There’s a third Atlas Shrugged movie out? But I didn’t even get around to watching the first two parts!
I haven’t seen the movies, but I’ve seen all three trailers, and when you can’t even keep the same actors in the movie…metaphors with rats and sinking ships come to mind. It is the kind of thing that gives Davis Aurini and JordanOwen42 hope.
But what ought to dash their dreams of making bad movies are the reviews. Here’s one very thorough review.
How bad is Atlas III?
It’s lead-based paint bad. It’s asbestos in the nursery bad. It’s Windows Vista pre-Service Pack 1 bad.
Imagine Written on the Wind meets Female Trouble, only not as good.
Let’s start with the script. Unfortunately, the filmmakers did not. Producer John Aglialoro, who was largely responsible for realizing this decades-long dream of a Hollywood Atlas, is notably absent from the screenwriting credits this time around. The script, such as it is, relies a lot on still photographs to cut down on costs and actual movement. (In fact, the whole film would have played better as one of those flip books you used to enjoy as a kid.) It hammers certain notes repeatedly, Objectivist points it wants to score, and leaves stuff like narrative flow, plot transitions, naturalistic dialogue, fluid pacing, and subtext for the losers. (I know, I know, subtext in a Rand story?)
It’s quite a long review, by a reviewer who professes some faint sympathy for objectivism, and the whole thing goes on and on in that vein. I can tell I’m not going to be able to get up the will to watch Part III, ever.
I think I’m a better person for that, however.
Oh my God.
How did I never see this?!
0% of 9 critics liked it.
And 57% of audiences liked it.
I think that might rather tell us something about the nature of the audience….
(Comparison: 17% of 18 critics liked God’s Not Dead, and 81% of audiences liked it….)
Was that a Ron Paul cameo? Says all you need to know about the quality of the movie.
This seems appropriate for this thread: Ayn Rand inspired libertarian utopia implodes almost instantly. Who could have predicted?
So FauxNews lives in the socialism dystopia of the “real world” in this film? [maybe that was intentional, to show just how bad the dystopia is] Will the torture never stop? I think this revelation would make even Rand (Ayn, that is, not Paul) spin in her grave (to power that perpetual motor gizmo Galt invented).
“To be fair” [scare quotes intentional], I gotta have this DVD, to see just how bad it must be.
I had a brain glitch and thought of Andrew Ryan from Bioshock. For those unfamiliar with the game, Andrew Ryan is an Objectivist who builds the undersea city of Rapture, which, as expected for an Objectivist utopia, has gone to hell by the time the protagonist arrives. The scientists who came along, unburdened by ethical review boards and safety regulation, developed gene mod superpowers for sale that drove everyone insane.
At one point, a recording of Ryan says something like this, “Yes, people have died. Yes, people have been driven insane. The market will correct this. The market is patient, and so we must be patient. We shouldn’t abandon our ideals out of fear.”
I prefer the YouTube version of the movie “The Fountainhead”, which was condensed to five seconds. Still too long. But not by so much.
Atlas Snored.
Yesterday while trying to finally get into Doctor Who and looking into some reviews of an ep that I thought was kind of awful I stumbled upon a review of this. My first thought (of course) was, wait, there was a part II?
Money quote:
Q: Ayn Rand maintained rights to her writing? Someone bought rights? Those depend on The State to maintain; why (one wonders) did they not simply use The Market?
A: the same reason Rand signed up for Social Security as soon as she could.
Hey, you were there for Part 1.
The free market decided it didn’t want the first movie; if they were true to their ideals, they’d stop there.
Also, I never knew John Galt was the son of a car mechanic. Pshaw. As if the 0.1% would ever even notice such rabble exists, let alone adopt him as their Lord and Savior. Does Ayn Rand think inventors can mass-produce their stuff without capital?
I think ‘fleas abandoning a sinking rat’ is the one you’re looking for.
For those who haven’t come across it yet, here’s a running review and commentary on Atlas Shrugged. You get all the crazy bullshit without having to actually read the multiple-page monologues.
@Bronze Dog, this seems like an appropriate place to ask. Whatever happened to the transcript of the Atlas Shrugged Part II viewing we did with King of Ferrets?
I can’t stress this point enough: none of the capitalist protagonists ever think of using their economic power to pressure Galt into selling the rights (let’s just go with Rand’s assumption that intellectual rights would even be a thing without a government-like body to enforce them) over his motor for a pittance. How generous (and therefore un-Randian) of them.
Also, Rearden is conveniently the owner and head researcher of his own company, meaning he didn’t do the same with the poor saps who invented “his” metal.
It’s worse than that. The actors in Part II look about 15 years older than their counterparts in Part I, and Part III roughly splits the difference. Anyone who hasn’t read the book and sees the three movies one right after the other is going to be greatly confused.
