Atlas Shrugged Part 2: The Strike, Part 1
Jun. 24th, 2013 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyOkay, you filthy commie pinkos, who's ready for a new Cheatsheet of Freedom?
Atlas Shrugged Part I (my review begins here), as you might have predicted, was a critical and commercial flop. It turns out that, well, there just wasn’t a market for a sloppily written, produced, and acted abortion of a movie based on a politically and philosophically vapid novel that also happens to be really dull. Producer John Aglialoro claimed that he wasn’t going to make Parts II and III unless Part I turned a profit, but upon being bitch-slapped hard by the Invisible Hand of the Free Market, went and made a second one anyway even though no one wanted to see it.
In an attempt to make Part II not quite as excretable as Part I (a low bar, to be sure, but a bar that everyone involved in this production manages to blunder into nevertheless) the entire cast has been changed. This does not improve the movie in any discernable way. In fact, the actors in both films are as wooden and robotic as a steampunk mecha, such that it took me awhile to realize that all of the generic white people in this movie were different generic white people from the last movie, not just some of them. They’re also, let’s face it, all too ugly for the capitalist übermenschen they’re supposed to be portraying. At least The Fountainhead has Gary Cooper. This has a bunch of bargain basement soap opera stars with smarmy faces.
The full title of the film is Atlas Shrugged, Part II: The Strike (which I’ll abbreviate to AS:S). Spoiler: There are no actual strikes in this movie. A strike is an organized withdrawal of labour by the working class. In this movie, a bunch of rich people go on vacation and then two trains collide in a tunnel. Not in a Freudian way. Possibly in a Freudian way. At any rate, that’s literally all that happens.
My alternate interpretation of the first movie still holds, which is that it’s actually about John Galt, serial killer, murdering the world’s capitalists and hiding the bodies somewhere no one will find them. My theory is not contradicted by anything in this movie either. Keeping it in mind is the only way to actually enjoy the film.
A warning: I don’t even have words for how bad this movie is. It’s worse than scat porn. It's worse than pubic lice. It’s worse than the Holocaust. It’s worse than Truck Nutz. It just pulls down its pants and takes a giant shit over the entire history of cinema. Don’t watch it. Trust me. Just don’t watch it. Like, I feel bad screencapping it for you because by doing so, I may have inadvertently exposed you to a fraction of the horror currently drumming its way inside my skull, as though I’d read you a few badly translated verses of the Necronomicon and now you can almost feel the slippery tentacles of madness tugging at your ankles.
Regardless, I watched AS:S so that you don’t have to. My application for fucking sainthood follows directly below the cut.
AS:S is set in the Bizarroverse, so it requires a title card set-up to explain the setting and why no one in this movie will act like an actual person and also why everyone is ridiculously obsessed with trains. I understand the difficulty of transposing a speculative fiction novel that’s actually about Soviet Russia, written by a neither very bright nor particularly prescient person, in 1957 to 2011-13. But they really should have tried harder. All of this stuff about railways and the American manufacturing sector just comes off as very weird and dated. Anyway, the titles attempt to give us context. Keep the energy crisis and lack of cars and commercial air travel in mind when you see all of the protagonists driving cars around, and in the next scene, when…
We’ve been told that no one uses planes anymore, so the next shot, naturally, is of not one, but two people, flying two separate planes. It’s actually a flash-forward and later on there will be some explanation of why there are suddenly planes when there were clearly no planes in the last movie and the intro just explained that there are no planes, but my expectations of this movie are so low that I believed that everyone involved in the movie’s production genuinely forgot, between this sequence and the last, that there weren’t supposed to be planes. That’s how bad the rest of it is.
New!Dagny Taggart. Like Old!Dagny Taggart, she has but one facial expression, and it’s not a nice one. I’d describe it as vaguely constipated. She still has the ugly bracelet made of Pure!Rearden!Steel! from the last movie, though, so we can tell it’s her. You may recognize her from Pump Up the Volume, but I didn’t.
Pump Up the Volume was so great, you guys. Let’s watch that instead of this.
