UPDATE BY RONBO:
On April 17, 2011, I went to the 12:30 P.M. showing of ATLAS SHRUGGED: THE MOVIE playing at a theater in the very heart of Seattle, Washington's tourist district. This was the first showing on a Sunday afternoon, but the viewing was over half filled with intelligent looking 60ish adults. I went to what I expected to be at best a three star movie based on the mixed reviews out of intense loyalty for the memory of the late great patriot Ayn Rand, America's greatest philosopher of capitalism and leading novelist.
The movie was excellent, in my never humble opinion, especially as it was produced on a shoestring budget using little known actors. In particular, I thought the special effects and street scenes well done, and I found the film noir setting of a bleak super depression in the near future of 2016/17 quite believable.
Of course, the film makers took liberties with Ayn Rand's opus, but I found the minor changes put the 1957 script into a contemporary and scary focus - I could just hear in my head Obama and his Leftist lackeys in the federal government saying and doing the same things done in the movie designed to destroy capitalism.
Please, please, PLEASE check the listing of movie theaters where Ayn Rand's master work is playing and attend the movie with a friend! This is only Part One and the producers say they lack the money to complete parts II and III.
On April 17, 2011, I went to the 12:30 P.M. showing of ATLAS SHRUGGED: THE MOVIE playing at a theater in the very heart of Seattle, Washington's tourist district. This was the first showing on a Sunday afternoon, but the viewing was over half filled with intelligent looking 60ish adults. I went to what I expected to be at best a three star movie based on the mixed reviews out of intense loyalty for the memory of the late great patriot Ayn Rand, America's greatest philosopher of capitalism and leading novelist.
The movie was excellent, in my never humble opinion, especially as it was produced on a shoestring budget using little known actors. In particular, I thought the special effects and street scenes well done, and I found the film noir setting of a bleak super depression in the near future of 2016/17 quite believable.
Of course, the film makers took liberties with Ayn Rand's opus, but I found the minor changes put the 1957 script into a contemporary and scary focus - I could just hear in my head Obama and his Leftist lackeys in the federal government saying and doing the same things done in the movie designed to destroy capitalism.
Please, please, PLEASE check the listing of movie theaters where Ayn Rand's master work is playing and attend the movie with a friend! This is only Part One and the producers say they lack the money to complete parts II and III.
TYPICAL BAD REVIEW FROM THE ANCIENT MEDIA:
Updated: Fri., Apr. 15, 2011, 1:20 PM 
Rand old time for Ayn adherents
In "Atlas Shrugged," it's 2016 America. The Dow has fallen below 4,000, gasoline prices are through the roof and infrastructure is falling apart. High-speed rail looks like the future. Government denounces selfish corporate interests and concerns itself mainly with dividing the dwindling wealth.
This isn't loony-bin stuff: Attention must be paid.
Though a bit stiff in the joints and acted by an undistinguished cast amid TV-movie trappings, this low-budget adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel nevertheless contains a fire and a fury that makes it more compelling than the average mass-produced studio item.
"Atlas Shrugged," a mega-fable that is to capitalists roughly what "To Kill a Mockingbird" is to liberals, centers on the struggles of a railroad exec, the beautiful and exacting Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), to overhaul a line with a controversial, untested new steel alloy produced by an equally arrogant industrialist, Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler).
Rearden is being forced to sell off his conglomerate bit by bit because of a new law that no one can own more than one business, while Taggart's brother (Matthew Marsden) believes the railroad's most important source of innovation ought to be collaborating with the government on tightly state-controlled enterprises.
The movie covers only the first third of the book and ends on a cliffhanger without fully resolving its central question: "Who is John Galt?" -- a shadowy figure who seems to be linked to the disappearance of many leading business figures.
The subjects the film deals with are fascinating, important -- and almost completely ignored at the movies. Even "The Social Network," the most acclaimed business movie of last year, placed the building of one of the world's most valuable companies in the background of a personality dispute and some whining about club membership. "Atlas Shrugged" wants to start an argument with you, to force you to (in Rand's often-repeated words) "check your premises."
It would be easier to do no such thing, to laugh off the stilted dialogue and stern, unironic hectoring, so that's what most viewers will do.
Atlas Shrugged Part I By Richard Baehr
Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead was published in 1943, and a film version was released in 1949. It took a bit longer to get Atlas Shrugged to the screen. Rand's lengthy book, a 12 year effort for the author, was published in 1957, and 54 years later, Part 1 of a planned three part film version opened (on April 15) at about 300 theatres around the country. Parts 2 and 3 are planned for release on tax day of 2012 and 2013.
