sabotabby | Atlas Shrugged Part 2: The Strike, Part 2

LJ's new interface is informing me that I have "social capital" and some kind of absurdly high activity ranking. As a good communist, I will redistribute this social capital—though I'm not sure what it is—according to my ability to each according to your needs.

Really, WTF is this shit?

Previously on AS:S: There was an energy crisis so the government passed a law to ban innovation and Rearden’s hard metal rod was a hotter commodity than Dagny’s railroad tunnel. Oh, and James got married to a lady he met at WalMart.

Cheryl is a raging bitch to Dagny because apparently she’s gotten a complete personality transplant after leaving WalMart. Dagny one-ups it with a horribly sexist joke. Oh for fuck’s sake, can we not?

Actually, can someone who’s actually read the whole book tell me what the point of Cheryl is? She takes up a lot of screen time for someone whose plot goes nowhere. I think the point for Francisco to be a dick at James’ wedding, but we don’t actually need the whole courtship at WalMart and piano concert and all of this dialogue for that to happen.

Francisco D’Anaconda shows up and smarms a bit so that Rearden can be jealous but not too jealous, which is a bit rich from a guy so blatantly cheating on his wife. Dagny can get some hot South American copper baron action if she wants to, Hank! You don’t own her. Or maybe you do. Fucked if I know what Randroids are into.

Then he actually holds the glass to his lips, as if to drink from it, but he is very obviously not drinking from it. I rewound this scene multiple times to be sure. I don’t get it. Is it a ratings thing? Did they replace all of the teetotaler actors from the last movie with new teetotaler actors? Why, in this movie that is about rich people who drink champagne, does no one actually drink from their champagne?

Dagny asks That Question twice, then asks Francisco if he’s John Galt, then Francisco fakes drinking another sip of champagne.

Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 8

We haven’t hit our anti-Bechdel quota yet (that would be female characters being bitchy to each other about a man for no reason), so Lillian tries to trade Dagny’s necklace for the ugly bracelet like they did in the last movie, even though Dagny is already wearing an ugly necklace (and one that’s a bit on the nose, don’t you think?) and Lillian is already wearing a bracelet, and really, all of this jewelry trading is giving me a headache. It’s giving Dagny one too, which might account for her facial expression throughout the whole movie.

STOP IT YOU ARE WASTING CHAMPAGNE JUST STOP IT.

The obscenely rich Taggart starts to give a talk about how love conquers socio-economic barriers and how their ideals transcend profit, because people totally talk like that at their weddings, which is just an opening for Francisco to give a long monologue about how great money is and how bad influence is, or something.

Most awkward wedding reception ever.

Actual dialogue: “Oh, so money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked yourself what’s the root of money?”

Wait, yeah, I did. Wasn’t that like the first third of Das Kapital?

Anyway, Francisco goes on about the labour theory of value for a bit and it’s not very comprehensible and doesn’t sound like anything anyone would ever say outside of a Grade 12 Economics essay. Taggart kicks him out—which I think is justifiable, given that Francisco interrupted the toast at his wedding to rant like a crazy person—but before he leaves, he has an aside with Rearden about how he plans to blow up all of his mines tomorrow.

Rearden, like a good protagonist that he is, immediately gets on the phone and reports this to the police, the Chilean government, and the media in order to protect innocent miners from getting blown up—haha, just kidding; this is not that type of movie. He doesn’t even heroically go it alone, hop a plane to Chile, and defuse the bombs. He’s just kind of like, “Oh, okay, that’s kind of a weird thing to do.”

Rearden sneaks into Dagny’s hotel room and watches her sleep like he's the creepy capitalist version of Edward Cullen. Except instead of sucking blood, he sucks all of the chemistry out of the scene. He mentions that he drove “her” (I assume Lillian) to the station, but she’s there in the morning to whine more about how they never have sex and how he’s cheating on her.

I bet their sex life would be more fulfilling if their dirty talk was more, “stick it in me, baby” and “Oh God! Yes! Yes!” and less “who is John Galt?” I’m just saying.

Rearden is like, “fine, I’ll give you a divorce.” Straw!Trophy Wife has a legit point that she’d lose everything if they divorced and she’s not exactly happy about giving up the lifestyle to which she’s accustomed just because he can’t keep it in his pants.

Unfortunately, she does it via more slut-shaming. She’s not exactly likeable, but she’s by far the most sensible person in the movie.

So Francisco blows up all of his mines, apparently without killing anyone, though it really looks a lot like there are people working there in this stock footage of mines blowing up that they’ve used. I guess they mean that he doesn’t kill anyone who actually counts. The most important thing is that his stock has gone down.