Ah, so anyway, Dagny, while looking like she’s giving birth to an entire litter of echidnas as she sits in her plane, chases another plane in an exciting plane chase when suddenly…
The other plane looks like it’s veering for a collision with the mountain, but instead vanishes into a low-budget special effect. I hate it when that happens.
Dagny mutters, irritably, (she also only has one vocal expression, and it’s irritation), “Who is John Galt?” and flies into the mountain as well. Jesus, Dagny, if everyone else flew into a mountain, would you? What kind of individualist are you?
While we’re on the subject of John Galt: It’s impossible for me to pick one thing that is the worst thing about this movie, but if someone held a gun to my head, I’d have to say that it’s the tendency of characters to bust out the arc words at the most awkward possible time. Like, there’s no context. People just say it whenever there’s a gap in conversation. It’s like Ayn Rand was utterly unfamiliar with the way people speak and the way new expressions get worked into the language. I don’t think that was because her first language wasn’t English. I think it was that she just wasn’t around people very much.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 2
Anyway, next thing you know it’s nine months earlier—how far this is from the end of the last movie isn’t clear. Dagny and this Emergency Science Hologram are down in what looks like a mine shaft, but sets are a bit budget in this film so it’s hard to tell where they’re actually supposed to be. Robert Picardo is looking really haggard these days; I guess times are tough and he can’t be choosy about roles, but really, I expected better.
The ESH exposits about how the magic engine that Dagny and Hank Rearden found in the last movie runs on static electricity and if they got it to work, it would end the energy crisis and the Depression in a year. Along with the laws of physics, presumably.
(In the interests of respecting genre conventions, I won’t pick too much at the McGuffin, as having a McGuffin that runs on unobtanium is a time-honoured skiffy tradition, and this movie is not about science. However, it’s supposed to be about economics, philosophy, and politics, so I do expect people to react to scientific developments the way actual people would.)
Because of the casting change, it takes me awhile to figure out that the ESH is supposed to be the guy from the State Science Institute who dissed Rearden’s steel and tried to stop Dagny from building the Unicorn Fart Railroad to Nowhere in the last movie. Why they’re friends now, I have no idea.
Anyway, the main reason she’s brought him here is to see if he knows who invented it. He doesn’t. He exposits some more that all of the “great minds” are disappearing, and he knows he’s not smart enough make the engine work because he hasn’t disappeared yet.
Which raises an interesting point—in what order is the Capitalist Rapture occurring? I mean, is Galtkilling abducting the brightest people, leaving the sorta bright for later if he has more time or, like, needs someone to empty the chamber pots in Galt’s Gulch? Or is he working his way up, leaving the smartest people (who have no doubt figured out that they’re being targeted by a serial killer) to cower in their laboratories, waiting to be killed? He’s certainly not going for essential services first, or we’d see a lot more missing plumbers.
But I digress. The ESH walks her into a subway station—so maybe they were under the subway before? Establishing shots are your friend—and calls a guy named Quentin Daniels.
Perhaps one of the more confusing aspects of this film’s ideology is an attempt to update the source material with references to Occupy. There are small groups of protestors in almost every street scene, but very little clarity as to what they’re angry about. Some hold signs that appear to be against “fat cats” and “greed,” while others negatively reference the Fair Share Act, which you might recall was the very strange law that made it illegal for anyone to own multiple companies, not that anyone in the film owned multiple companies because this was written in 1957 and Ayn Rand had no idea how capitalism worked anyway. The protestors have gas cans as well, and for a brief moment I thought that they might light whatever building this is on fire, but it turns out there’s a gasoline shortage so for some reason the protestors have a lot of gasoline.
It’s like the entire political movement is made up of Father Ted and Dougal.
Aww, they recast Eddie. I liked Big Love! Anyway, he shows up to—you guessed it, infodump! That seems to be his main job at the company.
The Colorado line is in a deficit, and the profits of the other lines don’t make up for it. This is a very, very boring subplot that I fear will lead to lots of walking and talking, probably through lobbies.
So I guess this is a recap of what the Fair Share Law is, since it’s going to be important later. Some kind of critique about centralized planning? It’s too much of a strawman argument to be a decent critique, especially since it’s not hard to come up with a cogent critique of centralized planning.
Wow, New!Mouch looks totally different, kind of like a poor man’s Bryan Cranston.
