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I saw Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt? today and really did not enjoy it. I have seen both of the prior films in the theater as well and this one–by far–was the least enjoyable of the three.
The film has major plot changes and suffers from extremely poor casting. It also, as Scott Holleran notes in his review, a soap opera or after-school special feel to it that is really grating. To me, though, the worst aspect is its portrayal of Dagny Taggart as wide-eyed and naive–too big a flaw for the movie to ever overcome.
When I saw the first installment of this series the theater was packed with barely any vacant seats. I think this attests to the hunger of the general public, at that time, for an alternative to the altruistic/collectivistic axis. Today’s showing had 3 other individuals present, illustrating how this far this film trilogy falls from its source material.
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Just great. Doesn’t make me want to go see it now.
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I appreciate Amesh’s comments. After seeing part 1 of this trilogy and being disappointed, I decided to skip parts 2 and 3 because I didn’t want them to contaminate the way I thought and felt about the novel. I’m heartened that it’s possible to produce a movie version of AS in today’s culture, but not surprised that that version falls far short of the novel.
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I also thought it was much worse than the first two. At least the first 20 or so minutes of it, which is the point at which I walked out.
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I made a number of observations about “Atlas Shrugged III: Who is John Galt?” Most of them amount to the movie being of negligible quality. In that sense, it fits with “Part I” and “Part II,” although it differs in what is egregiously wrong and what is passable.
What is the foremost characteristic of the final movie of the trilogy? Badly conceived conveyor of ideas tangentially related to the novel? A story-driven movie which robs that story of its drama? A romance which occasionally tells of the characters’ ideas, then drops further mention of those ideas despite those ideas being relevant to anticipating and understanding the characters’ decisions? A mash-up of disparate elements which necessarily seem ill-fitting, a clash of actors and story situations which don’t gel together because the production was too cheaply made for it to have appropriately-chosen actors or to depict situations involving distant, expensive locations or loss of facilities? All of these are in play here. There is blame to go around.
In discussing the film, I will mostly approach aspects in chronological order of when these aspects first occur in the film.
The Francisco d’Anconia actor is a bad fit for the part. He’s old enough to be Dagny’s father and then some. It doesn’t fit at all that this great mind was in college while Dagny was in high school. His mannerisms come off more like the Italian quarry worker who comes to replace Dominique’s fireplace marble in “The Fountainhead” movie. The latter was supposed to be unappealing. Francisco should come across as a man of passion, purpose and tremendous skill.
Francisco tells John first thing on his arrival in Atlantis that he can’t stay long, that he’ll leave momentarily. He doesn’t act on this, however, and nothing else is said about it. In the novel, his seeing that Dagny is alive is obviously what changes his mind, because he is emotional on realizing she survived the crash, he is willing to be with her at length, and he is afterward reminded about his prior anxious intention to leave, which would serve a purpose involving a search which no longer has to be made. In the movie, the details are gone, the emotions aren’t expressed, but the dialogue which establishes the situation remains.
Dagny hesitates where she should have been instantly decisive when her future in Atlantis (beyond the one month of recuperation) is under discussion.
Hugh Akston in the movie is a lousy speaker when he speaks one-on-one with Dagny about the importance of ideas. He seems like Paul Giamatti in “Sideways”: neurotic, narcissistic. (Giamatti’s character was supposed to be that way.)
There are whiskers on John Galt’s face. Hugh Akston has a full beard. Ayn Rand had insisted that any contract for an “Atlas Shrugged” movie declare that none of her heroes have beards or mustaches. The way that Leonard Peikoff has expressed it is that the heroes were not to have facial hair. This latter wording would include the unshaven look which Galt has. Peikoff has said that in negotiating a contract he included this preference of Ayn Rand’s.
A scene between Galt and Dagny late in their month in Atlantis starts with Dagny looking through the refrigerator and Galt telling her she wouldn’t find chocolate cake in it. What a waste of screen time! How petty for the characters to be considering this.
Dagny realizes that the plane flying over Atlantis is Hank Rearden’s and that Rearden would not be able to see the wreckage of Dagny’s plane nor the group of people she is with on the ground. However, there is barely emotion in her voice. This scarcely fits with Dagny’s newfound desire to be in the world for the length of time it would take to let Rearden know that she is alive and healthy.
When the people of Atlantis tell her that if she remains in Atlantis she will hear about all of the disasters in the world, including of the collapse of the Taggart Bridge — and inevitable collapse, they say — her response of “No” is not emotional. In a girly kind of way, perhaps it could be called emotional, but the “No” is devoid of a strong attachment to the Bridge’s maintenance which would communicate to others that this could be a decisive factor for her.