Oh yawn. Yet another government bureaucrat shows up to demand that Rearden actually sell his product to paying customers, and Rearden is rude to him. The guy threatens to arrest him and Danagger for violating the Fair Share Act. And now Rearden is stuck with Leonard, the guy who’d camped out in his office earlier in the movie, hanging around the factory doing nothing. I’m not sure what the point of any of this is. We could have just cut to the news report that follows stating that Rearden and Danagger have both been indicted and face up to 10 years in prison, because that’s the only bit that’s relevant to the plot.

It’s Lyta Alexander! She was nearly the worst thing on Babylon 5, but she’s the highlight of this movie. She psychically chokes Dagny while typing on her MacBook Pro (which is still a common computer in the future) then goes into the back room and shags a Vorlon.

At least, that was how this scene played in my head. Alas, in this movie, she’s just Danagger’s needlessly hammy secretary. Sorry to disappoint you. I’ll give Tallman credit for doing her best—she has one scene, and she does this great little flourish that’s totally hilarious.

Official “Who is John Galt?” Count: 9

In this context, it means, “Eh, I am about to go to jail for a decade, but who cares because I’m about to be disappeared by a serial killer.”

I think 99.99% of this movie is meetings. Some are in boardrooms and offices, others just involve eating a sandwich, dressed in business suits.

Ominous music plays, in case we aren’t quick enough to notice that, while Danagger has not been shown to smoke, there are two cigarettes in his ashtray. One has a dollar sign on it. What? John Galt is such a fucking weirdo.

To Dagny’s credit, she does notice, and somehow realizes that it means that Danagger is about to take his toys and go home. Or be brutally murdered. I’m not sure which and I don’t actually care about Danagger, who is even less interesting than the other characters.

He rants about government and taxes and my God this movie is so boring. Even if I agreed with the politics, it would be really boring.

Francisco shows up at Rearden’s office to encourage him to whine more about how hard it is to make a profit. Hey wait, didn’t the government just show up, twice, to offer him a big fat contract? Why am I expecting this movie to have any consistency? When the emo share-your-feelings session doesn’t work, Francisco encourages Rearden to quit or blow up his steel mill or I don’t know, I would actually be calling the cops at this point if I were Rearden. Then he goes on about Atlas shrugging and it’s very bad. Like, they’ve given the title drop to the most obviously insane character played by the only actor in the movie who’s hammier than Patricia Tallman, and it’s clear that they realize that they’ve made a mistake in terms of dramatic tension, because the conversation is interrupted by a random industrial accident.

You know, if I were Rearden, I would suspect that my crazy-ass friend, who earlier admitted to me that he’d blown up his own copper mines and had just finished encouraging me to blow up my own steel mill, might have had a little something to do with this random industrial accident that has injured at least one worker already. But I am not Rearden, and this movie is not any good, so he assumes it’s just a big ol’ coincidence. It’s actually just a random industrial accident because they had some special effects budget left over from blowing up the mines earlier and the trains later on, and needed to give Rearden something heroic to do, like shoveling and pushing buttons. Economy of storytelling what?

This said, it is a damned fine explosion and I wholly endorse this creative decision.

Francisco almost gets hit by a random falling beam—seriously, when was the last safety inspection done at this place?—but Rearden saves him and gets in a bit of a grope at the same time. Seriously, this scene is just here because they realized that he’s supposed to be a protagonist but he doesn’t do anything remotely protagonist-like in the rest of the movie.

Post-apocalyptic Utah, which is not discernibly different from regular Utah.

Dagny has flown? Driven? Taken the train? from New York all the way here so that Quentin can science at her for an hour. Energy crisis!

This movie raises some interesting philosophical questions besides, "Who is John Galt?" For example:

Is there a lock and key crisis too?

What is the point of stealing a car when gas is a bazillion dollars a gallon?

Is there no Skype in the future?

Why is this movie?

Maybe someone more engineering-minded than I am can explain the benefit of an engine that also magnetically draws all the objects on a table towards it. Like, I could see this being an actual drawback in many ways.

At any rate, Quentin got it on but it’s still not working properly for reasons, and he needs an unspecified period of time to figure out how to make it actually work. You know, unless she can find the actual inventor. UM QUENTIN SHE WAS TRYING TO DO THAT BUT IS TOO DUMB TO FIGURE OUT THAT IT’S JOHN GALT.

Stupid Dagny. This is why you’re going to get ~~eaten~~ abducted last.