At least they don’t need to recast Ellis Wyatt, because his corpse is still on fire thanks to Galt. Apparently Galt also killed all of the firefighters so they just let the oil burn despite the fact that there is an energy crisis.
Eddie says, “Who is John Galt?” That’s the third time in, like, five minutes.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 3
Energy crisis!
Oh, and Some Guy named Mitchum says, “Who is John Galt?” It seems to be what people in this universe say instead of “buggering fucknuggets!” when their computers crash. Dagny gets pissed off at him, and he asks why she named her railway after him if she hated hearing his name so much. Good point, Some Guy.
Okay, so the Colorado railroad subplot—because Wyatt and the one guy in the country who produces coal disappeared, they don’t have enough freight and they have to kill the line. Sad music plays.
Wow, aren’t the laws of supply and demand tragic? It’s almost like capitalism doesn’t do a great job of regulating itself or ensuring a decent quality of life for hardworking people.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 4
Just when you thought this movie couldn’t get any worse, a wild Sean Hannity appears, along with some other Fox News PersonalitiesTM and a tiny American flag pin. He’s here to kiss Hank Rearden’s ass and to inform the audience that Rearden is a hero, since pretty much nothing he does in the movie indicates any degree of heroism, or even basic human decency, and we need Hannity to tell us. Trust me, he knows about that stuff.
Even Rearden himself is giving this the side-eye.
Admittedly, the steel porn in this movie isn’t bad. I think this is where the entire budget went.
New!Rearden. Holy balls, what is wrong with Jason Beghe’s voice? He sounds like the Godfather. Does his voice always sound like this?
Anyway, the purpose of this scene is to establish that Rearden wants to sell his steel to a mine owner named Ken Danagger, which is illegal for whatever reason, and he doesn’t want to sell any to the government to be used for science, which is also illegal for whatever reason. I thought capitalists were supposed to want to make money? I mean, he basically talks the whole time about how he wants to make money, and then refuses a presumably large contract because it’s from the government rather than one of his buddies.
Then Dagny calls him to whine about having to close the Colorado line and he asks her out on a date.
In another thrilling and suspenseful exchange, some government flunky has camped out in Rearden’s office to try to get him to sell his product, in exchange for lots of money, to the government. Rearden is needlessly rude, calls him a moocher and a looter, and exposits more about how he doesn’t give a shit about the public interest. Then he starts in about tanks and guns like a Tea Partier or something, despite the fact that we haven’t seen any show of force by the government and it’s actually quite unclear as to how they enforce the Fair Share Act. (This only gets less clear later when the government is shown enforcing the Fair Share Act.)
They debate whether it’s better to be rigid or flexible. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.
Meanwhile, after another thrilling scene of Dagny walking in a foyer looking distressed at things, her brother James steps out of a limo (energy crisis!) to adoring crowds and has his flunky toss money at them. Um, okay?
Oh look, James on the front cover of the well-known magazine Economics. I am deeply confused as to whether or not the John Galt Line is actually profitable. This shot, and the scene that follows, would indicate that it is, but later it isn’t.
Presumably, however, James Taggart is one of the richest people in the world. Keep that in mind in the next sequence…
…where he can be seen choosing bargain basement ties at WalMart.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 5
A random saleslady recognizes James, flips out, and fangirls him. She seems way more enthusiastic and knowledgeable about railways than one might expect a random person who works a minimum-wage job that wouldn’t afford her the chance to ride trains all that often to be. But okay, let’s go with it. In Bizarroland, railroad tycoons are typically revered with a fervour that is matched, in our world, only by pre-teen fans of One Direction.
The saleslady’s name is Cheryl, and James is instantly smitten and invites her to go to a piano concert with him and ride in his limo. He marries her approximately thirty seconds later.
So they were at the show, the pianist finished playing, then disappeared.
I’m sorry, but at this point, someone has to raise the possibility of a serial killer targeting the wealthy and powerful. We’ve established motive: Everyone’s jealous and resentful of the rich, and many of the disappeared have left vast fortunes or resources behind (though in most cases, these have been destroyed in some way, as with Wyatt and the pianist). The alternative explanation, that these people chose to disappear, is easily debunked by the fact that they were all successful and at the top of their game when they vanished. A note, after all, can be easily forged by a killer as clever and resourceful as Galt seems to be.