Thursday night, I was invited by the Chicago Young Republicans to see a screening of the movie, hosted by the film's Co-Producer Harmon Kaslov. For one night the age limit on "young" Republicans was waived. Kaslov discussed the difficulty in getting the movie made, comments he also offered in a phone interview with the Illinois Policy Institute:
Predictably, the reviews of Atlas Shrugged in the mainstream press in Chicago Friday were generally awful, and some papers chose not to review the film. The reviewer in the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern, pledged that he had really tried to be fair and open-minded, before damning the film. The local Chicago papers had nice things to say, however, about several movies in the latest run of the Palestinian Film Festival.
I did not grow up as a big Ayn Rand fan, and read little of what she wrote. That made me part of a small minority in the group of 50 or so in attendance last night, many of whom seemed to recognize scenes or specific lines, and were smiling or chuckling throughout. Kaslov made clear that the film was made with a production team and actors who wanted to work, and quickly (only 26 days for filming), and with a modest production budget of about $7 million. Many in Hollywood said they had no interest in bringing Alas Shrugged to the screen because they thought the movie would have little commercial appeal. That view is consistent with the famous comment by film critic Pauline Kael that she was sure George McGovern would win the Presidential election in 1972, since everyone she knew (in her tiny corner of the upper west side of Manhattan) was voting for him.
I don't know if the movie version of Atlas Shrugged will be a commercial success, but 8 million Americans have bought the book, and sales have increased dramatically since Barack Obama became President. Much of this is undoubtedly due the fact that Obama started running the government much in the way Rand described government officials in Atlas Shrugged -- primarily interested in redistributing (government enforced charity), and sapping the success of society's achievers and inventers with taxes and regulations, since achieving equality of results (living arrangements, income and wealth) was the highest purpose of government.
Last year I reviewed for American Thinker a fine new intellectual biography of Rand written by Jennifer Burns Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Burns made clear that Rand lived in a world of ideas and loved intellectual combat. Avoiding intellectual combat by dismissiveness is how many on the left treat ideas and thinkers from the right side of the spectrum. As Burns describes, many on the right were also pretty dismissive of Rand in her era, due to her atheism, her opposition to the war in Viet Nam, and jealousy of her popularity with young conservatives.
The movie version of Atlas Shrugged presents an America in decline in the year 2016, with declining oil resources, wars in the Middle East, and rapidly rising inflation. Some of the cityscapes look like the bad parts of Detroit or the South Bronx (are there good parts?) . Crony capitalism is the order of the day, with the corporate losers working with their lobbyists and totally corrupted "policy institutes" and bought and paid for members of Congress, to derail the winners, and insure that the losers in the competitive market, nonetheless get their fair share of the business.
Derail is a good word to describe what passes for "managing competition" in the book and the movie, since the corporate heroine, Dagny Taggart of rail line Taggart Intercontinental, has to fight her laggard brother to get the company to invest in new track (to avoid derailments and accidents) and to make use of an untested but highly promising new metal alloy for the tracks, manufactured by Rearden Metal. It is more than a bit ironic that the result of the joint efforts of Taggart and Henry Rearden, is a high speed rail line, with long trains speeding along at up to 250 miles per hour. If such a thing could come from private industry without enormous federal subsidies, it might change the thinking of a lot of conservatives about the value of high speed rail. In any case, the scenes of the trains gliding through the Colorado Rockies are pretty spectacular.
Viewers who are unfamiliar with the story, or Rand, or the book, may find the movie confusing at times; why are corporate executives disappearing after meeting with the man in the trench coat? Who is John Galt? Do business people really speak that way and admit (proudly) that their goal is to make money? It is an entirely different experience, in general, for those who have read a book, and then see the movie version, than for those who have no idea what they will be seeing. This may be particularly true for Atlas Shrugged, since it is Rand's fullest exposition of her philosophy of objectivism, and lots of the dialogue are not there just to advance the plot.
The running time for Part I was 102 minutes, during which the federal deficit increased by just over $320 million, about the amount of spending reductions for 2011 actually realized from the recent budget deal. There are 8,760 hours in a year, and 2 of them are now a balanced federal budget. Rand would be appalled at how far we have moved towards the "collective good."
As government grows as a share of the economy, almost half now financed by debt, a film version of one of the great defenses of free markets, individualism and entrepreneurial creativity is a welcome addition to the general garbage now playing at the Cineplex. If Atlas Shrugged Part 1 is a box office success, the next two parts will be made. This is a pretty high stakes opportunity for the conservative film industry, and specifically for the producers of this movie. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was a huge box office success for Gibson, who financed the movie himself after it was rejected by the studios. That movie had an appeal to a large number of observant Christians, despite Gibson's Charlie Sheen-like rants through the years. I don't know how many objectivist or free market film fans are out there, but it would be nice if all three parts were made. Maybe Barack Obama will get his chance to purchase the 3 disc box set in his first year as a private citizen again in 2013.
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