User reviews

Following on from Part II of the series, Dagny Taggart has at last has met John Galt. He and all the missing entrepreneurs, academics etc are living in a secret location. Dagny now has to make a choice: remain with the intellectuals or head back into the world where the government is oppressing its own people and stifling innovation and entrepreneurship.

After the first two films in the series I wasn't expecting much from this but wanted to see how the story ends. The film lived up to my expectations.

As before, the story is quite clumsy, character engagement is close to non-existent and the performances aren't the greatest but the themes are interesting, relatable and supportable. Continuity from the previous film is also a bit suspect

On that note, once again, the entire cast has been changed, diminishing any character familiarity or engagement. Why do that - a three film-series with common characters but entirely different casts for each film? Would it have been more expensive to sign actors to three-film deals? Makes for some weird character (non-) continuity, e.g. Dagny Taggart was played by 27-year-old Taylor Schilling in Part I, 42-year-old Samantha Mathis in Part II and now 37-year-old Laura Regan in Part III. So how old is her character?

In some ways the cast change is a positive as the actors are better than those in Part II but that wasn't difficult to achieve.

There are some broader positives though. Part III does tie up reasonably well, though with some degree of deliberate open-endedness. The anti-government, pro-capitalism themes of the first two films are now even stronger here and are well illustrated.

As was also the case with the first two films, the themes and broad storyline are very good, just a pity the execution is so mediocre.

"Atlas Shrugged" has been a best seller for over 50 years. Its amazing prophecy about the current Obamanation has driven its sales to new heights. One would think it was a no-brainier for movie makers to make it. There is , however , one big catch: "Atlas Shrugged" boldly stands in opposition to the leftist culture infesting Hollywood. The Hollywood-Socialist alliance has tried to crush this movie from the beginning and up till now has succeeded in killing all such attempts. The bad guys of Hollywood did succeed in one respect : it was made without the seasoned talent of movie professionals. This tortured movie is the mangled victim of their relentless efforts of idealogical suppression.

I read the reviews. The usual enemies of liberty chimed in but it was the thumbs down from the free market folks that got my attention. "Atlas Shrugged" was a life changing book for me so I felt compelled to see the film anyways. If nothing else I wanted to reward the brave souls who finally made this important book into a movie. I was the only one in the theater that afternoon.

"Atlas Shrugged" is a long book filled with complicated philosophical ideas. It would have required minds as ingenious to film it as the mind which wrote it. No such talent was willing to touch it given the hostile environment of Commiewood . They would have become Hollywood poison , like former communist turned patriot Elia Kazan. This movie ended up being made by well meaning amateurs and it shows.

It's amazing this Hollywood thought crime was pursued to the end. All three parts have been commercial failures. You could see the production values decline as each one in turn was produced. The actors kept changing from movie to movie. They had to reintroduce characters with on screen titles. In this last movie key events were reduced to voiced over narrations done as simple lifeless news broadcasts. Like the movie "Dune" it tries to cram everything in from the book . Unless you read the book chances are you'd be totally lost by all the names and things happening.

The ideas still managed to come through but without any sparkle. They sounded more like the high school essays some kids would write. The actor they had for John Galt was not anything like I'd imagined him to be. Knowing how good the book was , watching this movie was more like attending a funeral. I'm still in mourning for this fading light that could have been great. Perhaps it will be remembered by future generations as a dying last gasp of American reason while the former nation of the enlightenment rapidly descends into the nightmare of collectivism and its inevitable tyranny.

This movie is terrible. I've read the book and this is not a representation of it. This movie is a let down on every front. The story line is scabbed together. The cinematography is terrible. Acting is less than second rate. Cohesion sucks. There is less climax in this movie than there is in a retirement home. What's with the music in the movie? Every transition scene has this grandiose symphony playing, making it seem like there is a plot point or twist coming up.