We, the audience, hear Galt ask the pianist if he’s “ready,” but the guy looks terrified, so even from a meta perspective, the serial killer theory makes more sense than what is actually supposed to be going on.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 6
More exposition going over what we know, which is that a lot of people have disappeared. This would be a good time to handwave my hypothesis away, but no one does. Instead, we get the ludicrous suggestion that a composer in the 21st century somehow has the ability to destroy all of his compositions. Like, there aren’t recordings? Backups? This movie makes no sense.
I guess this is Quentin Daniels, the guy mentioned earlier. He’s going to do science on the McGuffin, using a magnifying glass and the awesome power of his mediocre mind. I guess you could kick-start a static electricity engine using a magnifying glass, why not?
He is, however, mildly brighter than the three other characters who have seen said engine, because unlike them, he notices that it has marks of wear and tear, indicating that it was actually used at some point. That doesn’t make him smart, by the way, but it does make him less dim than everyone else.
They have some Randian flirting about how he’s going to devote his life to figuring out how to turn on the engine and reproduce it and then “skin [Dagny] alive, a painful percentage.” She looks about as horny as it’s possible to look when you have one facial expression and it’s not an O-face.
NO ONE SHALL BE ADMITTED DURING THE EXCITING HALLWAY TRACKING SCENE.
Actual dialogue: “So whaddya want from me, Danagger?”
“4000 pounds of Rearden metal, formed. Should be enough to shore up my mines and stop cave-ins.”
“You’ll get your metal, and when you need more, you’ll get that too.”
Then they talk about how if they go to jail, they’ll go together. The only thing that stops this scene from being gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide is the fact that you can’t imagine either of these characters having sexual chemistry with anyone, let alone each other.
Rearden goes to sleep, no doubt dreaming of how he’s going to stick his hot rigid steel into Danagger’s coal mine, and when he wakes, someone is calling his name. Unfortunately, it’s not Danagger, but his wife, New!Lillian. This is the one casting choice that’s an objective improvement. She’s a bit on the BDSM side, look-wise, and shows a lot of cleavage for really no reason, so at least that’s entertaining. She’s shown up to drag Rearden to James Taggart’s wedding to Cheryl from WalMart—I told you it took them thirty seconds to get married—and to bemoan the desolate wasteland that is their marriage and how he never slips her any of his molten steel anymore.
Lillian advances the plot and deepens the audience’s understanding of Objectivist philosophy.
Oh goodie, a party scene! I can't wait!
Part 2 of the review is here, and it's full of people holding their champagne but not drinking it and all of the leads looking pained and having no fun. Also meetings.
Atlas Shrugged Part I (my review begins here), as you might have predicted, was a critical and commercial flop. It turns out that, well, there just wasn’t a market for a sloppily written, produced, and acted abortion of a movie based on a politically and philosophically vapid novel that also happens to be really dull. Producer John Aglialoro claimed that he wasn’t going to make Parts II and III unless Part I turned a profit, but upon being bitch-slapped hard by the Invisible Hand of the Free Market, went and made a second one anyway even though no one wanted to see it.
In an attempt to make Part II not quite as excretable as Part I (a low bar, to be sure, but a bar that everyone involved in this production manages to blunder into nevertheless) the entire cast has been changed. This does not improve the movie in any discernable way. In fact, the actors in both films are as wooden and robotic as a steampunk mecha, such that it took me awhile to realize that all of the generic white people in this movie were different generic white people from the last movie, not just some of them. They’re also, let’s face it, all too ugly for the capitalist übermenschen they’re supposed to be portraying. At least The Fountainhead has Gary Cooper. This has a bunch of bargain basement soap opera stars with smarmy faces.
The full title of the film is Atlas Shrugged, Part II: The Strike (which I’ll abbreviate to AS:S). Spoiler: There are no actual strikes in this movie. A strike is an organized withdrawal of labour by the working class. In this movie, a bunch of rich people go on vacation and then two trains collide in a tunnel. Not in a Freudian way. Possibly in a Freudian way. At any rate, that’s literally all that happens.
