The Antisocial Socialist

“It was like a sex scene in an Ayn Rand novel, huh?” — Angels in America, Tony Kushner


Erstwhile on Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?, society fell apart because of a lack of Minnesota wheat and an excess of socialism, and Dagny returned from the Crunchy Conservative Compound to save her railroad company.




Dagny’s back at work and reunited with Eddie Willers, a.k.a., the only other person who does stuff at the company, a.k.a. the only black guy in this movie, a.k.a. the only one of our protagonists who dies in the book. Coincidence?

She’s also reunited, less happily, with her brother Jim, a.k.a., evil/useless government stooge, and some dude improbably named Cuffy who is there to oversee the Railway Unification Act, which will combine all the railroads and put them in state hands.

Wait a second. Haven’t we just spent two and a half movies establishing that there are no other railroad companies? There was one competitor but it went under, and there was a state-run train but it crashed into Dagny’s train, so now it’s just Taggart Transcontinental left. That’s the whole reason she needs to come back. Are they just unifying Taggart Transcontinental with itself? WTF?

Ultimately Dagny wants Minnesota wheat to get shipped out and Cuffy does not want the Minnesota wheat to get shipped out because fuck Minnesota.




*ring ring*

“There’s another impending train disaster!”

*ring ring*

“I don’t give a fuck.”

Then some random lineman calls Eddie. Why does he even have Eddie’s number? What does Eddie even do at this company? I don’t know. The lineman and I are both outta here.

Wait but wasn’t there some law in the last movie that froze the economy so that no one could get hired or fired? I think it also prevented people from quitting their jobs. Ah never mind. If Doctor Who doesn’t need continuity, why does anyone else?


Approximately two hours of trains and maps and arguments about trains and maps follow, as well as all-important Minnesota wheat updates. Jim invites Dagny to dinner with Thompson’s inner circle and she’s accordingly snarky about it.

It’s to be a “formal, but not overdone” event. I can’t wait to see what Dagny will wear!


Dagny has dinner with the bad guys, who are all dressed like caricatures of capitalists, smoking cigars, and talking about how Minnesota needs to be sacrificed for the greater good.

All of a sudden it matters that local farming is insufficient to provide for a large population. This didn’t matter for the chocolate cake in Galt’s Gulch, but it’s of utmost urgency now.


Dagny runs away to deal with the mysterious railroad crisis and the bad guys blow smoke rings and have a toast to sacrificing Minnesota. What does everyone have against Minnesota?



Oh.


I still have no idea what the railroad emergency is but let’s take a moment to appreciate Dagny running in her formal, but not overdone, evening dress and high heels.


Dagny comes up with some scheme for making the trains run on time that involves lanterns and cellophane and gives an inspiring speech and frankly this bit is boring. I suppose plot-wise, the important bit is that Galt has been posing as one of her workers. Does he even know anything about trains? Is he the reason there’s some sort of train-related emergency?

You know, if Galt is—as it’s implied—just a common worker who turned out to be really smart, he was probably educated on the taxpayer’s dollar in public schools, but you never hear him admit to the fact that he owes everything to the hard work and sacrifice of other people.


They do the least erotic sex scene committed to film since that night at the Piers Gaveston Society when Lord Ashcroft held a camera and David Cameron said, “here, hold my beer.”


That’s not fair, sabotabby. He didn’t actually kiss it. (As far as we know.)

There’s the same weird repeated fade-to-blacks as in other sex scene in one of the earlier movies, as if the camera itself had to keep shutting its lens in horror, and one strobe-like transition that should carry a seizure warning.

Anyway Dagny’s plan works and the train emergency is solved, plus now she’s got a bit more bounce to her step, so I guess Galt’s trickle-down was a bear market.


One of those odd hobos—why does an arch-capitalist like Dagny let hobos hang around her train station?—who exists in this movie solely to utter, “Who is John Galt?” at random intervals does it at her, and…

HOLY SHIT SHE MAKES A SECOND FACIAL EXPRESSION.

This is clearly a superior Dagny to the other two Dagnies, as she can smile. Not convincingly, but she moved her mouth-parts in a smile-like configuration. I’ll take whatever progress I can get.