I suffered through this junk because I had a fast forward button. Which is sad since I thought the first movie in this series was pretty well done. Then the second movie sucked. The third movie (this one) was so exponentially terrible compared to the first two that scientists are still trying to come up with a logarithmic formula to accurately represent the decaying quality from the first to third movies.

Watch the first movie and accept that it never goes anywhere. Don't watch this.

When i thought that Part II was worse than Part I, Part III went one step further. With another change in the cast, it's been difficult again to follow what's been going on.

With the ideas of Ayn Rand diluted in sub-par writing and below average acting, Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? became a perfect background for an afternoon nap. No pun intended.

Once again, i'm not sure why the producers insisted on making three movies instead of opting for a TV show. Nowadays this seems to be a gateway to a broader audience. Besides, the book Atlas Shrugged had enough contents and ideas for eight to ten one-hour episodes.

It's the curiosity more than anything. I've already seen the first two "Atlas Shrugged" movies; can't really leave the trilogy unfinished, right? This is what drove me to finish an unsatisfactory series of movies. And the final entry finishes things off in the worst possible fashion.

I'm not even concerned with Ayn Rand's philosophy, only with Part III's complete mishandling of it. This is a cartoon with robotic performances, non-existent production values and haphazard direction. The dialogue's stilted, none of these TV actors have any breathing room, and the story rolls out in a hurried low-standards manner. It's so cheap and so cut-rate that any message (even one delivered with a smug sledgehammer) is smothered in the execution. At a certain point, it just becomes unintentionally funny. Just not funny enough to be entertaining.

Is this at all like the book? I have no idea, but once was more than enough with this movie. What a sad end.

A car company changes its pay structure to one based on the workers' needs. John Galt (Kristoffer Polaha) refuses to go along and vows to stop the motor of the world. He convinces other industry leaders to go on strike and disappear to his hideaway. He has also invented a revolutionary engine to power the world. Dagny Taggart (Laura Regan) goes in search for the mysterious John Galt. Her plane is brought down by an electrical shield and Galt carries her out of the wreckage. She decides to return to the world to fight for her railroad business against the dictatorial Head of State Thompson and her incompetent brother James Taggart (Greg Germann). Meanwhile the world is collapsing without the captains of industrial and under attack from the pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld.

The story and dialog are clunky. This is basically a ninety minute sermon. Nobody in real life speaks like this. It makes the story very unwieldy. The Galt hideaway is a huge disappointment. It's a bunch of ski lodges and cabins with a farmer's market. With all the greatest minds in the world, it needs to be a magical Tomorrowland. I was glad when Dr. Floyd Ferris brings out a Star Trek scanner but that's the only thing. Sure Galt has his motor but they don't let it be amazing. It's a horribly flat and boring first half hour. There is an interesting section where Dagny returns home to battle his idiot brother. However, even that section is messed up by simplistic ideas like Minnesota. Apparently Minnesota is the only wheat growing state. It only adds to the ridiculousness. It makes any theory advanced by this movie sound stupid. Then there is the final battle. I didn't know torture requires a complicated machine. It seems like a car battery and a jumper cable would have done the same job. It's also one of the worst guarded torture site ever imagined. It's an ignominious end to a poorly executed story.

People need to be more reasonable. It's a miracle this third installment even got made. Obviously there was a very strong drive to finish the project even though they've had very little encouragement all along the way. The acting is good and on the budget it has it's much better than I expected. Many low budget projects would kill to look this good. Sure they have to shorten the elements from the Book just like they did with Game of Thrones. This is actually a better writing job than the last season of GOT which was just nuts. This follows the book OK, it get's the main themes across and many people just seem to want to hate Ayn Rand and do what they can to belittle the concepts. These days with the Strong leftist control of most all of mainstream media, you see these ideas coming across on some of the top College Campuses that used to be bastions for Free Speech, now they have been taken over by very totalitarian overseers that do anything to Squelch free speech and brainwash our kids to their insane ideologies. It's very surreal and hard to imagine how we let this happen, but there it is. Movies like this are important and need our support. The books of Terry Goodkind are fantasy books with these concepts too and are very good. It was a good movie overall and better than many new releases on Netflix. Give it a chance and give some slack too for the effort it took to even complete these three films with so much obstruction in Hollywood trying to prevent it.