My alternate interpretation of the first movie still holds, which is that it’s actually about John Galt, serial killer, murdering the world’s capitalists and hiding the bodies somewhere no one will find them. My theory is not contradicted by anything in this movie either. Keeping it in mind is the only way to actually enjoy the film.
A warning: I don’t even have words for how bad this movie is. It’s worse than scat porn. It's worse than pubic lice. It’s worse than the Holocaust. It’s worse than Truck Nutz. It just pulls down its pants and takes a giant shit over the entire history of cinema. Don’t watch it. Trust me. Just don’t watch it. Like, I feel bad screencapping it for you because by doing so, I may have inadvertently exposed you to a fraction of the horror currently drumming its way inside my skull, as though I’d read you a few badly translated verses of the Necronomicon and now you can almost feel the slippery tentacles of madness tugging at your ankles.
Regardless, I watched AS:S so that you don’t have to. My application for fucking sainthood follows directly below the cut.
AS:S is set in the Bizarroverse, so it requires a title card set-up to explain the setting and why no one in this movie will act like an actual person and also why everyone is ridiculously obsessed with trains. I understand the difficulty of transposing a speculative fiction novel that’s actually about Soviet Russia, written by a neither very bright nor particularly prescient person, in 1957 to 2011-13. But they really should have tried harder. All of this stuff about railways and the American manufacturing sector just comes off as very weird and dated. Anyway, the titles attempt to give us context. Keep the energy crisis and lack of cars and commercial air travel in mind when you see all of the protagonists driving cars around, and in the next scene, when…
We’ve been told that no one uses planes anymore, so the next shot, naturally, is of not one, but two people, flying two separate planes. It’s actually a flash-forward and later on there will be some explanation of why there are suddenly planes when there were clearly no planes in the last movie and the intro just explained that there are no planes, but my expectations of this movie are so low that I believed that everyone involved in the movie’s production genuinely forgot, between this sequence and the last, that there weren’t supposed to be planes. That’s how bad the rest of it is.
New!Dagny Taggart. Like Old!Dagny Taggart, she has but one facial expression, and it’s not a nice one. I’d describe it as vaguely constipated. She still has the ugly bracelet made of Pure!Rearden!Steel! from the last movie, though, so we can tell it’s her. You may recognize her from Pump Up the Volume, but I didn’t.
Pump Up the Volume was so great, you guys. Let’s watch that instead of this.
Ah, so anyway, Dagny, while looking like she’s giving birth to an entire litter of echidnas as she sits in her plane, chases another plane in an exciting plane chase when suddenly…
The other plane looks like it’s veering for a collision with the mountain, but instead vanishes into a low-budget special effect. I hate it when that happens.
Dagny mutters, irritably, (she also only has one vocal expression, and it’s irritation), “Who is John Galt?” and flies into the mountain as well. Jesus, Dagny, if everyone else flew into a mountain, would you? What kind of individualist are you?
While we’re on the subject of John Galt: It’s impossible for me to pick one thing that is the worst thing about this movie, but if someone held a gun to my head, I’d have to say that it’s the tendency of characters to bust out the arc words at the most awkward possible time. Like, there’s no context. People just say it whenever there’s a gap in conversation. It’s like Ayn Rand was utterly unfamiliar with the way people speak and the way new expressions get worked into the language. I don’t think that was because her first language wasn’t English. I think it was that she just wasn’t around people very much.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 2
Anyway, next thing you know it’s nine months earlier—how far this is from the end of the last movie isn’t clear. Dagny and this Emergency Science Hologram are down in what looks like a mine shaft, but sets are a bit budget in this film so it’s hard to tell where they’re actually supposed to be. Robert Picardo is looking really haggard these days; I guess times are tough and he can’t be choosy about roles, but really, I expected better.
The ESH exposits about how the magic engine that Dagny and Hank Rearden found in the last movie runs on static electricity and if they got it to work, it would end the energy crisis and the Depression in a year. Along with the laws of physics, presumably.
