Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who Is John Galt? (2014)

 

Director: J. James Manera

Screenplay: J. James Manera, Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro

Based on the novel by Ayn Rand

Cast: Laura Regan as Dagny Taggart; Kristoffer Polaha as John Galt; Joaquim de Almeida as Francisco d'Anconia; Eric Allan Kramer as Ragnar Danneskjöld; Tony Denison as Cuffy Meigs; Rob Morrow as Henry "Hank" Rearden; Larry Cedar as Dr. Floyd Ferris; Greg Germann as James Taggart; Jen Nikolaisen as Cherryl Taggart; Louis Herthum as Wesley Mouch; Dominic Daniel as Eddie Willers

Ephemeral Waves

 

At the end of Atlas Shrugged Part II, in pursuit of someone in the midst of vanishing, Dagny Taggart crashes her plane, and in shadow, we finally can face-to-face with John Galt, who throughout the previous films has been disappearing important and talented people from the United States. As the US government pulls the country further down the mire, into a dark age, we finally after the production has struggled to get this trilogy based on the Ayn Rand novel adapted get to the climax. A climax where Galt will appear in public and take the final stand against those against Objectionist ideals in the final push, and a lot transpires in the book which is ambitious for the narrative. The original Atlas Shrugged novel is a problematic novel, a mess as a piece of literature, but here in the book it became ambitious and also bat shit insane, reading as bombastic and ridiculous a book as you could get from a science fiction melodrama about extreme right wing economic politics.

Oh, but here is where everything in the trilogy collapses, and the final film does not even attempt to adapt all hundred pages of the John Galt speech either. Previously mentioned, this final film had to be produced with a Kickstarter fund, but rather than question the logic of this from an Objectionist philosophy, which others have done, watching the film was a shock for how barely the production is put together. Knowing what was in this part of the novel, and by itself in terms of build up from the previous two films, it is shocking how this turned out. Producer John Aglialoro once before considered making this "like a Les Miserables kind of a musical,”¹, which would have added lunacy to the history, but instead in the real world we got something more tragic even if you view these beliefs as monstrous. A warning sign came when a narrator, for the first time in this series, explains the previous events and what is going on now. Even the previous films, whilst having explanations, did presume the audience remembered details from previously. Even if you factor in the length of time between this and the previous film, this seems an abrupt creative choice.

The plot by now is that, for the conclusion, Dagny Taggart finally leans the secret of John Galt, once a regular employee of the 20th Century Motor Company, referred to frequently as a folly of bad socialist ideas. When the replacing managers were introducing these plans, he stood up in front his colleagues and quit on the job, warning he would destroy this ideal by kneecapping the US. Now we know those he brain drained from the country have been hiding in "Atlantis", the choice of the mysterious lost land as the name, for what is depicted as idyllic countryside Americana hidden under a mirrored force field, having an amusing nature to it. Now we have all the key players in the open, Galt finally returns to the world to take an open shot at all the glad-hands and yes men of altruism.

Immediately we have to address Dagny Taggart being recast again. Canadian actress Laura Regan takes over what has become a perverse reinterpretation of Todd Haynes' I'm Not There (2007), his experimental interpretation of casting many different actors as Bob Dylan, where an actress whose career varied between the horror film My Little Eye (2002) to the series Mad Men (2007-2015) is now part of this character's fluctuations. The first Dagny felt like an Ayn Rand ideal played by Taylor Schilling; part two had an older Samantha Mathis who played a professional with intelligence; Laura Regan plays a waif-like figure, meant to be strong but is undermined in her role by a film that collapses mid-film. That, and as the train this franchise derails on starts to crash, the franchise that like Kate Winslet fawning over Leonardo DiCaprio in the 1997 Titanic film as the sink sank, the film fawns on John Galt as everyone else follows the train down in flames.

