet led countries could be ran like, depicting the idea of communism being a concept of collected wealth, everyone being equal but ultimately turning into the idea of no one being higher than the state, leading to cultural stagnation, is something worthy to consider as a piece of dystopia science fiction. Considering you barely see the ordinary working class until Part 2 as extras, this sealed off world we are meant to idealise in itself feels like a shallow progress for profit with no end goal - either boredom or merely more profit with no conclusion if any of these characters were allowed to just progress their laissez fez businesses - and archetypes just to move forward plot points, for philosophy first, like awkwardly thought out chess piece moves.
God knows how much of the notes, just deviating off into prodding the philosophy as told in thi,, I have had to cut for these reviews. This film is dry, my morbid interest in this trilogy, and the guilty pleasure for the book, my investment to make this entertaining, as much as my habit to prod work like this, even if like road kill on tarmac with a metaphorical stick in some cases, without just immediately vilifying a work. To criticise this for the politics would be a waste of my time, and film critics got to that back when this was first released. This film does not have the visual dynamic, even on a low budget, to turn its simplistic message into an art form. The director regardless of his career before this is not to blame, likely most known for some as a prominent actor in the drama series One Tree Hill (2003-2012), feeling more like he had to just make the film to the best of his abilities regardless of artistry in a scenario where there was little time to try to flesh this project stuck in development hell for eighteen years out fully. It has nice countryside shots of rural Americana, in Colorado and Wyoming, but we will lose those in later parts.
It is not going to question its own philosophy either for better drama, forcing Dagny to ask herself, that if the railway was successful, that it would still have to be a public service first, as with almost all businesses and services in real life, or that like a sausage factory, your figurehead is not the one who keeps the trains running and can be easily replaced unless they have a lot of innovation to keep it run. That last part is something clearly Objectionism wants to lionise, but there is a difference between the innovator and their status in a company which is blurred here, which feels more like lionising executives or middle management who do not get their hands dirty in extracting the coal to run these trains or for the steel foundry, but take all the credit.
Knowing this franchise too, by the final film, however collapse in upon itself makes all this build up smart more in terms of irony. This already shows the author's talents to hide a misbegotten philosophy in her vivid text, but what is also exposed is how even the drama in this form, its philosophy, is not interesting as a film for entertainment either. This premise would be fascinating if it was about a world broken down by compromise. That the State Science Institute, an antagonist to Rearden's innovations in steel, is a state funded group forced to kowtow for money. That safety in using new metal is contracted by anti-metal rhetoric just to bury innovation out of cowardice, and the cries for the sake of the public's benefit, for the likes of James Taggart, is just to become popular and get power. This is closer to real life unfortunately, and more dramatically compelling. What you get is a work that, roll into parts two and three, is not this, and befitting the trains being important to the plot, the obvious and means metaphor of this leading to a derailment is apt.
That this review was even longer than this and took a long time to even get coherent truly sums up, yes, there was a pleasure in this film for me in just a masochism. That however was just the initial part of the text, and the next chapter on and off the screen would offer even more to have to wrap my head around...
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