Government weapons are being produced to control the population. Such is reported, not shown (except a single incident on a single person–hardly a population). This report turns out to be a substitute for the Project X of the novel, which was not included in the story of the movie. The novel involved a weapon whereby the millions of people within a wide radius all die together. In the movie, the subject comes up in a way that makes the government seem more like what the American government has been feared of becoming in America during the time of the making of this movie: one which uses SWAT teams and paramilitary vehicles for civilian arrests on civil charges.
Hank Rearden supposedly learns of Dagny’s being alive when Dagny calls him from a train on her return from Atlantis, but there is no surprise in his voice, no gasp of shock, no loss of his equilibrium while he processes the hearing of a voice he thought he would not hear in the real world again. This Rearden practically mocks his values by not expressing a sense of love, even of love lost. (The appropriate reaction would have been that of Clifton Webb on discovering Gene Tierney alive in “Laura.” He can barely summon his voice to whisper to someone to take some pills from a specific pocket of his.)
This Rearden compounds the problems with his function in the story by saying he can’t talk any longer because Frisco is with him. So Frisco is more important than Dagny? And how did Frisco get to Rearden in Pennsylvania so quickly when Frisco had been where Galt and Dagny were a short enough time ago that Dagny is only now in a middle-America state? And why does Rearden have such warm feelings for Frisco when for that to be the case, there would have to be time spent tearing away at the misunderstandings and Rearden’s thinking of Frisco as a wastrel? This is bad screenwriting: perfunctory dialogue is made to attach seems of plot fabric which require a more intricate design than a few stitches can patch.
Rearden remains on the phone long enough to go from the misplaced perfunctory to the outright peculiar. He laughingly, mockingly says “Who is John Galt?” as if to communicate he knows something he hadn’t before. What? In the novel, when the expression “Who is John Galt?” comes up in a conversation which Dagny and Rearden have shortly after Dagny’s return from Atlantis, Dagny has laid groundwork for the context — she spoke of meeting people whose identity she promised not to divulge, but admits that she can report that she learned prior to her crash and without promise of non-disclosure that Galt was the name of the inventor of the motor. This is enough for Rearden to make a rational, evidence-rich connection between the man in the airplane Dagny was pursuing, the inventor, and the name. Such detail would require much more screen time than the quirky, ridiculing quip made by the Rearden of the movie, yet it should have been possible to write dialogue for Rearden which would retain his intelligence, his devotion to a rational mindset, to his respect for Dagny’s mind. All that was junked. It would have been better that the telephone conversation been cut short than that it try to shoehorn this stripped-souvenir from the printed page into the script.
James Taggart is portrayed well. James Taggart has to be portrayed so that he has a professional outward demeanor, one able to garner confidence of the public, while also showing signs of the mental disintegration which instigates and grows from his bad business decisions, and which will lead to his becoming a babbling imbecile. Greg Germann’s portrayal makes this graspable. He is a big improvement over the James Taggarts of Part I (too little expression beyond the perfunctory) and Part II (where the James Taggart was a full-of-himself braggart and self-publicizer that he came across like Terry McAuliffe [ex-Clinton fundraiser and current governor of Virginia]).
Undercutting the plot and theme, when we hear James Taggart insist that he’s doing well by Taggart Transcontinental under the Railroad Unification Act, we hear him say the company is making money and the company is poised to benefit from the government intervention which pools industry resources, but there’s no mention of Taggart’s profits coming from its use of the Atlantic Southern’s tracks and maintenance outlays, nor that the president of Atlantic Southern had committed suicide. Such a point would have driven home to the audience that some are harmed when others use government cronyism to grease the system, but the point was not made.
The movie doesn’t give us much reason to recognize that James Taggart’s way of running his business is destructive, except that we know he lied in declaring that Dagny died when her airplane went missing and that he has neurotic mannerisms. A little additional dialogue from the book would have established a rational basis for judging him.
Likewise, Dagny’s business acumen is not properly established in the movie. This Dagny in her meetings at Taggart Transcontinental allows too many economic premises go unchallenged. The Dagny of the novel asked pertinent discomforting questions.
