Spoilers!
I read the massive book about fifteen years ago. At 1200+ pages that’s no small feat. To be completely honest, I started reading it then checked out the audio version from the library and listened to it over the course of a month or so. I own a copy of the book just in case.
It also bears noting that at that time I was a card-carrying, ballot-listed Libertarian, as well as chairman of the county’s Libertarian Party. So you could say I am, or at least was, sympathetic to much of the Ayn Rand classic. I got it. I understood what she was trying to say and for the most part agreed. (I’ve mellowed a little since, though ‘Libertarian’ still more accurately describes my overall political philosophy than other available labels.)
I liked the book a lot. Sure it labored a little, it was quite dated, and the ‘strong’ female lead still fell into the ‘princess in need of rescue by a strapping, powerful male’ role, but like I said, it was a bit dated. After all, the heroine runs a railroad and her ally runs a steel mill. In the 50’s these industries seemed to be all-powerful, quite unlike the archaic, rusting relics they are today.
Those things aside, the story was still a good one. Ever-increasing, well-intentioned, socially-sensitive manipulation of big industries by the U.S. Government led to the crumbling of industrial empires, with the side effect of the industrialists cashing out and heading for, for, well that isn’t revealed in the first part. Needless to say, with motivation for success stifled by government fiat, the industrialists and empire builders stopped even trying and disappeared to parts unknown.
The last few still trying, Dagney Taggert with her railroad, and steel-man Hank Reardon team up with oilman Ellis Wyatt to create an upgraded railroad line made of a new metal from Reardon, to be used by Wyatt to ship his precious product. Even more laws and taxes are passed to ‘protect’ smaller, less efficient business and unions, effectively rendering the new industrial alliance unprofitable, illegal, allegedly unsafe and downright evil.
At the end of part one, Wyatt sets his oil fields ablaze and leaves a foreboding message “I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It's yours."
It takes the book several hundred pages to cover part one, the movie version takes less than two hours.
The book is at many points plodding. Lots and lots of dialog about goals and dreams and politics and philosophy. This works well in the book because Rand knew she was not preaching to the choir, she had to take the reader from sub-zero and get them to take the side of what otherwise would be considered too-beautiful, uber-wealthy, self-centered, profit-motivated industrialists. No small chore even then, but over the course of hundreds of pages, you actually start growing sympathetic to at least a few of the ‘one percent.’
Movie version: Fail.
There’s simply not enough time, especially in this current political/economic climate. It’s kind of like the old TV series ‘Dallas' but written as if the producers wanted us to imagine J.R. in all his glory, as the good guy. It's a tough sell.
Any story where the writers fail to get the audience to identify or sympathize with the protagonist is doomed to failure.
Sometimes good actors can pull it off. Take for example the STARZ TV Series ‘Boss’. In that series the Mayor of Chicago, played perfectly by Kelsey Grammer, is a corrupt, evil and brutal tyrant of a man, and we love him for it. We don't like what he does, or why he does it, but we sure wish we had the nads to be as confident and driven. Going further back, we loved Archie Bunker even though he had virtually no good qualities. Good writing, great acting can sometimes make it work.
Ayn Rand handled it slowly, a little at a time, gradually building up the characters to a point where we eventually sided with them. The movie fails completely to do this due to the truncation of the story for the minimalized screenplay and the fact that the actors themselves are just not at all convincing.
The movie’s cast is a who’s who of veritable unknowns. The only actor I recognized on sight was Dagny’s assistant (played by Edi Gathegi) who had a seven or eight episode arc on the TV series ‘House’ as a young, black, Mormon doctor trying to become part of the loveable curmudgeon’s diagnostic team. Everyone else in the cast I looked up and found them only in TV shows or movies I’d never seen, or on a single episode of ‘Law and Order’ or some other minor role. This is not always a bad thing, sometimes a fresh face can define a role, in this case however, the cast was just weak. They looked and sounded bored, stiff, completely lacking in energy. Angel picked up on this just listening to snippets from the other room: ”It sounds like a school play.”
To update the book, (written in the 1950's) for the screen (now set in 2016), We are told that gasoline, because of global turmoil and federal economic and environmental legislation, is thirty seven dollars per gallon, which means that rail is back as a viable and important mode of transportation for goods and people. Okay, I’ll buy that, I filled up my tank this morning. Back in the 40’s and 50’s when Rand was writing the book, people still rode on trains, they expected modern chemistry to solve all problems, and America was in constant fear of godless, anti-economic communists, so this whole thing was a much easier sell then.
Then we see the new train on the new track. OMG! The special effects were horrible! Nothing about the train roaring down the track looked remotely real. The scaling, perspective and speed were all way off. And it was just a train, not a planet-sized starship or hideous space alien. This gave the whole film the look and feel of a bad TV movie,(remember the 1979 series 'Supertrain'?) as bad as another low-budget, direct-to-TV movie we watched a couple of weeks ago called ‘Swamp Volcano’. (Also as bad as it sounds) Clay-mation would have been an improvement over the special effects employed in this film.
This film made me think that maybe “Atlas Shrugged” just cannot be successfully adapted to the big screen. Even Ayn Rand herself was reluctant to allow it, worried that her big picture would be sacrificed adapting it to the big screen. The biggest, most vital concepts in the classic book, and in fact the heroes themselves, are cerebral and philosophical, not physical or emotional.
Or maybe the producers of the film simply weren’t up to the task. The director, hired for the job just nine days before filming began, was Paul Johansson, who has very few ‘director’ credits and his acting credits are primarily in only moderately successful roles and films. Why he was chosen for such a daunting task is unknown to me.
The screenplay is weak. Once again though, a nearly impossible task of converting dated and complex cerebral, political and economic themes to a visual medium.
Roger Ebert said of this film: "So OK. 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?"
And that’s where I fall. I awaited eagerly and was, without exception, on every level, let down.
As for those who have not read the book, or have no stomach for even a whiff of objectivism or libertarianism, this film will only prove even more insufferable. In fact, because of the poor quality of the casting, the awkward screenplay and the mangled manhandling of the core message, I can’t imagine a single demographic that would enjoy this pig.
Summary: Don’t bother. If anything, pray for the immediate demise of the proposed parts two and three.
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