I don’t know about that. Kristoffer Polaha (Galt) is better known than anyone who was in Part II. Also better known than anyone in Part I was at the time it was made, though Taylor Schilling (Dagny Taggart) and Grant Bowler (Hank Rearden) have gone on to starring roles in TV series.
My biggest peeve about the casting is that Armin Schimmerman–who was born to play an Ayn Rand bad guy–got only a cameo in Part I.
I’ve never, thank FSM, read the book, but did they just give away the entire plot in the trailer?
Not a great marketing decision.
It’s all part of the ludicrously unrealistic set-up that Rand produces. Rearden not only dropped out of school as a teenager to work his way up from the bottom as a miner, he also somehow managed to learn how to be a business executive, alloy engineer, and architect at the same time. In the real world, he would have died in a mining accident in his twenties, dirt poor and barely able to read.
He’s hardly the only example. There’s also the guy who play the stocks and literally never makes a bad investment. Or the guy who, despite being described as penniless, unknown and refusing any government assistance, manages to build a trans-continental railroad.
Did she really never notice that this was out of touch with reality? Was she actually so far up her own rectum that it didn’t occur to her that this wasn’t how the real world worked? I’m honestly baffled.
vaiyt
Especially interesting because there is much BAWWWWing over Big Gubmint doing that same exact thing to nationalize Rearden Brand Mithril. She definitely isn’t opposed to strongarm business tactics, so I think it just for the convenience of the narrative: if she had Holy Capitalist Overlords using the same tactics that she has Evil Government Overlords using, then it doesn’t make it clear that Caplitalist good, Gubmint bad!
Rand is occasionally called a philosopher. Considering that I think that is a grave insult to philosophers despite the fact that I hold philosophers in low esteem really sums up that state of affairs. Though even just calling Rand a Young Adult Fiction Author is a similar level of insult to that field, so maybe it isn’t saying much.
Neither of which were problems fixed by capitalism.
It boggles me that they tried to make this as a live-action film. The book itself is pretty sparse and symbolic on most of the world-building details, with a nebulous “alternate 1930s America” feel where the government is just described as “Washington” and “The Legislature”. It’s the type of thing that would be almost ideal for animation, where you could stretch the budget farther, give it that 1930s vibe, and just generally add stylism to it.
@LykeX
The “Nathaniel Taggart” bit was similar to the case of a real railroad (Great Northern Railway) , which actually was the first transcontinental line built without federal land grants or subsidies. The founder of it – James Hill – did come from modest means, having been born in Canada but migrated to the US, and worked his way from a clerk and bookkeeper for a steamboat company up to what he did.
The whole “Midas Mulligan is so brilliant he never loses money on investments” is pretty absurd.
The book fascinates me in a way, even if I disagree with most of it. Technically what Galt’s trying to do with the capitalists and “makers” in the book is no different than what any other labor organizer is trying to do – he’s raising their consciousness and working to convince them to withhold their labor until conditions get more favorable. I mean, the whole point of Hank Rearden’s story is that it’s wrong for him to keep trying to holding on to his plant and make it work as the political conditions, restrictions, and taxes worsen. But of course, there’s nothing other than the occasional “going Galt” chatter on it in terms of the willingness of existing CEOs and rich folk to withhold their efforts, probably because they don’t actually think they’re indispensable.
Pharyngula should get right on making Atlas Shrugged Part Four: Galtnado. We could film it in three days for $25 in someone’s basement. An hour of it could just be the Uncut version of Galt’s monologue, the version They didn’t Want You to hear. Could also splice in some Mein Kampf to see if people are paying attention. After that, cut to Galt kicking the Head of State in the balls, saying “I am king now”, and Galt, Hank, Dagny, and other random rich people drinking champagne in a limosene while KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way I like It” plays. This scene will be used at least three more times in the remainder of the movie. The rest of the movie will be John Galt and crew hunting down moochers with shotguns. The climax will be John Galt kung fu fighting the head of the EPA ontop of a very poorly CGIed skyscraper. Fight ends with nameless villain splattering on pavement and John Galt high-fiving Dagny, who was implied dead in a previous scene and no one cares to explain how she is alive now. We end with John Galt walking off into the sunset, raising his fist triumphantly in the air and cut to black, while “I Will Always Love You” starts playing.
This movie would have a profit margin of 10 million percent. Who’s in?
HOW? Did the run it on fast forward?
On second thought, I don’t care.
Fast forwarding Galt’s speech would have been the perfect solution. Just imagine it:
Alvin and the Chipmunks sing “Moochers and Looters”.
…If you ignore the fact that it was formed from the buying of individual railways that were in fact built with federal grants. The actual, physical building of many of these rails was done with government help. E.g. Hill bought the Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad, obtaining the land grants that it had access to.