Cherryl Taggart’s death is not explained. After her death is reported a strictly a death, the movie provides flashbacks to a fight she had with James and her reaching out to Dagny with Cherryl telling Dagny that she has discovered that James is a monster. Nothing there tells the audience when this occurred–certainly, those who have not read the novel could not surmise that they occurred in the hours leading up to her death. An earlier scene had her meeting with Eddie, no dialogue given, just a narrator saying that Cherryl had found out more about James, but not what it was she heard. This is impressionistic approach to filmmaking. Furthermore: how difficult would it have been to show the suicide? It would just require showing a pier with a deep drop, then the camera turning to show the entrance to the pier as the actress begins her rush across the expanse of planks and her descent from the edge. (The camera position could easily be chosen to hide the net awaiting the actress just below where she would last been seen.)
Were the producers afraid of the subject of suicide? There were two which should have been included (either by mention or depiction). Is it that the producers wanted not to offend religionists who are against suicide? The film depicts a deteriorating society; suicides should be expected, even by religionists, under such circumstances.
Galt’s speech includes statements that the public had been told to consider it immoral for any person to work just for himself *and his family*. In the original novel, he says, “you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country.” Later in the original speech from the novel, he says, “If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat”. The screenwriters may have thought they were consolidating these points by adding “and your family” to change “live for yourself” to (as I remember it) “yourself and your family,” but it comes across as a sop to conventional moralists.
The visuals during Galt’s speech are bad. Unlike in the novel, where there is no image of Galt on the television screens, the television signal instead carrying just the same sound heard over radio, in the movie this Galt speaks in the shadows, with his hair and eyes shown, but the lighting too dark to see his cheeks, chin or mouth. As he speaks, the picture often cuts away to people listening in groups at televisions in public places. The reactions are appropriate, but distracting. Though journalistic correct, what is shown onscreen is irrelevant to the concepts being spoken of by Galt. The consequence is that Galt’s words are diluted. In “The Fountainhead” movie, the people shown in cutaways while Roark gives his courtroom speech are appropriate for the subject under discussion: when Roark discusses an imitator, Keating is shown; when Roark discusses the type of person who wants to tie all men together, Toohey is shown. The Galt’s speech of the 2014 movie is random about what it shows.
When Galt is in Thompson’s captivity and in a meeting with him, Thompson tells Galt that Thompson can grant Galt’s wishes, and gives as example, “If you want higher profits and lower wages,” he can make that happen throughout the country. The Galt of this movie smiles here, the kind of smile that says it’s momentarily tempting, that he sense solidarity with Thompson, and entertains the thought of being what Thompson is, if just for a moment of out-of-context fantasy. He quickly quickly snaps out of this, moving on to laughter over the absurdity of there being any genuine meaning to the granting of totalitarian power. Nonetheless, the Galt of the novel doesn’t have out-of-context moments (save the one he admits to about seeing Rearden come out of a New York meeting), so there’s not any moment of waking up. In the novel, while Thompson hasn’t finished a statement, “Galt burst out laughing. It was the simple amusement of the laughter that shocked Mr. Thompson.” The movie, by adding nuance, sunders the message.
Narration tells the movie audience of the collapse of the Taggart Bridge as the screen shows a still photo of the Bridge tower already severed of its cross-river tracks. What should have been a moment of drama becomes instead a moment of journalistic exposition. The narrator says that Government intervention brought the collapse, but is no more specific than that, mentioning no decisions or intermediary event.
The violent strike at the Rearden Steel mills was likewise (earlier in the film) dealt with by narration and a overview images that don’t depict the actual moments of conflict. We see smoke come from the mills, and are merely told of a clash. Information is not given which could enable viewers unfamiliar with the novel to determine which party or parties — government, labor union, employees, management, owner, outsiders allowed in to the facility) — were to blame.
While Galt is in captivity, he is in the same room as Robert Stadler. Stadler addresses Galt as though they already know each other, but their backstory has not been part of this movie, and any mention in any previous movie would have to have been so fleeting or vague that I’ve forgotten. (Were any comment in a prior movie one where Stadler says he hopes “That man is dead” — as he says to Dagny earlier in the novel — it may have been said so as to be disconnected from the specific John Galt who had been both his student and the inventor sought, in which case the moviemakers could not count on audiences making the connection Stadler himself didn’t.) The Stadler of the movie doesn’t experience trepidation, fear, hatred, guilt in Galt’s presence, but merely recognition of someone whose path crossed with his in the past.
The performance whereby John Galt is brought to the screen is sensitive and assured, his mannerism self-interested without conceit. The description of Galt familiar to readers of the novel — “The Face Without Pain Or Fear Or Guilt” is a chapter title and a description given in dialogue and text — is respected in this performance. He is respectful of Dagny, though allows her to know he wants her for his own. Only when he has been found by her working in the Taggart tunnels and follows her to a deeper catacomb, does it seem he has an inappropriate skip to his movements, as though his mind were electrified by the thought “I’m going to get lucky!” In the moment of Dagny being followed, the performance of Dagny is worse than Galt’s: she has a schoolgirl-crush kind of satisfaction about being followed, not an assured, earned come-with-me movement of a woman with well-developed adult romantic yearnings.