(In the interests of respecting genre conventions, I won’t pick too much at the McGuffin, as having a McGuffin that runs on unobtanium is a time-honoured skiffy tradition, and this movie is not about science. However, it’s supposed to be about economics, philosophy, and politics, so I do expect people to react to scientific developments the way actual people would.)
Because of the casting change, it takes me awhile to figure out that the ESH is supposed to be the guy from the State Science Institute who dissed Rearden’s steel and tried to stop Dagny from building the Unicorn Fart Railroad to Nowhere in the last movie. Why they’re friends now, I have no idea.
Anyway, the main reason she’s brought him here is to see if he knows who invented it. He doesn’t. He exposits some more that all of the “great minds” are disappearing, and he knows he’s not smart enough make the engine work because he hasn’t disappeared yet.
Which raises an interesting point—in what order is the Capitalist Rapture occurring? I mean, is Galt
But I digress. The ESH walks her into a subway station—so maybe they were under the subway before? Establishing shots are your friend—and calls a guy named Quentin Daniels.
Perhaps one of the more confusing aspects of this film’s ideology is an attempt to update the source material with references to Occupy. There are small groups of protestors in almost every street scene, but very little clarity as to what they’re angry about. Some hold signs that appear to be against “fat cats” and “greed,” while others negatively reference the Fair Share Act, which you might recall was the very strange law that made it illegal for anyone to own multiple companies, not that anyone in the film owned multiple companies because this was written in 1957 and Ayn Rand had no idea how capitalism worked anyway. The protestors have gas cans as well, and for a brief moment I thought that they might light whatever building this is on fire, but it turns out there’s a gasoline shortage so for some reason the protestors have a lot of gasoline.
It’s like the entire political movement is made up of Father Ted and Dougal.
Aww, they recast Eddie. I liked Big Love! Anyway, he shows up to—you guessed it, infodump! That seems to be his main job at the company.
The Colorado line is in a deficit, and the profits of the other lines don’t make up for it. This is a very, very boring subplot that I fear will lead to lots of walking and talking, probably through lobbies.
So I guess this is a recap of what the Fair Share Law is, since it’s going to be important later. Some kind of critique about centralized planning? It’s too much of a strawman argument to be a decent critique, especially since it’s not hard to come up with a cogent critique of centralized planning.
Wow, New!Mouch looks totally different, kind of like a poor man’s Bryan Cranston.
At least they don’t need to recast Ellis Wyatt, because his corpse is still on fire thanks to Galt. Apparently Galt also killed all of the firefighters so they just let the oil burn despite the fact that there is an energy crisis.
Eddie says, “Who is John Galt?” That’s the third time in, like, five minutes.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 3
Energy crisis!
Oh, and Some Guy named Mitchum says, “Who is John Galt?” It seems to be what people in this universe say instead of “buggering fucknuggets!” when their computers crash. Dagny gets pissed off at him, and he asks why she named her railway after him if she hated hearing his name so much. Good point, Some Guy.
Okay, so the Colorado railroad subplot—because Wyatt and the one guy in the country who produces coal disappeared, they don’t have enough freight and they have to kill the line. Sad music plays.
Wow, aren’t the laws of supply and demand tragic? It’s almost like capitalism doesn’t do a great job of regulating itself or ensuring a decent quality of life for hardworking people.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 4
Just when you thought this movie couldn’t get any worse, a wild Sean Hannity appears, along with some other Fox News PersonalitiesTM and a tiny American flag pin. He’s here to kiss Hank Rearden’s ass and to inform the audience that Rearden is a hero, since pretty much nothing he does in the movie indicates any degree of heroism, or even basic human decency, and we need Hannity to tell us. Trust me, he knows about that stuff.
Even Rearden himself is giving this the side-eye.
Admittedly, the steel porn in this movie isn’t bad. I think this is where the entire budget went.
New!Rearden. Holy balls, what is wrong with Jason Beghe’s voice? He sounds like the Godfather. Does his voice always sound like this?
Anyway, the purpose of this scene is to establish that Rearden wants to sell his steel to a mine owner named Ken Danagger, which is illegal for whatever reason, and he doesn’t want to sell any to the government to be used for science, which is also illegal for whatever reason. I thought capitalists were supposed to want to make money? I mean, he basically talks the whole time about how he wants to make money, and then refuses a presumably large contract because it’s from the government rather than one of his buddies.