I am a big fan of the book, and I liked the first movie. That said, this was awful.

The story is rushed, character development is thin to none, and some of the best scenes from the book are missing. Whether or not you agree with Ayn Rand, she understood the beast (in her opinion) very well, and represented the conflict through engaging dialogue in fiction. There is none of that here.

Instead, there is a string of passionate speeches given by the central star but he comes across somewhere between a crazy man on the New York subway, and a poorly edited Anonymous speaker on YouTube. He does not come across as a veritable world leader. There are cameos from various B-list news figureheads, making this appear more a reunion of The Celebrity Apprentice than beautiful fictional story with a timely message.

Like others, I saw it to complete the trilogy, and out of respect for an integrity-based way of doing business that is legitimately threatened today. This movie does not help the cause.

Atlas Shrugged Part 3 Full review: Really a shame, since Part 1 was decent and Part 2 was legitimately good. I was excited for 3 to continue the progress and for this to be a trilogy worth showing to people who won't read the 1100 page book. Nope. Bad casting, bad acting, bad music (not alone, but it didn't match what was happening on screen), bad adaptation of the plot, baaaaad dialogue.

First, we had to deal with the re-casting of all the roles from Part 2, just as we did from Part 1 with one glaring difference. Part 2's actors were improvements, Part 3's were not. Francisco D'Anconia is cast as a man too old to be Dagny's sweetheart, rather more of a father figure. Almost every other character is almost comically one-dimensional, as if they are cast for only their one trait. Rearden is saved from this travesty by being completely omitted from the story save for his voice on a phone call. John Galt is acceptable, and even gives a passable speech. Worst was Mr Thompson, who couldn't be bothered to know the first thing about his own philosophy, but more on that later. Hugh Akston had a believable conversation with Dagny which, unfortunately, may be the highlight of the movie. All of this is being distracted from by music that doesn't fit the on-screen action, unnecessary landscape shots of California pretending to be Colorado, and dialogue so badly cut, that the audio track doesn't even match the visual track in some places. And that's just the details.

My biggest complaint is the audience was treated like idiots. The plot was narrated through the whole movie (ever heard of show them, don't tell them? I guess not), and the characters explicitly spelled out their ideals more like they were reading talking points off of Ron Paul's pamphlets, not describing hard decisions they actually had to make in their lives. Additionally, the antagonists in the movie were bumbling idiots. At the point in the book most of the movie covers, the leaders of the People's State of America are supposed to be whole-heartedly dedicated to the way they are running the world., completely convinced of its morality, and well versed in the language used to defend it. Instead, they are obvious fools, unable to defend the most basic premises of their world view, supposedly so that the audience can more easily see that their world view is wrong. Well I didn't need that help, thanks. Almost as offensive is portraying John Galt, Ayn Rand's (a staunch atheist) hero of society, as Jesus complete with torture on the cross and a resurrection scene. It was probably added to make the movie more appealing to Evangelical Republicans who might be sympathetic to a Randian ideology if it weren't for the atheism. And to round out the offensiveness, Dagny Taggart, a powerful woman who runs a railroad empire and is the strongest voice against the socialist elites, is reduced to s starry eyed schoolgirl seemingly struck dumb (literally and figuratively) by her love of John Galt and her admiration of the society he's built. Her character is reduced to a passive window through which we watch the "story" unfold. 0/10 would not see again, and will not be adding the Blu-Ray to my collector's edition Parts 1 and 2.

I thought I knew what to expect being a Ann Ryand based film and figured if I agreed with it or not it might be a study in that mindset.

