Atlas Shrugged: Part III

"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.

When i thought that Part II was worse than Part I, Part III went one step further. With another change in the cast, it's been difficult again to follow what's been going on.

With the ideas of Ayn Rand diluted in sub-par writing and below average acting, Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? became a perfect background for an afternoon nap. No pun intended.

Once again, i'm not sure why the producers insisted on making three movies instead of opting for a TV show. Nowadays this seems to be a gateway to a broader audience. Besides, the book Atlas Shrugged had enough contents and ideas for eight to ten one-hour episodes.

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.

A car company changes its pay structure to one based on the workers' needs. John Galt (Kristoffer Polaha) refuses to go along and vows to stop the motor of the world. He convinces other industry leaders to go on strike and disappear to his hideaway. He has also invented a revolutionary engine to power the world. Dagny Taggart (Laura Regan) goes in search for the mysterious John Galt. Her plane is brought down by an electrical shield and Galt carries her out of the wreckage. She decides to return to the world to fight for her railroad business against the dictatorial Head of State Thompson and her incompetent brother James Taggart (Greg Germann). Meanwhile the world is collapsing without the captains of industrial and under attack from the pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld.

The story and dialog are clunky. This is basically a ninety minute sermon. Nobody in real life speaks like this. It makes the story very unwieldy. The Galt hideaway is a huge disappointment. It's a bunch of ski lodges and cabins with a farmer's market. With all the greatest minds in the world, it needs to be a magical Tomorrowland. I was glad when Dr. Floyd Ferris brings out a Star Trek scanner but that's the only thing. Sure Galt has his motor but they don't let it be amazing. It's a horribly flat and boring first half hour. There is an interesting section where Dagny returns home to battle his idiot brother. However, even that section is messed up by simplistic ideas like Minnesota. Apparently Minnesota is the only wheat growing state. It only adds to the ridiculousness. It makes any theory advanced by this movie sound stupid. Then there is the final battle. I didn't know torture requires a complicated machine. It seems like a car battery and a jumper cable would have done the same job. It's also one of the worst guarded torture site ever imagined. It's an ignominious end to a poorly executed story.

It's the curiosity more than anything. I've already seen the first two "Atlas Shrugged" movies; can't really leave the trilogy unfinished, right? This is what drove me to finish an unsatisfactory series of movies. And the final entry finishes things off in the worst possible fashion.

I'm not even concerned with Ayn Rand's philosophy, only with Part III's complete mishandling of it. This is a cartoon with robotic performances, non-existent production values and haphazard direction. The dialogue's stilted, none of these TV actors have any breathing room, and the story rolls out in a hurried low-standards manner. It's so cheap and so cut-rate that any message (even one delivered with a smug sledgehammer) is smothered in the execution. At a certain point, it just becomes unintentionally funny. Just not funny enough to be entertaining.

Is this at all like the book? I have no idea, but once was more than enough with this movie. What a sad end.