Hahaha this is what Hank Rearden, a.k.a. Sir Not Appearing In This Movie, looks like now. No wonder she was so keen to dump him. He looks like a knock-off Al Pacino except in a bad way. Don’t worry, though, we never actually see him in the movie.


With all the voiceover narration, it’s clear that they had not filmed enough to make a minimum running time, so there’s a weird shoehorned-in plot digression about Cheryl, Jim Taggart’s wife who was rude to Dagny that one time. She finds out that her husband’s a fraud and then dies. I gather from the book that it’s suicide, but the way it’s set up here, it’s not clear whether she killed herself or Jim killed her or maybe she got on one of those exploding trains that are so common in this universe, and it exploded.

I personally don’t feel that “Taggart’s wife dies” is a believable newspaper headline in this day and age, but I don’t know why there are paper newspapers in this world to begin with as there are barely any now.


This revelation is followed by two weird flashbacks, shot soap-opera style with colour grading and vignettes. In one, she fights with Jim, and in another one, she apologizes to Dagny. I have no idea why this plotline is even here as it has zero bearing on the main story and is never mentioned again.


Thompson is about to give a speech. Speeches are very important, you see. They’re very special things, not like in our world where presidents give speeches on a regular basis. For some reason Dagny is invited but nopes the fuck out of there after she has a flashback of Galt tucking her into bed.

But that’s okay, because it’s interrupted by…


JOHN GALT’S SPEECH!

When this movie first came out, I predicted the speech would have to take up the entire movie, as it is 70 pages long in the book’s first edition. If you want to read it, here it is.

I guess the one good creative decision made here is that they cut it down a lot. It’s only about 5 minutes here, though it does feel like it goes on forever. The downside of this approach is that since it’s various bits excerpted from the speech as a whole, it is even less coherent than the original, and it’s impossible to imagine that it would trigger any more reaction than any other random crazy person ranting on the telly.

Anyway, he brags about how he’s drained the life force of the world. He admits to taking all the greedy, I mean heroic, capitalists away and tells everyone that they’re doomed. The only hope for the people is to go off into their own little off-the-grid communities (he does not invite anyone else to join Galt’s Gulch). In combination with the darkness and framing, he comes off as very supervillainy and also looks a bit like Tyrion in Game of Thrones.



I also predicted we’d get a montage of society going to hell + businessmen to break the monotony of the Johnologue, but they didn’t go that route, probably because it’d be too much work and they only recently learned how to use iMovie. So there are just a few reaction shots of the studio and various people watching the speech on TV. Again, marginally less incompetent than I expected, but only marginally.


The fallout from the speech is that Thompson now wants to make a deal with Galt, and crowds of people are screaming, “We want Galt!” all the time. Because that is a thing that would happen.

Even weirder, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, as themselves, go on FOX News and sing Galt’s praises as well. Now, in a jackbooted socialist dystopia, why the fuck is FOX News around? Why are Hannity and Beck allowed to speak? Are there no firing squads? Are there no gulags?

See this is one of the many reasons why I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief. I keep being told that the government is evil and oppressive, but the logical conclusion of this assertion is never shown. If I ever become Head of State or whatever, the first thing I’d do is come up with a cooler title than Head of State, and the second thing I’d do is put Beck and Hannity up against the wall. And I’m a pretty nice person, whereas Thompson isn’t.


Thompson is as sick of people chanting for Galt as I am, so he tries to get Dagny to propose a deal with Galt, since she was impressed by his speech and so obviously knows him well enough to act as a go-between.


They didn’t have the money to hire decent actors for this but I bet Ron Paul did it for free.

Speaking of which, I never found out if these actors are in SAG-AFTRA, and if so, how the union feels about their presence in this movie.


Dagny looks up her employee records and finds Galt, who was stupid enough to use his real name, so she tracks him to his shitty apartment and they mack on each other, because that’s the usual reaction to mutually stalkerish behaviour.

He tries to talk her into pretending to hate him so that she’ll be safe from Thompson’s guys. Isn’t that kind of, I don’t know, self-sacrificing? I’m not calling him a hypocrite but he’s a fucking hypocrite.


Remember how one, maybe two of the magic engines were in Galt’s Gulch? Either he built another one or it can also teleport, because he’s got it in his apartment that he’s renting under his real name even though government-sponsored union thugs are after him. He’s a genius, that Galt!


