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by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright September 2014
As I walked out of the theater after watching Atlas Shrugged 3 I was hit with a chill of irony: I felt I had experienced the product of one of those cheap-shotting capitalists that the movie villains were reviling. The movie itself was technically well produced: It had competent actors and behind the scenes staff. But the settings for the story were slapdash and there was so much inconsistent product placement that I found myself constantly head-scratching as the movie progressed.
The story centers around Dagny Taggart, the last competent manager at Taggart Transcontinental Railroads, and her romance with John Galt, hunky, mysterious, scientist-engineer type who started the strike of the world's brightest and best which is the central theme of the three movie series.
The setting inconsistencies show up from the first scenes and carry on throughout. In the opening scenes Dagny is opening her eyes as she recovers from her private jet crashing into Galt's Gulch, the secret lair for all those on strike. Rather than having medical equipment show up to tend her, hunky Galt simply carries her out of the woods to his vehicle. Odd, for a place where the brightest and best are busy inventing lots of new and wondrous things because they are no longer constrained by grasping government regulators. The inconsistency continues in the next scene when the doctor gives her a quick scan with a smart phone-looking device he has invented, and announces she has a sprained ankle, but then gives her a cane to walk with rather than some kind of neat high tech "smart cast" on her ankle. My feeling seeing this sequence was the movie makers were thinking, "We can keep the budget down here by using a cane."
In the scenes that follow there is constant confusion about when in time this movie is taking place. Sometimes cell phones pop out, other times people are driving around in 80's vintage cars, and at one point a 1940's vintage Beechcraft is used to fly Dagny out of Galt's Gulch. Whew! Adding to the inconsistency these Galt's Gulch people had cell phone towers, big, wide roads, plenty of gasoline, and plenty of brand name products in their homes to show off during party times. Overall, Galt's Gulch felt like a Marin County gated community with a Walmart and a hipster farmers market just outside the gate. How was this place any sort of secret? Where was the advanced technology that these bright and brilliant people were developing?
Deciding on the time setting is important. Ayn Rand first published Atlas Shrugged in 1957, a time when commercial air travel was only for the daring and Interstates were a gleam in President Eisenhower's eye. In that time railroads were the king of transportation methods, and Taggart Transcontinental would have been a keystone company. In the 1950's air freight and trucks on interstates weren't available as alternative freight haulers. If this is a 2010's setting and Taggert is to be a keystone company, then change Taggert Transcontinental to something vitally important for the 2010's economy: example, make it a supplier of a critical iPhone component.
The film makers never tried hard to reconcile this difference in cultural setting between the 1950's and the 2010's. They never decided, and stuck with, a decision about when this movie was taking place. Instead the attitude seemed to be "Smart phones? Old cars? Even older airplanes? Brand new airplanes? Why not? This story is timeless! (And if we can get product placement, do it.)"
This inconsistency of era messed up all the philosophy and business talk. The talk became nonsense. And one more example of it messing things up: Mid-movie the Science Institute Chief complains that his new mind-probing invention is being used as a torture device. Late movie we see it in action on John Galt and it looks like, and acts like, a simple, sparkly electric shocking device. And Galt resists it quite competently. This is the best the Science Chief, and the movie makers, could come up with for a state-of-the-art torture device? Lame, indeed. <sigh>
And a final example: John Galt's "we interrupt this government-sponsored news broadcast to give you a message from The Revolution"-message suffers from this confusion just as badly. As best I could tell, it had no call to action in it for the masses to follow.
So, all-in-all, it is a movie to... shrug off.
-- The End --
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