Atlas Shrugged: Part II

First Hit:  Poor acting, monologue heavy, but better than Part I.

Part I, which I reviewed in April of 2011, was poor from the get go. Part II is slightly better but Samantha Mathis does not bring life or any character to her part as Dagny Taggart.

She is simply not believable as the head of Taggart Railway, and some of her scenes she was not engaged and it seemed as if she was reading the script for the first time. Jason Beghe plays Henry Rearden head of Rearden Steel. He portends to be the guy with all the right morality when it comes to business but not so in his personal life because he is cheating on his wife Lillian (Kim Rhodes) with Dagny.

This film is supposed to move the whole set of films (Rand's story) along so that we wonder how the fight between big private business versus big government turns out and who's right. The government wants the people who have nothing, that don’t create value (according to Rearden), to receive their fair share by bilking big business. If you look at today’s 99% protest marches, the similarities come to light with a slightly different twist. In the film the government creates edicts which will destroy the companies.

Some of the scenes in this film were shot much better than many of the scenes in Part I. And low and behold, Part III will be coming.

It stands on its own that none of the actors in Part I made it to Part II. However, many of the actors in Part II may make it to Part III.

Mathis cannot carry this film in her title role. Speaking dialogue that, in many cases, didn’t work, and when she tried to make it work she wasn’t believable. To her credit, at times, it was completely just a bad script. Beghe was more believable, yet the script led him to have these monologues which got old. Rhodes was more believable and fun to watch in her brief appearances. Esai Morales (as Mine Operator Mogul, Francisco d’Anconia) was amusing and again his role was to spin monologues. Richard T. Jones (as Eddie Willers – Dangy’s right hand man) was good and one of the strongest characters in the film. Duke Sandefur and Brian Patrick O’Toole wrote this monologue driven script with a heavy hand. John Putch did a better job with this film than Paul Johansson did with the first.

Overall:  If you’ve got nothing to do, and it is Sunday, and you like Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, maybe take a gander to see how different this film is from how you might have imagined the story when you read Rand’s book.

Atlas Shrugged: Part I

First Hit: Atlas Shrugged and so did I.

I fondly remember reading Ayn Rand’s book about capitalism and its main characters, Taggart Transportation, Rearden Steel and John Gault.

And although I liked some of the principles I read then (self-reliance, we deserve the spoils of our labor and efforts and if someone has a monopoly on something that works, so what) it also assisted me in thinking about concepts of sharing wealth and the government’s role in servicing and supporting the poor. It was a book that provided some clearer understanding about how some people feel about wealth and the distribution of wealth.

Therefore I was looking forward to this film and wondered why it hadn’t been made before. It seemed to be a ripe story, especially with today’s abilities with special effects, to be made into film to enjoy what the future might hold and how people thought about wealth.

What actually happened was that this film provided a feeble and amateurish idea of what Rand shared in her book. Often the acting was amateurish with back and forth dialog between people being stilted and forced. Also some of the sets appeared to be just that, a set. A potted plant put in a corner because something needed to be in the corner (this was one of many visualizations that stayed with me the next morning).

In other words, the feeling of being taken or swept away by the actors, story and scenes was, for the most part, absent. Granted there were some good scenes and some good acting but mostly it felt as though it was created on a limited budget (which I’m sure it was) and that this “Part I” was made to generate enough money to allow Part II to be made at a higher and more professional level.

Briefly the story: Dagny Taggart (played by Taylor Schilling) co-owns Taggart Transportation with her brother James (played by Mathew Marsden). He milks the family owned company for all the profits he can get but sees a problem coming up with the latest rail breakage and train pile-up. Dagny, on the other hand, is the smart one who wants to create a great business and sees an opportunity to do this from the incident.

With the accident, Dagny has had enough of her brother’s ineptitude and decides the company is going to go into another direction. She wants to rebuild the infrastructure with a new metal from Henry Rearden (played by Grant Bowler) who owns Rearden Steel. The government doesn’t want this to happen because the steel could be so good that it will put all the other steel mills out of business and it could make Taggart Transportation the only viable rail line in the United States and Rearden Steel the only steel company.

A Coloradan named Ellis Wyatt (played by Graham Beckel) wants the rail line done right so that he can move his oil in Colorado out to the public (to make more money). After their initial success of the new rail line on Rearden steel, he tells Rearden and Dagny that this new rail line will be used to move the “sea of natural gas” lying below the oil which will make them even more rich. 

As was in the book and in this film, the characters playing the government’s case to distribute the wealth and control monopolies are weak and self-serving which is disappointing. At least in the book there was more attention paid to their case and it was more logically supported.

However, as in the book, John Gault is finding and removing these capitalists from public society. For what reason? Who knows. Who is John Gault? The answer to these questions and more will be revealed in Part II.

Schilling is good enough, but the type of strength required for her role isn’t really present (or acted out as Dagny) in her. She is one of the better people in this film. Marsden is ill prepared to be in the role he is in. He is the primary character in a number of poorly acted scenes. Bowler is OK as Rearden, but his actions and relationship to his wife and family do not fit (why would he marry the person who is his wife in this film?). Yes he is supposed to be disassociated from everything but his work, but his passion for his work doesn’t come through. Beckel was the one actor that felt fully engaged in his character and when he was in the scenes, I felt more engaged. John Aglialoro wrote the screen play from Rand’s book. The screenplay appeared to be OK but through some of the bad acting it was hard to discern. Paul Johansson directed the film and again I don’t know if it was the limited budget, bad actors and overall bad directly that left me with the feeling, why was this film made.

Overall: This was an unfortunate expression of a book that has a clear point of view whether one agrees with it or not.