Casting throughout is changed and really noticeable. Part III of Atlas Shrugged, as everyone sinks with the vessel baring the idealised titular man, is left as archetypes in a mangled and at times unfinished production of exposition dumps, a newly added and frequent narrator, and even content only described in still frames, one less than even Edward Wood Jr. who managed at least stock footage when he did that in his own films. As a production, this is a disaster where the financing could not plaster over, with the casting and how the characters are used really erratic. Henry Rearden, now played by Rob Morrow, is probably the most galling in creative choices as, in the new romance with John Galt, the greatest crime of this trilogy is not the United States succumbing to socialist idiocy, but a major character through two films being jilted by the franchise for the new sexy John Galt. After being a huge character, now he is reduced to Morrow (looking a little like John Cusack) only appearing in one shot, and only in a little voice over, despite being an important character in the whole book, and never to be seen at all barring mentions.

Characters previously mentioned in other reviews do not get a lot either. Antagonists from before are reduced to a sole corrupt cabal of politicians, and even James Taggart (now Greg Germann), a very important character before, never has a closure on his greed and folly as a narrative. His wife Cheryl introduced in the second film, as I will also get into in a later paragraph, has her death brushed off in flashback, making her pointless to having been written into the trilogy in the first place. There are also characters, for those who know the book and/or seen the films I have never mentioned in the previous reviews, but are important in the source material. I have stayed off mentioning them until now. One is Francisco d'Anconia - played in the first film by Jsu Garcia, the second by Esai Morales, and here by Joaquim de Almeida, who looks jarringly older than before.

A Latin American billionaire playboy, revelled to be helping Galt, de Almeida is important in the book, but baring one heavy handed speech in the second film, there was never any real point to him within the narrative or to actually mentioning him in the reviews. There is also a troubling nature to what the character is in the book and the films, that in mind I have viewed these films as the ideas of upper class white North Americans, d'Anconia never really is a character with his own consciousness despite his proclaimed heritage. He never speaks a language beyond English, never shows his cultural heritage and how that may affect his involvement, nothing. They cast a character named Eddie, an assistant to Dagny at the railway company, with African American actors, but these films, even with a multi-ethnic cast of extras in the previous film, cannot shake their origins in a troubling white class privilege. d'Anconia for me furthers this as, truthfully, he feels closer to an old stereotype of upper class "Spanish" speaking nobles, a bias in his status and debonair appearance than actually depicting a man from a Latin American country².

And then there is John Galt, the man this franchise is ultimately about and here is meant to be the zenith, the mouthpiece, of the ideas Ayn Rand would write into philosophy texts. Kristoffer Polaha tries, but here I think of how once I imaged if Douglas Sirk had adapted Atlas Shrugged. Having made a film ultimately about altruism, Magnificent Obsession (1954), he was effectively disqualified anyway, but the German emigrant to Hollywood cinema made a variety of films in different genres but is famous for a run of melodramas, "women's pictures", from between 1953 to 1959 which are stunning as they are heightened in emotion. Sirk would have managed to make a spectacle closer to the films Rand was actually fond of, and for this reference point, whilst Polaha tries, Sirk's regular actor Rock Hudson would have been an incredible John Galt who could have actually, nearly, made the dialogue work. (Hudson is also probably the manliest of manliest men you could ever cast as a John Galt superman heartthrob, let alone an incredibly underrated actor).

Polaha is stuck, ironically for a man who starred in Hallmark films, with the fact his material betrays him in the lack of appropriate tone even in look, including the Atlantis sequences feeling closer to a pretty average film from the Hallmark Christmas movies I have seen, shot in designer catalogue living rooms. This is not an insult to Hallmark movies, but that this is a film where what the mind imagined in the book is undercut by the budget limitations but even, if they had went for a no-budget epic regardless of wonky effects, has no imagination and compromised instead. That white elephant, literally, of this questionable white middle class and upper class elitist philosophy is almost comically stuck within a completely lack of the ambition the philosophy here is meant to expose.  A composer once taken by John Galt in his brain drain, of legendary compositions never written down, feels more a dinner music player than the type of madly ambitious music even a plebe like me has heard, the kind Rynd would probably dismiss as degenerate. Even the evil villains, a shadowy cabal of men in offices dictating for the people are still stuck in smoky small rooms.