The performances of Galt and Dagny when with each other and in the process of determining each other’s emotional readiness to forge a romantic relationship with the other, have an atmosphere of television daytime soap opera. These moments are the least appropriate to the characters for both actors. The worst moments are at the very end, when such declarations as Dagny calling Galt her “final choice” are detached from the context given in the novel, and are delivered as though soap opera.
Looking at the film overall as a film, where the film did attempt a dramatization of a scene (rather than a narrated news-broadcast account), the scenes were more cinematic than in the two prior “Atlas Shrugged” films. There is more incutting of different camera perspectives, more details, than in the prior films, which each had often consisted of lengthy dialogues shot from a distance without many close-ups. In “Part III,” the focus control on the camera is used appropriately to let what should be sharp be what is clearly delineated for the viewers’ eyes while unimportant background is blurry. The scene where Dagny finds Galt among the workers who she is assigning lantern duty especially benefits from this. As the camera shows the workers as she sees them, one worker after another comes into her view in soft focus and with strain she brings them into focus. When without warning Galt comes into view, his coming into focus is stark and sudden. This camerawork captures in vision what the novel expresses in words about her attitude of the dregs on the workforce not using their minds, not being worthy of her attention–and then the emotionally-charged moment of rediscovering Galt where she never expected him.
It’s been said that the film brings forth philosophic content only when it advances capitalism on economics grounds. That largely is the case, but rationality gets a nod when it fits a story point. The movie does include the dialogue between Galt and Dagny where, when Dagny is deciding whether to stay in Atlantis or return to Taggart Transcontinental, Galt tells her that in a conflict between heart and mind, choose the mind. (The actor’s mannerism is appropriate for this.) There may be a few other fleeting mentions on rationality; Galt’s speech touches on individualism (by implication) as the basis of each person choosing his life path, but that’s as far as it goes.
The most favorable things I can say about the movie amount to tributes to the director and certain cast members. The worst aspects are a result of the script. The script was the one aspect more than the others which could be developed leisurely, unlike aspects which are dependent upon the shooting schedule, wherein creative decisions dare not take too long lest dozens of cast and crew personnel be made idle at the expense of all their salaries and the rental fees paid for equipment and locations. The scripts of the first two “Atlas Shrugged” movies exhibit reasonable efforts to incorporate the essential plot points of the novel, and use dialogue which though often faulty has more sufficient semblance to the original than does “Part III.” The two earlier parts suffer much more from unimaginative use of the potentials of the film medium than they suffer from their script deficiencies. “Part III” has the reverse problem. With this final part, the screen image has more life to it than did the images in either of the first two parts, but lack of an adequate screenplay is horridly in evidence. Drama isn’t allowed to be cathartic or emotional, and the theme about the human mind is rendered fragmentary: ideological positions of the original are jettisoned will-nilly in favor of ones more palatable to conservative audiences.
Blameworthy choices are all about. Some are the result of letting settings be conventional without thinking through why the story would necessitate the settings not be conventional. For instance, as viewers see in the first minutes of the film, Colorado license plates are on the vehicles in Atlantis even though there would be no need there for the owners to adhere to the state laws. A lack of license plates would have communicated to viewers without words that they were seeing a special place, under its owners’ own rules. I found myself wondering if there could be an excuse: Were the license plates in place for those occasions when one of the strikers needs to go out to the world and return? Perhaps. However, these scenes take place at the point when Atlantis is supposed to be self-sufficient. (It’s not that the license plates were already on the cars. The film credits state that the movie was shot in Los Angeles, and the appearance of the community strikes me as near Big Bear Lake or Lake Arrowhead, two mountainous rustic areas neighboring one another about eighty miles from Los Angeles. Almost certainly, the prop handlers went to the trouble of removing California plates to replace them with Colorado ones, even though the scene would have better served the story had the prop men stop these tasks once the California plates were removed.)
The limitations of this production comes across when the story reaches a point of something which in the book was particularly dramatic and wide in scope–the film practically dodges such scenes. The assault on Rearden Mills is “depicted” in a few far-off shots of what could be any steel mill with smoke around it, and a narrator tells us what happened there. Huge slough-off! Too much trouble to stage a riot for the camera, so they didn’t. Project X doesn’t happen, either.