Then Dagny calls him to whine about having to close the Colorado line and he asks her out on a date.
In another thrilling and suspenseful exchange, some government flunky has camped out in Rearden’s office to try to get him to sell his product, in exchange for lots of money, to the government. Rearden is needlessly rude, calls him a moocher and a looter, and exposits more about how he doesn’t give a shit about the public interest. Then he starts in about tanks and guns like a Tea Partier or something, despite the fact that we haven’t seen any show of force by the government and it’s actually quite unclear as to how they enforce the Fair Share Act. (This only gets less clear later when the government is shown enforcing the Fair Share Act.)
They debate whether it’s better to be rigid or flexible. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.
Meanwhile, after another thrilling scene of Dagny walking in a foyer looking distressed at things, her brother James steps out of a limo (energy crisis!) to adoring crowds and has his flunky toss money at them. Um, okay?
Oh look, James on the front cover of the well-known magazine Economics. I am deeply confused as to whether or not the John Galt Line is actually profitable. This shot, and the scene that follows, would indicate that it is, but later it isn’t.
Presumably, however, James Taggart is one of the richest people in the world. Keep that in mind in the next sequence…
…where he can be seen choosing bargain basement ties at WalMart.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 5
A random saleslady recognizes James, flips out, and fangirls him. She seems way more enthusiastic and knowledgeable about railways than one might expect a random person who works a minimum-wage job that wouldn’t afford her the chance to ride trains all that often to be. But okay, let’s go with it. In Bizarroland, railroad tycoons are typically revered with a fervour that is matched, in our world, only by pre-teen fans of One Direction.
The saleslady’s name is Cheryl, and James is instantly smitten and invites her to go to a piano concert with him and ride in his limo. He marries her approximately thirty seconds later.
So they were at the show, the pianist finished playing, then disappeared.
I’m sorry, but at this point, someone has to raise the possibility of a serial killer targeting the wealthy and powerful. We’ve established motive: Everyone’s jealous and resentful of the rich, and many of the disappeared have left vast fortunes or resources behind (though in most cases, these have been destroyed in some way, as with Wyatt and the pianist). The alternative explanation, that these people chose to disappear, is easily debunked by the fact that they were all successful and at the top of their game when they vanished. A note, after all, can be easily forged by a killer as clever and resourceful as Galt seems to be.
We, the audience, hear Galt ask the pianist if he’s “ready,” but the guy looks terrified, so even from a meta perspective, the serial killer theory makes more sense than what is actually supposed to be going on.
Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 6
More exposition going over what we know, which is that a lot of people have disappeared. This would be a good time to handwave my hypothesis away, but no one does. Instead, we get the ludicrous suggestion that a composer in the 21st century somehow has the ability to destroy all of his compositions. Like, there aren’t recordings? Backups? This movie makes no sense.
I guess this is Quentin Daniels, the guy mentioned earlier. He’s going to do science on the McGuffin, using a magnifying glass and the awesome power of his mediocre mind. I guess you could kick-start a static electricity engine using a magnifying glass, why not?
He is, however, mildly brighter than the three other characters who have seen said engine, because unlike them, he notices that it has marks of wear and tear, indicating that it was actually used at some point. That doesn’t make him smart, by the way, but it does make him less dim than everyone else.
They have some Randian flirting about how he’s going to devote his life to figuring out how to turn on the engine and reproduce it and then “skin [Dagny] alive, a painful percentage.” She looks about as horny as it’s possible to look when you have one facial expression and it’s not an O-face.
NO ONE SHALL BE ADMITTED DURING THE EXCITING HALLWAY TRACKING SCENE.
Actual dialogue: “So whaddya want from me, Danagger?”
“4000 pounds of Rearden metal, formed. Should be enough to shore up my mines and stop cave-ins.”
“You’ll get your metal, and when you need more, you’ll get that too.”
Then they talk about how if they go to jail, they’ll go together. The only thing that stops this scene from being gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide is the fact that you can’t imagine either of these characters having sexual chemistry with anyone, let alone each other.
