(You can also read my review of the first Atlas Shrugged movie and my review of the second Atlas Shrugged movie.)

By all rights, the third movie in the Atlas Shrugged adaptation trilogy should have been the best of the lot. It's the one that features John Galt, the charismatic main character who has not yet appeared on screen. Everyone's been talking about him for two whole movies, so the audience is ready for a big reveal. Better yet, the whole world is falling apart as the action unfolds, leaving plenty of room for big-budget disaster shots. And it's got romance, as Galt falls in love with Dagny Taggart, the train magnate who has been the focus of the other two films. Character, action, romance—how could you possibly screw that up?

Let me tell you how you screw that up: You film the movie with an apparent shooting budget of $500 or less. 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. The second film was a soap-opera-quality production. The third film nears Tommy Wiseau territory in terms of acting and production quality. 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. She meets John Galt (Kristoffer Polaha), and it's all downhill from there. 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. He's an ideal pulp leading man: Brilliant, forceful, arrogant, and a great planner. The problem is, Polaha is a schlub, a forgettable face that spews out his lines with no real understanding of what the words mean. 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.

Without an even borderline-decent Galt, the rest of the movie collapses. Not that it was ever on sturdy ground to begin with.

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. 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. All of these events are portrayed with shitty stock video footage. 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. Dagny responds by lecturing them about the importance of keeping government out of the way of important business people. Meanwhile, the narrator comes back and informs us about the further collapse of America, with even more stock footage. The film ends with Galt's speech (truncated from tens of thousands of words to about five very boring minutes, and followed by clips of Glenn Beck, Ron Paul, and Sean Hannity telling us how moving the speech was) and a silly raid by the captains of industry waving around plastic guns as they try to save Galt from being strapped to a Hot Topic display wall and tortured by government agents. The movie ends abruptly, with the world in tatters and the smug rich white people crowing about how they were right all along.

The perfect example of how terribly Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? fails as a movie? All through the film, characters talk about a bridge that Dagny has constructed, one that will stand for a hundred years. The bridge is referred to several times—each time, it's accompanied by a photograph of the bridge. At the climax of the film, we are told by the narrator that the bridge collapsed, and this is accompanied with a shoddy Photoshopped image of the scene of the collapse, a plasticky, hard-to-read photo manipulation that shows a lot of fake smoke and not much else. They couldn't even afford to make a bad CGI shot of the bridge collapsing with a few extras pointing at it offscreen and remarking on how terrible it is. That Photoshop represents this entire Atlas Shrugged trilogy: It's a cheap workaround, an imitation of a photocopy of a rip-off of a forgery that couldn't even convince a five-year-old it's an authentic movie with something real to say. Even Ayn Rand deserved better than this.