Cuffy Meigs, in the book, serves the function of getting in the way of Dagny in running Taggart Transcontinental, but in the movie there’s no mention of his selling Taggart copper wire for his own enrichment (though the copper-wire shortages are shown), and he becomes a stand-in Thompson aide late in the film, instead of starting his own faction, as in the book.
“Part II” in the movie trilogy developed the storyline of the Wet Nurse, but in “Part III” this character is omitted altogether. Thus, “Part II” has the set-up, “Part III” omits the payoff. This is another example of the movies in the trilogy having been badly-thought-out insofar as forming a trilogy. Even within given parts of the trilogy, conflicts are set up but then nothing comes of them. (Example: In “Part II,” Lillian is eager to know the identity of Hank’s mistress. Lillian states maligning assertions about her — e.g., “whore” — which should make audience members feel good that Hank is vindicated when Lillian discovers the true identity. Except that vindication doesn’t come. A moment of feeling good about the film’s hero, a moment when Lillian’s face could expose the dawning realization that her estimates were wrong and her disparagement of her husband unwarranted, goes missing.)
The word “scab” is not said in “Part III,” though it is said by several strikers about Dagny in the book. Dialogue in “Part III” is spoken about non-striker Dagny being among a multitude of strikers, but to express the thought, it’s said that Atlantis has its “first trespasser.”
Poor thinking — whether of prop men, set designers, screenplay writers, producers, advisors — mars this production.
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Those interested in my criticisms of “Part III” may also be interested in what I wrote about the “Part I” movie at the time of its release. That article, which largely addresses the deficient performances and evidence that the producers did not provide conditions under which the roles might have fit the characters, remains online at http://www.dhwritings.com/AtlasShruggedMovie/
For a web page I put online in April of last year, I assembled a table of casting choices which Ayn Rand expressed for “Atlas Shrugged.” This compilation of information remains online at http://actorsinaynrandroles.dhwritings.com/Appendices.html#a2
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You should probably give spoiler alerts for those who havent seen part 3 yet or completed the book yet, like myself.
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Actually, Dagny is called a “scab” in the movie by Ragnar.
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>the Italian quarry worker who comes to replace Dominique’s fireplace marble in “The Fountainhead” movie. The latter was supposed to be unappealing.
I make two predictions: As Rand becomes more influential, a literature professor will complain that Rand had no compassion for Pasquale Orsini, a symbol of tragic, humble man, trapped in a web of selfish sexual intrigue. And a musician will compose, “Blues For Pasquale.”
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Blues for Pasquale?
Stone mason blues or I cant shake the dust of that quarry blues.
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I saw the weak Part 1 and am glad that I missed 2 and 3. This movie’s virtually worthless, if not worse, adaptation of the novel seems to have resulted from artistic incompetence and ideological compromises by the producer. Whatever the cause, it’s a bad work of art. Having recently watched the near-excellent, High Noon, recalling, e.g., the early Bond movies, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, To Have And Have Not, and, from TV, Miami Vice, Have Gun-Will Travel, The Rockford Files, Peter Gunn, Perry Mason, and The Twilight Zone, Cheers, Frasier and watching, or tryng to watch, many library DVDs of many decades of little known movies, I’ve induced some principles. Each scene must be intensely dramatic and needed for the plot. There must be no filler, no long car chases or pretty scenery. Art is about man in the universe, not about the universe. Man and his moral character must dominate each scene. Each actor must create a powerfully specific character, not a stock figure or with throw-away, mumbled dialog. The minor characters in The Rockford Files are better drawn than major characters in many other filmed dramas. And the same for the briefly seen Peter Lorre character (“Rick! Rick! Help me!) in Casablanca. To integrate all these issues and more into a well-told, filmed story is very, very difficult.
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I saw Part I in the theater at a special screening with John Aglialoro. With Part II, I waited for it to hit Netflix. That’s what I plan to do for Part III, too. And if it never makes it to Netflix, then I doubt I’ll end up seeing it at all.
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I saw Part 1 in the theater; it was bad, but not as bad as I expected. I saw Part 2, again in the theater; I thought it was better than Part 1. I will skip Part 3, partly because I cringe at the thought of seeing the various cameos.
Fine – it’s over with and I’m ready to forget about it. I don’t think a 30 part mini-series would do justice to the book. An unabridged graphic novel, though…
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Re: Stephen Grossman’s post 105151 of 10/27/14
https://emanuellevy.com/review/high-noon-why-john-wayne-hated-the-film-9/
*sb
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