All I saw was a bunch of clowns trying to act with so much cheese on top and worse editing mixed with lots of old footage.

If Hitler has seen this piece of sad propaganda he would of shot all who made this film. Heck even the propaganda films I have seen in the past from the 40's had way more merit than this cruddy work.

Do Not waste your money! The people giving such high ratings are those who would give a water closet with Ann Ryands name on it a high rating. They are just you brain dead fan boys who can not think beyond their indoctrinated hate of anything the see as a enemy; which basically everything that is not right of Atilla the Hun is their enemy.

Save you money and save your eyes!!!

Ayn Rand is spinning in her grave.

These people couldn't have possibly have read the book. They've taken a well written and reasoned novel (whether you agree with he philosophy or not) and reduced it to cheer leading the current right wings talking points.

If these people ever read Ayn Rand they would realize that they are exactly the type of people she referred to as takers, users, and looters.....

While the first two installments of this robbery of the mind (as Ayn would put it) showed at least a little self awareness and knowledge of the under pinnings of the novels intent this one completely misses the mark.

I can't claim to be Ayn Rand's biggest fan, or the greatest fan of "Atlas Shrugged." I have referred to the book many times as "my other Bible," and I have read it once each year since 1978, so there are my "bonafides."

And I am disgusted by the abomination "Atlas Shrugged-Part III."

I saw this "flick" on the day it was released and have avoided reviewing it until now. But the DVD release is imminent and I want to warn everyone who is considering a purchase to refrain. If you haven't already done so, buy a copy of Part I (I rate it 7 of 10) or even Part II (6 of 10, redeemed primarily by Samantha Mathis' brilliant performance as Dagny Taggert). Don't for a moment believe that by skipping Part III you're missing anything. Instead, buy a copy of the novel, and read the final third.

Briefly, "Atlas Shrugged-Part III" violates the first rule of story-telling: Show, don't tell. All this movie does is talk. There is one scene where this is effective, and I'll get to that in a moment, but the entire film is made in the style of a documentary, only without an engaging narrative. Its like watching a slide show of somebody's week-end at a motivational seminar. That said, the centerpiece of the film is the "This is John Galt speaking" oration; for two years I anticipated hearing/seeing this brilliant speech on film. I both craved and dreaded this segment because it is the heart of the novel, the heart of everything Ayn Rand wanted to say, and I believed how effectively it was presented would make or break "AS-Part III." I was wrong. In "Part III" Galt's speech is effectively though too briefly presented, but for all its merit, it could not save the rest of the movie. Its odd that the movie's producers chose to keep so short the only part of their story that should rightly and appropriately be all talk.

Sadly, this brief highlight is soon followed by a gutless interpretation of the novel's climax. Most readers of the novel are keenly aware of the comparison Rand's climax makes to the climax of the New Testament's Gospels. The producers of Part III clearly avoided this controversial (some would call it blasphemous) re-interpretation. Read the book and you will likely reconsider what was intended by (the commandment?) "Thou shalt deny me three times."

And that is the main problem with "AS-Part III". In the novel Rand challenged readers to challenge everything they have been taught about their morals, ethics and spirituality. The only thing "Atlas Shrugged-Part III" challenges is the audience's patience.

I actually cried when the film ended...cried in disappointment for what could have been. It may seem an odd comparison, but like the "Lord of the Rings," "Harry Potter" and several other book-to-film series, "Atlas Shrugged" has a built-in audience. The novel has been read, valued and loved by tens of millions of people around the world. I could be cynical and suggest the the producers of "Part III" thought that audience would love whatever we were given. But I don't think that is the problem. I think "Part III" was simply entrusted to incompetents.

In the mid-1970's NBC previewed a TV mini-series version of "Atlas Shrugged." Fred Silverman cowered at the anti-Rand sentiment the network received and the mini-series was never completed. I believe the script was personally approved by Rand. Perhaps it could be resurrected?