“Er, Mr. Aglialoro?”

“What is it, manservant?”

“We seem to have run out of money to build a set that looks remotely like a courtroom.”

“What do we need a courtroom for?”

“Because Rearden is on trial for selling metal to Danagger, and this is a big deal to the government for some reason, so we need an imposing looking courtroom.”

“WHO IS JOHN GALT?”

Sigh. “Look, the Objectivist Club will let us use one of the lecture halls on campus, will that do?”

“Eh. Good enough. Roll the cameras.”

Though I’m surprised the Objectivist club has this many members or that they’re that multicultural. I think the filmmakers interrupted an actual lecture.

P.S. The 1970s called. They want their phone back.

So after failing to recognize the court’s jurisdiction, Rearden goes on yet another rant about guns and seizing assets, which again begs the question of how the government actually enforces this act.

You know what might have added to the believability of a totalitarian socialist government expropriating the profits of hard-working capitalists? A scene where that actually happens. Preferably with, like, guns. And asset-seizing. As is, the closest to asset-seizing that’s happened so far is that scene where Rearden makes a go for Francisco’s anaconda while they’re rolling around on the steel factory floor. And the government thugs all look like pussies because they keep threatening but don’t actually have the means to uphold the laws they’ve created. And Rearden looks crazy because the judges are like, “um, we don’t actually have any guns WTF are you on about?”

Rearden goes on yet another monologue about how profit is the only thing that matters, and fuck the public good because he’s a job-creator, and his fellow men would agree with him, which gets him a standing ovation and applause from the audience, who are apparently not part of the public. Kudos to the extra on the front row on the right, who neither applauds nor stands up. Love that guy.

Anyway, he gets the full sentence but gets let off because apparently he’s the only one who can make the metal and the government needs it and this is stupid. What if he had a heart attack? Would he seriously not have left the specs for making his metal with anyone else in the company?

Then there’s another standing ovation and Lillian looks pissed and storms off. Wouldn’t she be happy that her fortune isn’t being confiscated as proceedings from a criminal enterprise?

Dagny is happy—I mean, you wouldn’t know it from her facial expression, but her dialogue is happy dialogue—that Rearden has, I shit you not, “given the people a voice.” After he has just monologued about how he doesn’t give a shit about the people.

But he’s sad because the world is fucked and even if they get the magical engine working, “they” will find a way to stop it.

Then they bond about how “they” are threatened by people who make things work because fuck having realistic and consistent motivations for your antagonists, that’s why.

Really? I’m pretty sure my cat has shat out better post-production than this.

SLOW-MO POWER STRIDE!

This is the Taggart board of directors, I guess. I didn’t realize there was one. There’s been this suggestion that all companies are owned by one or two people who do everything in that company.

The board of directors has some deeply bizarre discussion that ends in the John Galt Line being dismantled so that the unions can get a raise. Wait, I thought that was the one really profitable line? I’m so confused. Are they just in it for the evulz?

Dagny calls them assassins—because dismantling a railway line is worse than blowing up a bunch of Chilean miners—and then leaves.

SLOW-MO POWER FLOUNCE!

Could Samantha Mathis have maybe tried for a facial expression that approximated what humans might consider "anger" here? Because I think that would have fit the scene better than "all-encompassing ennui" or "my colon is stalled in committee meetings" or whatever it is she's going for here.

Oh good, I was worried we weren’t going to get any railway porn in this movie. The fact that it looks like no railway ever is besides the point.

Whatever budget they did have for this movie evidentially did not go to the special effects artists.

I hope you like meetings, because here’s—you guessed it—another meeting. This one’s between Lillian and James and takes place on the same set where James’ wedding took place, but who’s paying attention at this point? James manages to not drink his martini, and asks Lillian to persuade Rearden to shut up. Or something. It doesn’t matter, as this subplot goes nowhere. There’s a good deal of menacing music, though.

Then a rather demonic looking president passes Directive 10-289 (as with economics, Rand seems unclear as to how laws get passed), which—I am very confused about this. It freezes the economy. Like, literally. No one is allowed to get fired or quit their jobs, no one is allowed to produce any more or less than they did the previous year, no one is allowed to spend or make any more money than they did the previous year, no inventions are allowed, and most terrifyingly, all patents go to the government.

Can someone please explain to me how this is even logistically possible, let alone beneficial, because I am so confused right now. Like, how do they enforce something like that? How would you even figure out how much each individual person spent in a year? Does everyone have to submit spreadsheets?

Shit’s getting real now! I promise that the final instalment has another explosion in it.