Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt?

Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt

(while not stated in the title, that would be Atlas Shrugged, Part 3)

thoughts on the film

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I am thrilled that all three in the series of the Atlas Shrugged film project actually made it to the screen, after all the overwhelming obstacles this project has had to surmount over the last half a century.  

The film should have moved forward with Al Ruddy's project starring maybe Faye Dunaway and Robert Redford, as originally planned, from 1972, but Ayn  Rand insisted on veto power over the script, perhaps rightly so, and therefore the producers scuttled the project. The film should also have moved forward many times in the subsequent years, not least due to the interest of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, several years ago. But it was not to be.

So here we are with Atlas Shrugged, Part 3, finally on the big screen, and the conclusion of the project.

Okay, so this last installment of the film was made on a measly $5 million budget, which is roughly half the budget of the previous installment, and that film was roughly half of the first film's budget. 

Big budget films spend $300 million or more. The average film runs something like $130 million. This film was made on less than 4 % of the average feature film's budget!

The film appeared in an almost vanishingly tiny percentage of American theaters. There are over 5,000 theaters in the US with over 39,000 screens. Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt appeared in its first week in 245 theaters, which is less than 5 percent of the available venues. One would think that no visible impact can possibly result from such a meager showing.

Moreover, what kind of film are we allowed to get for such a minuscule budget?

You know, we actually get some gorgeous scenes of natural beauty, depicted in the segments set in Galt's Gulch and elsewhere too. We get scenes of appropriate atmospheric quality in many places. 

Also, on the good side of the ledger, we get a ravishing film score ... again ... by Elia Cmiral, the composer of the first film's score, who was dropped in the second film, but returns in the third installment. Cmiral's score gives us reprises and more beautiful music, woven appropriately into the scenes (yes, much of it was recycled from the first film, but this is entirely appropriate, in the same sense as a Wagnerian recycling and redevelopment of leitmotifs.)

Alas, on the negative side of the ledger, we get a thoroughly ridiculous scene at the climax of the movie, in which the bad guys torture Galt as absurdly as if in a 1930's sci-fi drama, with stupid looking equipment, with with big levers and sparks flying absurdly off an apparatus that is as hokey as something that should embarrass the likes of the producers of the 1950's film, Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman. I truly hate to say this, but I feel it's true.  

I wanted to be able to stand up and cheer this film. I'm afraid that I can give it only rather more tepid praise.

There are other things about Part 3 with which I want to quibble.

The film is so epigrammatic that it is hard to follow a truly coherent narrative thread.

Here's another thing: as an airline pilot, I have to raise an eyebrow at the opening scene in which Dagny crashes her business jet in Galt's Gulch, and is evidently thrown free of the fuselage. She is also thrown free of her seat itself, with all its belts and harnesses as well, and yet suffers no physical harm beyond a bloody nose and a couple bruised ribs. Oh, come on, now! Worse than this is her acting after this scene, which I would hope is the result of misguided direction. I thought that Laura Regan's acting, apart from this scene and its immediate aftermath, was pretty strong. In general, I thought all the actors performed at a pretty high level.

My wife thought that Kristopher Polaha was entirely too sexy a piece of eye candy to be a believable John Galt. She thought Galt's appearance should be more ... hmm ... scholarly, intellectual, with sharper planes in his physical appearance, less sexy. Being a man of a certain age, I was, of course, disappointed by John Galt's depiction in the the currently fashionable look of an unshaven vagrant's three day growth of beard, and his shirt tail hanging over his trousers belt. Yeesh. Call me an old geezer, I don't care. Yech. It's ugly.

Given the ever more crabbed and disappearing budgets of the three films, I don't want to quibble much with the ever shrinking scale of the scenery. They nevertheless did more than a couple beautiful things even with this last installment.    

I want to say there were things I loved about the whole series, and Part 3, in particular.

I loved the depiction of a Galt's Gulch as a place which was populated with many strong, accomplished, brilliant, and beautiful women! And there were children there too! Yay!

I loved the detail at the end, that Galt's rescuers were going back to get hapless Eddie Willers, whom Rand left out in the desert, abandoned to god only knows what horrible fate!

I was amazed that Galt's speech could be boiled down from 60 pages in the novel to four minutes and 40 seconds, and still have something left of intellectual muscle that could be wrenching and compelling.

I confess to feeling a certain disappointment here. And yet, I do not feel that the essence of Ayn Rand's work has been tainted by these films. I do have the feeling that they may yet draw many people into reading the books.

And yet, I don't see how anyone can come away from these films without the strong impression that we have just watched a powerful explanation for why the world is now coming apart because of the poisons of government collectivism, crony capitalism, authoritarian, righteous-but-cynical control freak, bureaucratic central planning of everything. 

In the end, I must also say that I come away from the theater with something of the spirit of Ayn Rand ringing in my ears, perhaps not as sonorously as I would have liked, and not with the kind of big, cinematic presentation which the book's themes cry out for, but something wonderful anyway.  

There is still something important that is captured by these films, and I don't see how one can come away from these films without at least a strong whiff of that bracing fragrance which is Rand's sense of life. I came away from this last film in the Atlas Shrugged series imbued with more than a hint of the vibrant feeling of what is the essence of Rand's work, namely, that your own life is unique, precious, and your most sacred possession, the thing which your reasoning mind should do its best to develop for the purpose of living your life and being happy here on this beautiful earth! 

What's wrong with that? 

Not so bad, in the end, for a series of films brought to the big screen on a crabbed and tiny budget, reaching a vanishingly small percentage of the movie screens in the country, and produced in the face of enormous hostility. Yes, hostility. Read the reviews. It's enough to make you retch and cry at the outright blindness and malevolence of the reviewers.

Go see the film in a theater, while you still can.

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2014.1027