The greater issue is that, even in the content of the book, these excises so much from the source including moments which I could defend the book with, both in good writing and hilariously mad passages. Cheryl Taggart's existence in the films as a waste is painful as, for all the problematic aspects of the book even in the philosophy of how the scene plays out, her suicide from guilt in the book was Rynd's best writing, a moment of pure descriptive delirium. In terms of deliciously bizarre content, tragically they also excised Project X. We get Project F, effectively a pretentious version of using a car battery to torture someone, whilst Project X in the book was literally the madness of the socialist American government, pretending to help the people, wasting science on a horrifying weapon of destruction. That weapon was a giant fuck-off sound cannon with incredible destructive capabilities. It is a chapter that, appearing, takes you back in the book, and it would have been a compelling piece of lunacy to witness even on the budget of a made-for-TV monster film from this era of filmmaking.

The sense of entropy having devoured the film is almost tragic here. So much is removed, so much had to be hastily removed, and even the need to have John Galt, including Dagny immediately falling in love with him, compromised. The film ends with the rescue of Galt, but there is not even a true ending. No resolution, certainly not the epilogue of the book which is post-apocalyptic in its tone, a train stuck in the middle of desolation, n-o-t-h-i-n-g but an abrupt conclusion. Not even Dagny has a resolution as the one surviving main character we viewed the film through for all three films. The true spectre that lingers in this story, of Rand's reaction to communism, of governmental folly of food being left to rot in warehouses as the powerful people are more interested in shipping soldiers around the country on the railways, and willing to sacrifice Minnesota, are all compelling as real fears left to exaggerate in these metaphors and philosophies. To scrutinise them, for better and for worse, is something worthy for a dissertation, but it is pointless to refer to this at this point. The trilogy of films here reveal themselves to have been part of an eighteen year project completely disconnected to the writer, who tried writing the script herself, that have stagnated after numerous failed attempts was hastily adapted. Clumsily, to the point it is arguably an insult to her from her followers.

This is in mind to the John Galt speech, over a hundred pages for a whole chapter for one man's speech, is barely here baring a one percent of the original length. It is a terrible piece in the book in just how long it is, which I openly admit to having glazed my eyes over reading, realising it was a folly to read it, and that most people would not be able to get through it. Even here, it is rhetoric in the book which is vague, regardless of politics, a call-to-arms that feels similar to better speeches of the ilk in other novels and films. I openly admit I enjoyed every moment of this viewing experience, even marathoning Part II and III in the same day, but Part III's collapse is a dumbfounding resolution to find at the end. These follies are still, as talked of in the first review for the first film, for me worthy to talk of as key films in 2010s cinema but for what they contextually represent than the films themselves. That they represent the voices of right wing and even alt-right politics which, perceiving a lock on the world by liberals and liberal Hollywood, found alternative methods that the 2010s allowed all film making to go through if you were willing to make cheaper films. And yet beyond politics, regardless of political ideologies, I do look back to the 2010s for myself with thought that was when people would pour resources on ill thought-out and ultimately questionable ideas and concepts as perfectly exemplified here. To not just bury conservative politics for three reviews, this came off as more of a great example of how a lack of complexity came something to consider, willing to sacrifice it as this did even if it meant sacrificing well thought out construction and artistry as well. I have even found social media memes as badly tapped together as moments this film felt like, but there is something to think of an entire trilogy based on a novel that turned out like this too. For that bleak reason, if with a little sick humour, that is why this trilogy of films is aptly a signpost for what the 2010s was like least from my position.

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1) As referenced here.

2) Less serious, but among the many disappointments for me, is Ragnar the pirate. Referred as far back as the first film, Ragnar is a character from the novel, but throughout, he is pointless and contributes nothing onscreen, never even appearing in a boat. Even if a buccaneer outfit would be inappropriate in the 21st century, it is disappointing, alongside the lack of boat or for him even to exist, for actor Eric Allan Kramer to just be a man in a beanie hat and black top.