Rearden goes to sleep, no doubt dreaming of how he’s going to stick his hot rigid steel into Danagger’s coal mine, and when he wakes, someone is calling his name. Unfortunately, it’s not Danagger, but his wife, New!Lillian. This is the one casting choice that’s an objective improvement. She’s a bit on the BDSM side, look-wise, and shows a lot of cleavage for really no reason, so at least that’s entertaining. She’s shown up to drag Rearden to James Taggart’s wedding to Cheryl from WalMart—I told you it took them thirty seconds to get married—and to bemoan the desolate wasteland that is their marriage and how he never slips her any of his molten steel anymore.
Lillian advances the plot and deepens the audience’s understanding of Objectivist philosophy.
Oh goodie, a party scene! I can't wait!
Part 2 of the review is here, and it's full of people holding their champagne but not drinking it and all of the leads looking pained and having no fun. Also meetings.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2013-06-24 07:53 pm (UTC)And how did you stand it?
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Date: 2013-06-24 07:57 pm (UTC)I was, naturally, exceptionally drunk when I watched this, though I had to be sober to do the screenshots and write-up.
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Date: 2013-06-24 08:04 pm (UTC)*snerk*
The only thing that stops this scene from being gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide is the fact that you can’t imagine either of these characters having sexual chemistry with anyone, let alone each other.
All the internet love in the world cannot heal the scars of having seen this, I am sure, but it is your due...
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Date: 2013-06-24 08:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-06-24 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-24 08:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-06-24 08:44 pm (UTC)...while looking like she’s giving birth to an entire litter of echidnas
It's lines like this that make this review fun to read.
You should do this movie review thing professionally. You're so good at it! Why don't you have your own television show yet?
Am I a bad person because for the photo of Lillian deepening the audience’s understanding of Objectivist philosophy all I could think about was big boobies?
Just tell me, is it in the "so bad it's good" category? Could MST3K do this movie if they were still around?
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Date: 2013-06-24 08:57 pm (UTC)Why don't you have your own television show yet?
Trufax: While I think I'm capable of being pretty funny in writing, able to generate lulz in person, and not entirely un-photogenic, I freeze up and sound like an idiot the second I'm in front of one of them moving-picture devices. The camera adds about 50 pounds and subtracts about that in IQ points. I tried to do the vlog thing once and I just came off as incredibly stoned.
Am I a bad person because for the photo of Lillian deepening the audience’s understanding of Objectivist philosophy all I could think about was big boobies?
Lillian's boobs got me through this movie. They, and the explosions that come later, are the only things that make this shitfest at all bearable.
Just tell me, is it in the "so bad it's good" category? Could MST3K do this movie if they were still around?
I'm of the opinion that they could do anything well, but it would be hard work. Its main flaw is not shitty writing and wooden acting, nor is it flawed ideology, though it has all of those things in abundance. The main problem is that it's boring as fuck.
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Date: 2013-06-24 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-24 09:01 pm (UTC)Ignore the explosions and the little Orwell bit at the beginning—they take up a mere fraction of the movie itself. Focus on the striding through foyers and affectless acting.
Now ask yourself if you could sit through two hours of mostly that. I did, but I'm a sick fuck.
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Date: 2013-06-24 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-24 09:05 pm (UTC)At least Picardo's only in that one scene, and it's so dark that I confused him with Mitch Pileggi at first. Though Pileggi would have made me even sadder.
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Date: 2013-06-24 09:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-06-24 11:50 pm (UTC)Be honest, how much would Dicktrap Costumes For Everyone have improved this movie? XD
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Date: 2013-06-24 11:54 pm (UTC)Dicktrap Costumes For Everyone would have killed the budget but at least been something to look at. :)
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Date: 2013-06-25 12:46 am (UTC)Thank you for this review, anyway: it is a mitzvah.
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Date: 2013-06-25 12:57 am (UTC)And you're welcome!
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Date: 2013-06-25 03:50 am (UTC)Awaiting the next Station of the Crass.
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Date: 2013-06-25 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 08:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 03:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 12:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 03:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-06-26 01:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-27 12:25 am (UTC)I think you should develop your interpretation into an actual book.
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Date: 2013-06-27 02:13 am (UTC)