Atlas Shrugged: Part III

This movie is terrible. I've read the book and this is not a representation of it. This movie is a let down on every front. The story line is scabbed together. The cinematography is terrible. Acting is less than second rate. Cohesion sucks. There is less climax in this movie than there is in a retirement home. What's with the music in the movie? Every transition scene has this grandiose symphony playing, making it seem like there is a plot point or twist coming up.

I suffered through this junk because I had a fast forward button. Which is sad since I thought the first movie in this series was pretty well done. Then the second movie sucked. The third movie (this one) was so exponentially terrible compared to the first two that scientists are still trying to come up with a logarithmic formula to accurately represent the decaying quality from the first to third movies.

Watch the first movie and accept that it never goes anywhere. Don't watch this.

"Now you know everything, now you understand why." Dagny Taggart (Regan) has crashed her plane on the other side of the mysterious glow and when she comes to she sees the mysterious John Galt (Polaha). She also sees other people she knew that have disappeared and is told of what is happening. When she makes the choice to return to the "real world" she tries one last time to change the direction of industry and the country. This is a movie series that seemed to get steadily worse. The first one was good and got me sucked in but the second one seemed to drag a lot and the reason I watched this was really just to complete the story. While these movies aren't terrible the fact that they couldn't keep the same cast throughout made it confusing trying to remember who was who and what happened in the earlier movies. I really think had they done this as a mini-series it would have helped. They all have the feel of a made-for-TV movie anyway. Overall, a movie series that started off interesting but really stumbled at the end. Worth a watch just to complete the saga. I give this a C.

I am a big fan of the book, and I liked the first movie. That said, this was awful.

The story is rushed, character development is thin to none, and some of the best scenes from the book are missing. Whether or not you agree with Ayn Rand, she understood the beast (in her opinion) very well, and represented the conflict through engaging dialogue in fiction. There is none of that here.

Instead, there is a string of passionate speeches given by the central star but he comes across somewhere between a crazy man on the New York subway, and a poorly edited Anonymous speaker on YouTube. He does not come across as a veritable world leader. There are cameos from various B-list news figureheads, making this appear more a reunion of The Celebrity Apprentice than beautiful fictional story with a timely message.

Like others, I saw it to complete the trilogy, and out of respect for an integrity-based way of doing business that is legitimately threatened today. This movie does not help the cause.

Following on from Part II of the series, Dagny Taggart has at last has met John Galt. He and all the missing entrepreneurs, academics etc are living in a secret location. Dagny now has to make a choice: remain with the intellectuals or head back into the world where the government is oppressing its own people and stifling innovation and entrepreneurship.

After the first two films in the series I wasn't expecting much from this but wanted to see how the story ends. The film lived up to my expectations.

As before, the story is quite clumsy, character engagement is close to non-existent and the performances aren't the greatest but the themes are interesting, relatable and supportable. Continuity from the previous film is also a bit suspect

On that note, once again, the entire cast has been changed, diminishing any character familiarity or engagement. Why do that - a three film-series with common characters but entirely different casts for each film? Would it have been more expensive to sign actors to three-film deals? Makes for some weird character (non-) continuity, e.g. Dagny Taggart was played by 27-year-old Taylor Schilling in Part I, 42-year-old Samantha Mathis in Part II and now 37-year-old Laura Regan in Part III. So how old is her character?

In some ways the cast change is a positive as the actors are better than those in Part II but that wasn't difficult to achieve.

There are some broader positives though. Part III does tie up reasonably well, though with some degree of deliberate open-endedness. The anti-government, pro-capitalism themes of the first two films are now even stronger here and are well illustrated.

As was also the case with the first two films, the themes and broad storyline are very good, just a pity the execution is so mediocre.

"Atlas Shrugged" has been a best seller for over 50 years. Its amazing prophecy about the current Obamanation has driven its sales to new heights. One would think it was a no-brainier for movie makers to make it. There is , however , one big catch: "Atlas Shrugged" boldly stands in opposition to the leftist culture infesting Hollywood. The Hollywood-Socialist alliance has tried to crush this movie from the beginning and up till now has succeeded in killing all such attempts. The bad guys of Hollywood did succeed in one respect : it was made without the seasoned talent of movie professionals. This tortured movie is the mangled victim of their relentless efforts of idealogical suppression.

I read the reviews. The usual enemies of liberty chimed in but it was the thumbs down from the free market folks that got my attention. "Atlas Shrugged" was a life changing book for me so I felt compelled to see the film anyways. If nothing else I wanted to reward the brave souls who finally made this important book into a movie. I was the only one in the theater that afternoon.

"Atlas Shrugged" is a long book filled with complicated philosophical ideas. It would have required minds as ingenious to film it as the mind which wrote it. No such talent was willing to touch it given the hostile environment of Commiewood . They would have become Hollywood poison , like former communist turned patriot Elia Kazan. This movie ended up being made by well meaning amateurs and it shows.

It's amazing this Hollywood thought crime was pursued to the end. All three parts have been commercial failures. You could see the production values decline as each one in turn was produced. The actors kept changing from movie to movie. They had to reintroduce characters with on screen titles. In this last movie key events were reduced to voiced over narrations done as simple lifeless news broadcasts. Like the movie "Dune" it tries to cram everything in from the book . Unless you read the book chances are you'd be totally lost by all the names and things happening.

The ideas still managed to come through but without any sparkle. They sounded more like the high school essays some kids would write. The actor they had for John Galt was not anything like I'd imagined him to be. Knowing how good the book was , watching this movie was more like attending a funeral. I'm still in mourning for this fading light that could have been great. Perhaps it will be remembered by future generations as a dying last gasp of American reason while the former nation of the enlightenment rapidly descends into the nightmare of collectivism and its inevitable tyranny.