I feel like my arm is all warmed up and I don’t have a game to pitch. I was primed to review "Atlas Shrugged." I figured it might provide a parable of Ayn Rand’s philosophy that I could discuss. For me, that philosophy reduces itself to: "I’m on board; pull up the lifeline." There are however people who take Ayn Rand even more seriously than comic-book fans take "Watchmen." I expect to receive learned and sarcastic lectures on the pathetic failings of my review.And now I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone’s vault. I suspect only someone very familiar with Rand’s 1957 novel could understand the film at all, and I doubt they will be happy with it. For the rest of us, it involves a series of business meetings in luxurious retro leather-and-brass board rooms and offices, and restaurants and bedrooms that look borrowed from a hotel no doubt known as the Robber Baron Arms. During these meetings, everybody drinks.
More wine is poured and sipped in this film than at a convention of oenophiliacs. There are conversations in English after which I sometimes found myself asking, "What did they just say?" The dialogue seems to have been ripped throbbing with passion from the pages of Investors’ Business Daily. Much of the excitement centers on the tensile strength of steel.The story involves Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), a young woman who controls a railroad company named Taggart Transcontinental (its motto: "Ocean to Ocean"). She is a fearless and visionary entrepreneur, who is determined to use a revolutionary new steel to repair her train tracks. Vast forces seem to conspire against her. It’s a few years in the future. America has become a state in which mediocrity is the goal, and high-achieving individuals the enemy. Laws have been passed prohibiting companies from owning other companies. Dagny’s new steel, which is produced by her sometime lover, Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler), has been legislated against because it’s better than other steels.
The Union of Railroad Engineers has decided it will not operate Dagny’s trains. Just to show you how bad things have become, a government minister announces "a tax will be applied to the state of Colorado, in order to equalize our national economy." So you see how governments and unions are the enemy of visionary entrepreneurs.But you’re thinking, railroads? Yes, although airplanes exist in this future, trains are where it’s at. When I was 6, my Aunt Martha brought me to Chicago to attend the great Railroad Fair of 1948, at which the nation’s rail companies celebrated the wonders that were on the way. They didn’t quite foresee mass air transportation. "Atlas Shrugged" seems to buy into the fair’s glowing vision of the future of trains. Rarely, perhaps never, has television news covered the laying of new railroad track with the breathless urgency of the news channels shown in this movie.Let’s say you know the novel, you agree with Ayn Rand, you’re an objectivist or a libertarian, and you’ve been waiting eagerly for this movie.
Man, are you going to get a letdown. It’s not enough that a movie agree with you, in however an incoherent and murky fashion. It would help if it were like, you know, entertaining?The movie is constructed of a few kinds of scenes: (1) People sipping their drinks in clubby surroundings and exchanging dialogue that sounds like corporate lingo; (2) railroads, and lots of ’em; (3) limousines driving through cities in ruin and arriving at ornate buildings; (5) the beauties of Colorado. There is also a love scene, which is shown not merely from the waist up but from the ears up. The man keeps his shirt on. This may be disappointing for libertarians, who I believe enjoy rumpy-pumpy as much as anyone.Oh, and there is Wisconsin. Dagny and Hank ride blissfully in Taggart’s new high-speed train, and then Hank suggests they take a trip to Wisconsin, where the state’s policies caused the suppression of an engine that runs on the ozone in the air, or something (the film’s detailed explanation won’t clear this up).
They decide to drive there. That’s when you’ll enjoy the beautiful landscape photography of the deserts of Wisconsin. My advice to the filmmakers: If you want to use a desert, why not just refer to Wisconsin as "New Mexico"?"Atlas Shrugged" closes with a title card saying, "End of Part 1." Frequently throughout the film, characters repeat the phrase, "Who is John Galt?" Well they might ask. A man in black, always shot in shadow, is apparently John Galt. If you want to get a good look at him and find out why everybody is asking, I hope you can find out in Part 2. I don’t think you can hold out for Part 3.‘Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’ is an anagram for ‘My Ultimate Ayn Rand Porn’ In anagram news today, it’s been discovered that “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan” uses the same letters and the same number of letters as “My Ultimate Ayn Rand Porn” – therefore making it a very good anagram. Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist who promoted an idealized free-market capitalism with her books “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”
She was also vastly influential in promoting objectivism. Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are both corporate shills controlled by donors (and shadowy Ayn Rand-ian figures like the Koch brothers). Paul Ryan in particular is a certified Rand worshipper. So this anagram is just too perfect. Anagramming is a form of wordplay used by people at dinner parties to appear interesting.“You see the movies they make now… They just keep making the same one over and over again.” Francis Ford Coppola no longer believes in cinema. Of all the Best Films Never Made projects haunting the dark corners of Hollywood, Coppola’s ‘dream project’ amasses the most space. It was going to be a career-ender, or a masterpiece that redefined cinema. There was no in-between. At once, it’s bizarre and unique. On the other hand, it’s overblown and maddening. To refer to that opening quote – the Coppola of old was a true legend of film. Creating four of the best films of all time in seven years, 40 years ago Coppola was untouchable.