So, yeah, technically he didn’t personally get the grants, but the grants were part of how the railroad was built. Frankly, it’s not uncommon for private investors to wait for the government to take all the risk and pay all the expenses and then step in and buy the project once the hard work is over. Usually, they have willing shills in the government happy to help them make this happen.
Ayn Rand was, as soon as she got to the US, a social climber and courtesan to wealth. She lived by catering to the ego and insecurities of people wealthier than herself. Her novels are, IMHO, best seen as an extension of that survival strategy.
Consider the self-flattering and entitled mindset of extreme wealth. They consider themselves superior to others and the creators of all prosperity. They think themselves deserving of anything they can take. They think righteous indignation and revenge is their birthright. They consider themselves such a gift to humanity that their ultimate threat is to simply withdraw and watch society flounder without the benefit of their beneficence.
That matrix of thought existed long before Rand stuffed it all into her anti-hero with uninspired prose.
Unfortunately, as most people making their living polishing the self-image of the wealthy find out, you can make a nice living doing it, but you will never be allowed above a certain level and that living is dependent on continued output. Once your stroking of the ego diminishes, or they grow bored with it, the returns dwindle. In the end you find yourself, as Rand did, with more time remaining on earth that income to maintain your accustomed lifestyle. Having patterned her life on emotionless short term transactions she had no emotional credit or loyalty to fall back on.
vaiyt
No, she thinks they can mass-produce their stuff without workers. They’ll have capital, because in Randworld capital just magically materializes whenever anyone has a marketable idea.
brett
This is only true in a very technical sense; the land purchased by the Great Northern Company was already heavily subsidized by the governments, State and Federal, which were selling it extremely cheaply to attract settlers. The Great Northern essentially took advantage of this to buy up great tracts of land, use them to build up capital, then resell them at close to, or even below, cost to settlers, who would be constrained to pay the Great Northern Railway for their passage and shipments to and from their new settlements, thus producing their own captive markets. There’s also the assorted legal benefits that accrued to railways generally, relating to rights-of-way, immunity to certain types of legal complaints, etc.
There’s also the question of whether building the railway that way actually benefitted anyone except that of James Hill, vs the various benefits that accrue when infrastructure isn’t run at an attempted profit.
lorn
I believe the word you’re looking for is courtier. A courtesan is something else.
@LykeX
That’s why I specified “transcontinental”. They bought a bunch of smaller lines and then built their own line linking them together. The smaller lines were built with land grants (both state and federal), and usually loans and financing from state governments.
@Dalilama
That was a two-way street. Without commercial and agricultural development along its lines, the railroad track was nearly worthless. Allowing the railroads to sell land along their tracks tied them together with broader pro-development plans. It’s a strategy that some modern successful rail transit programs have used, like in Hong Kong and Japan.
You’re right about the easements, although there was a tendency to over-exaggerate the “natural monopoly” aspect with railroad track – some of the early British railroads were perfectly happy running railroad track right next to their competitors’ track IIRC.
The settlers got land and rail access, the railroad got cargo to pay for the line, Hill made money, and his investors earned money on the bonds they’d bought. Pretty good for everyone all around involved, except of course for the native population that initially had their lands stolen for it.
It’s usually easier to run infrastructure like that as a regulated monopoly rather than just as a straight-up government agency with an assigned budget – look at the utilities. You incentivize the monopoly to run it efficiently, instead of having to do the more unpopular “raise taxes to fund it” aspect along with whatever costs it takes for oversight – especially since good oversight was in short supply in the corrupt governments of 19th century America.
@Dalillama:
Right or wrong, I don’t think courtesan was unintentional.
Brett, 32
Utilities, or at least utility infrastructure, isn’t monopolized. That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to upgrade power, telephone, and Internet lines, because not all the lines are owned by the same entities. And while I’ll grant that there was plenty of corruption in 19th century government, I fail to see any less in 19th century business.
Brett
And that’s why it’s even more disingenous to claim that the railroad was in any meaningful sense built without government money/subsidies.
Except, you know, the pre-existing West Coast cities that the railroad ran to, right? I will also note at this time that commercial and agricultural development follow rail lines anyway, in much the same way and for the same reason as such development follows rivers and well-made roads. See the Interstate Highway system and the suburbs that it spawned for an example.
Of course, building the damn railroad would have accomplished the same thing, with a whole lot less overhead in the form of fat paycheques for Hill and his cronies.
Something tells me that you don’t fully understand the concept of a natural monopoly. It’s a situation where a)there are extremely large barriers to entry, and b) there are massive efficieny gains when there is a sole supplier (although the connection is not often made in public discourse due to a bizarre worship of private profit, another way to say ‘natural monopoly’ is ‘infrastructure’, which is generally recognized to be the province of the state). These are both indisputably the case with railroads, and the existence of parallell competing railroads is in no way counterevidence: All of them were founded by people who already had control of huge amounts of capital, enabling them to overcome a), and the parallell railroads, depots, turnarounds, etc. used up vastly more space, iron, timber, coal, etc. than a unified system does, hence b).