So the government-sponsored union thugs beat down his door, Dagny gives him up and demands her reward, and they go searching in his apartment. But when they reach the room with the magic engine in it, they don’t say the magic words to open the door, so everything in the room disappears in a cloud of pixie dust.

See what I mean about genre being a serious problem in this movie?


Thompson is affably evil at Galt. Galt secretly pocket-dials Dagny so she can listen in. As he talks, Thompson somehow acquires a faux-Georgia accent like Kevin Spacey in House of Cards.

Speaking of which, you know who would have the Galt problem solved really quickly? F.U.



Urquhart would just have him killed in time for afternoon tea and call it a day. That’s what I call evil competence. The bad guys in this movie are incompetent and therefore no fun at all.

Thompson offers Galt Wesley Mouch’s job, so he can make America all capitalist again with lower wages and no unions. But Galt doesn’t think that there should be any government involvement in business, so he refuses. Before they take him away, they conveniently mention that they’re taking him to the State Science Institute so that Dagny can here and get Francisco and Ragnar the Pirate to come bust him out.


But we don’t get to find out the dramatic conclusion right away, because there is yet another voiceover. This one is about the Taggart Bridge, which has finally collapsed due to “regulation.”

Um. Randroids. A word, if you will.

Government regulations are what stop bridges from collapsing. That’s the point of regulating infrastructure. Otherwise, people will just slap up whatever they want with no concerns for safety and the transport network starts to look a lot like the inside of the Death Star.



This is backwards land. On the plus side, they can probably use magic to fix it later.


Dagny meets up with Francisco and says the magic words and then they go off to rescue Galt with Ragnar the Pirate and his Very Convenient Helicopter that we’ve never heard about before and is immune to fuel shortages.


We finally get to see Project F, and boy oh boy is it ever a disappointment. It’s basically an electrocution device, which is hardly something that you need advanced science to make. I mean, the VC did exactly the same thing in Rambo with nowhere near this level of budget or wankery.



Anyway it is pretty fun watching Galt get tortured. I could watch this scene forever. It’s the only good scene in the whole movie.

I might have watched it more than once for the sake of catharsis.



The genius bad guys have left one dude in charge of guarding the entire State Science Institute and all of their top-secret projects. Parking lots have more security than that. Also he’s unarmed.

So Dagny fucking kills him. I mean, she tries to get him to just let her in, but when he refuses, she shoots him.

So much for the Non-Aggression Principle.


The one funny bit is that the machine breaks and none of them know how to change a fuse, so he tells them. I think he likes being tortured, the kinky bugger. I told you it was a bit 50 Shades of Grey.

This upsets all the bad guys so they just leave, in slo-mo no less, with no one watching Galt.


But it’s okay ‘cause he dead. YAY!





Unfortunately, Dagny chooses that moment to arrive and SAYS THE MAGIC WORDS AND KISSES HIM BACK TO LIFE

FUCK THIS MOVIE



FUCK IT RIGHT UP ITS BIG WOODED GULCH WITH THE SHARP EDGE OF A HARD METAL DOLLAR SCULPTURE



Oh yeah and Eddie doesn’t die either like in the book because they didn’t have time to shoot that bit, I guess, so Francisco and Midas go off to rescue him.


Then the lights go out because the White House has never heard of a backup power generator or anything.

And Dagny tells John, “You’re my forever” and I throw up in my mouth. I think my vomit just vomited.


Then ALL THE LIGHTS in the ENTIRE WORLD go out except in Galt’s Gulch and the Statue of Liberty, because the magic power of capitalism is enough to keep it lit even in the absence of a functional power grid.

And everyone dies except the capitalists. Happy ending! I mean, it’s a happy ending if you’re a sociopath.


FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU

Anyway.

In the first part of this review, I questioned whether you could make a good movie out of a bad ideology. But when it comes down to it, this film may fail as a propaganda tool for the Objectivist movement, but it is a truly excellent argument for Stalinism, as everyone involved with its production deserves to be ground down beneath the jackboots of state socialism, then rounded up and thrown into a gulag, and then shot.

Repeatedly. Until there is nothing but chunky bits of meat.

Which should then be stomped on some more and then shat upon.

Also, as you all well know, this happened immediately after the movie:




That’s it folks! I’m gonna go drink myself to death.