The Coppola of today is a disappointment. Since 1992 the director’s résumé has read like a downward-heading line graph: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jack, The Rainmaker, Supernova, Youth Without Youth, Tetro and Twixt. “He’s gone soft”, “he’s lost his edge”, “the times have changed”. No, that’s too simple. The mind behind the paranoia of The Conversation, the class of the Godfather series and the beauty of Apocalypse Now does not just ‘lose his touch’. It’s where Megalopolis provides the key to a new theorem: Coppola, for the last two decades, has been a mind distracted and bored. He’s been quoted prolifically saying three of the above were fodder to convince the studio to do Megalopolis. Meanwhile his latest trio have been small, independent, self-financed movies with little care for profit. His wine business covers him in that respect. There’s little wrong with that, but his tune is too heavily in the minor key. 2001 was the game changer, and Megalopolis was front and centre of it all.
Looking at reports from early in the year, Coppola seemed a man of hope. Reports say he’d already shot at least 30 hours of second unit footage, and his redrafted script was ready for a cast. Further inspired by Star Wars: The Phantom Menace pioneering new filming techniques, he arrived at Cannes to announce Megalopolis. The enigmatic director announced that this new one was going to be even bigger than Apocalypse Now. A Cecil B. DeMille-like feature. This was going to be a “vastly huge, enormous production”, with the aim of casting “the greatest actors around”. An enthralling narrative of a genius rejuvenated, and this is just Coppola. Listen to him tease Megalopolis as “the story of a man’s battle to build an ideal world… a hero’s fight to realise his dream to build a city of the future.” “My feeling is that if we can show people what is possible, they will want it”. “My feeling is that if we can show people what is possible, they will want it”
Six months later, 9/11 struck New York. The Big Apple could no longer be the star of a Utopian future. The director argued that “I feel as though history has come to my doorstep” with Megalopolis becoming more relevant than ever. Soon after, he shifted his Zoetrope company from New York back to San Francisco and began reevaluating. By 2005, no one had stepped forward, and the project was declared dead. It’s the hope that kills you. So what is Megalopolis? This fountain of youth set to revitalise cinema and Francis Ford Coppola? Well: no definitive script has ever emerged, but we have sketches (included throughout) and one of the drafts, which weighed in at 212 pages. The top-line analysis is that this was inspirational and ambitious filmmaking. It was an evolution of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, with heavy influences from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, receiving direct inspiration from the Cataline conspiracy framed within an epic vision of a future New York City. The star of this picture is Serge Catalane: a genius architect, controversial icon and lover of debauchery.
His goal is to revolutionise the city, overhauling it to become a global and economic icon to the world. In doing so, he kicks ‘Cityworld’ to the curb – a conservative facelift for New York from Mayor Frank Cicero. The battle between two men begins, as Frank becomes determined to destroy Serge and Megalopolis. There are dirty politics, organised crime and evil big businesses that combine to try and take down Megalopolis. That’s an intriguing storyline, yet hardly puts the Mega in Megalopolis. See, the devil is in the detail. Megalopolis is drowning in extensive, and overwrought details, themes and characters. Throughout the story’s five-year period, there are underage sex scandals, an inordinate amount of lead characters, political agendas and social commentary. All varying from the brilliant to the odd and unpleasant. The length and breadth of Megalopolis makes it hard to define all its ambition and plans. On script, the words reveal a visionary at work. Coppola’s let everything flow into this.
He’s making the movie he thinks everyone should be making. Every modicum of an idea or character he’s observed is within these pages. It’s not clear how it would have all worked, but you suspect it might have. Coppola dealing with futuristic utopian ideals, using the latest tech, and based around Ayn Rand, is an irresistible temptation. If he had pulled off the thematic stabs at modern-day America, Coppola could have created another masterpiece. Only he could write and direct this beast. “If I didn’t have this script [Megalopolis], I could not hold my head up, I would be crushed” Now in his late 70s, Coppola’s ‘dream project’ appears to be just that. This series of articles has seen projects from the insane to the outright absurd. For Megalopolis, it earns the title of being the most ambitious. A quote from a 1999 interview confirms that Megalopolis is the key. Coppola says: “You live for the work. To be challenged… the things that I did make didn’t really live up to what I would love to make.