And, except for Hill and his cronies, all of that would still have happened had it been built with the ordinary subsidies and easements, or even at purely Federal expense. Hence my question, which remains unadressed.
I am. They’re crap. I’d rather deal with the water bureau than the power company any day, and they give better rates, too. Likewise for places where the power utility is civic, and the cities that instituted public broadband before lawsuits from the monopolies made them stop are providing faster and cheaper service than Comcast or Verizon ever did or ever will. Meanwhile, Amtrak is better than Greyhound too, and at similar rates.
Oh, wait, you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.
In places with functioning economies and infrastrucures, where you actually get things back for your taxes and most people aren’t chronically on a financial edge, it’s a lot less unpopular and easier to do. Also, the U.S. culture has a particular bugbear about taxes due to generations of propaganda, which doesn’t help. Still, maybe if all the money didn’t go to military adventurism and lining the pockets of the already rich, even Americans wouldn’t gripe so much about taxes.
Dalillama:
I might believe that if it were anyone but lorn. I expect he was trying to find a way to say Rand was a whore to wealth, without being called on it.
CD, Iyéska
So noted. I have no firm recollections of lorn, beyond a prior presence in comment threads.
Actually, even JordanOwen42 hated the Atlas Shrugged movies and had no hope for the third movie, despite being a Rand fan himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3pqMDIqwIo
I wish the RIfftrax crew would take a stab at these movies. The Randroids would probably try to stop them, though.
GuineaPigDan @ 38:
That’s some serious missing of the point. See: “What I really admire about you black folk…”
Oh, I don’t know. I think having the entire 40 pages long diatribe in there would be excellent. especially if it was read by someone with a completely toneless voice. People just don’t realize that the libertarian message is nuts. Once upon a time I thought Rand’s ideas were charming and highly attractive. Just everyone doing their own thing, harming none and making their own way through life. Then I realized that Rand’s worldview offers much in the way of self-interest and very little in the way of enlightenment. Spoils to the quickest, devil take the hindmost is not a way of running a society. Unless you’re already rich and powerful at the beginning. Or completely ruthless. Who really wants to live in that world ?
DLC
I was thinking have like a random slide show and some background music. Play the National Anthem during the uplifting parts, playing Fox News footage with hosts having halos around their head. Maybe a picture of Bush II, Cheney, and Saint Reagan. Rush Limbaugh with a golden Buddha smile. Then when he is ranting and angry, play death metal and show Obama with devil horns, Nancy Pelosi eating children, Harry Reid shitting on a coma patient, Biden looking like The Joker. And then maybe insert some random pictures of bunnies and puppies and some random pop songs and BAM. Instant movie, for cheap and therefore Maximum Profit, just like Rand would like it.
To give some idea of how railroads were and are managed, Hill’s railroad, the Great Northern, owned 49% of the stock in the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad (commonly called the Burlington) and the Northern Pacific owned another 49%. In 1901 Hill wanted to acquire control of the Northern Pacific and bought 51% of the NP’s shares. When Hill applied to merge GN and NP the Interstate Commerce Commission would only allow the merger if the consolidated railroad divested itself of the Burlington. So for 69 years the three railroads operated as separate entities, all owned by the same holding company. In 1970 Reagan deregulated the railroads and the three railroads became the Burlington Northern (BN). In 1995 the BN merged with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe (Santa Fe) to become the second largest railroad in the US, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe. In 2005 the company changed its name to BNSF. In 2010 Warren Buffet bought control of the BNSF.
From the trailer, the movie looks like a cliche-ridden dystopian cheesy romance. I love how conservatives pompously intone about the hell on earth that is our society in the near future, which of course they had nothing to do with creating.
There’s another interesting issue. Consider who the movies are intended to flatter. People who have earned a lot of money and who fancy themselves exploited John Galts and Dagny Taggarts and Hank Reardens and Francisco d’Anconias and … Why haven’t they contributed millions of dollars of their money in an attempt to show how misunderstood and persecuted they are?
In case people haven’t seen it, definitely check out Daylight Atheism’s review of Atlas Shrugged (He also reviews the first movie). It’s a lot of fun, and he dissects how some of the implausible things would play out in the real world.
@45 Ipetrich
Ayn Rand is fringe, and even smart Libertarians try not to be associated with her even if they believe in her. If anything, Rand turns people off to Libertarianism because she’s such a horrible figure and cult leader. And she’s an atheist, which doesn’t get her any points among the more conservative blocks.