#Atlas shrugged movie movie#

Dagny responds by lecturing them about the importance of keeping government out of the way of important business people. After being wooed to join Galt's Gulch (And who built all these houses in Galt's Gulch? Who cleans up after all these assholes? We only meet the ideal oil magnate and the ideal copper mine owner, we never meet the ideal road-paver, the landscaper who, frustrated with all the government taxation of the landscaping industry, was recruited by John Galt to scape lands the way he always intended without Big Government intrusion) Dagny heads home, where the ignorant big-government cronies try to get her to give up the secrets of John Galt. All of these events are portrayed with shitty stock video footage. Meanwhile, a narrator with an infomercial voice talks about the apocalypse unfolding in the world outside, now that all the captains of industry have gone on strike: Riots, looting, disasters. Here's the plot of Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt?: Dagny is shown around Galt's Gulch, where Galt and a number of other industrialists (including Stephen Tobolowsky in a glorified cameo, giving the only professional-grade performance in the film) lecture Dagny about the evils of government regulations. Not that it was ever on sturdy ground to begin with.

#Atlas shrugged movie movie#

Without an even borderline-decent Galt, the rest of the movie collapses. Every time he walked back on screen and the camera focused on him, I had to take a moment to remember who he was and which part he was playing.

The problem is, Polaha is a schlub, a forgettable face that spews out his lines with no real understanding of what the words mean. He's an ideal pulp leading man: Brilliant, forceful, arrogant, and a great planner. Even I, a lefty liberal who proudly voted for a socialist in the last city council election, can respect the appeal of Galt as a literary character. She meets John Galt (Kristoffer Polaha), and it's all downhill from there. After possibly the cheapest-looking plane crash in cinematic history, Taggart (played with all the charm of a block of wood by Laura Regan this time, making her the worst of the three Dagnies) winds up in Galt's Gulch, the resort community where all the millionaire industrialists have fled to after government overreach made it incapable for them to do their jobs. The third film nears Tommy Wiseau territory in terms of acting and production quality. The second film was a soap-opera-quality production. The Atlas Shrugged trilogy has been plagued with low budgets from the very beginning, and since the first movie bombed, the scope of the films have fallen lower and lower.

Let me tell you how you screw that up: You film the movie with an apparent shooting budget of $500 or less.