On DVD Now: "Atlas Shrugged" Part 1

http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Part-Edi-Gathegi/dp/B005N4DP1E

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.

Movie Time: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

No spoilers!
This was my birthday present this year, I got to choose a movie.I met up with Angel and Adam in Fenton after I got off  work.  There wasn’t a big crowd at the cine-plex, Thursday I guess, being a light night.
I’d read the book earlier this year, or maybe it was last year, the entire trilogy actually. It was  long ago enough that I couldn’t recall exactly at what point in the epic trilogy storyline each of the three books started or ended. I easily recalled events, characters and plots, but not the exact chronology. Adam and Angel had not read any of the books. I was really curious about what they might think of it.
Another thing that I should point out, I only see movies in a theater rarely, one per year or less. It takes a really, really potentially good movie to get me to sit in a theater for several hours. Most movies I’m willing to wait for the pay-per-view or DVD. That way I can pause, replay, set the volume, etc. I really don’t like theaters.
That being said. . .
The opening credits/theme was James Bond-ish, bold music, a slime covered woman dancing seductively, not really relevant to the story at all, stylish, but too long. By this time we’d already suffered through several ads, a half dozen previews, and various warnings about cell phone usage. I wanted to get on with it. (Where’s fast-forward when you really need it?)
The movie’s actual opening scenes set the time and place well, Sweden, winter, cold, dark. The two protagonists, Lisbeth and Mikael don’t interact with each other for nearly the first hour of the movie. We follow them individually though. This is in line with the book. We quickly gather that Lisbeth is a troubled, damaged, but a brilliant freak abused by just about every man that has ever been part of her life. She has a certain moral code, but it’s one of her own making, and one that is certainly honed from a very rough life.
Mikael steps aside from his co-publisher role at Millennium Magazine after a scandal involving stories he wrote about a wealthy industrialist. We’re told he was set up, deliberately given bad information, but public trust in journalism is fickle. Another damaged, vulnerable hero. This part is covered very, very quickly and not in depth. The book had the luxury of explaining it in more understandable detail.
He is hired by an old, retired industrialist, a foe of the one that messed up Mikael’s career. The plot is laid out. A teenage member of the wealthy Vanger family went missing several decades prior, the old man suspects someone in the family killed her and disposed of her body while they were living on or visiting the isolated island compound that day. The Vangers are a completely dysfunctional lot, former Nazi’s and sons/daughters of Nazis and all hermits, nags, wife-beaters and asses. Completely unlikable people.
This is essentially a locked room mystery as the girl disappeared while the island was even more isolated than usual due to a truck accident that blocked the only bridge to the mainland for much of the day of her disappearance.
Meanwhile Lisbeth’s social worker/guardian suffers a stroke, and her case is handed over to a cruel, abusive bureaucrat. In short time he forces Lisbeth to perform increasingly cruel and violent sex acts in exchange for her allowance.
Here’s the next thing you need to know. Though this storyline is in synch with the book, the book’s description of these acts is tempered by brevity. The book leaves the reader to imagine most of it. The movie SHOWS us the acts in graphic detail. If you are at all squeamish about nudity and sexual violence on the screen, you will definitely squirm during these scenes. And there’s more than one of them.
Personally I think this could have been handled much, much better. This was too overt, too violent. The point could have been made with a lot less flesh and blood. I’m pretty liberal minded about this sort of thing, but even for me much of it was simply awkward, gratuitous, and worse, just plain unnecessary.
What took several chapters in the book, Vanger telling the story of his damaged family, one by one, took up only a few minutes in the movie. I don’t know how they could have done it much differently though, the cast of characters in the book is nearly as cumbersome as that in ‘War and Peace’. Add to that the names being Scandinavian, Germanic, etc. the poor, typical American brain doesn’t quite grasp them all as well as if they were Smiths, Jones, etc. I found that in the book there were several names with peculiar dots and lines over some of the letters that I could not even mentally pronounce. I asked Angel about this segment and she said she eventually tuned it all out, finding it impossible to keep up with all the names and who was the son/daughter of whom.
In all though, the movie doesn’t stray much from the book. The visuals are all stunning, the musical score very good, if not quirky. Some of the background narrative, as I pointed out earlier, is sped up to a dizzying, confusing pace. Even though the movie is nearly three hours along, a lot is left out, or incomplete in context, by necessity. (in the book we know more about the golf club that Lisbeth uses as a weapon.) The book was very detailed and precise. In the book there were several plot line distractions to keep the reader from guessing the outcome. Some of these, like the whole Nazi story line, were trimmed in the screenplay to the point where it probably could have been left out altogether in the movie. Novels, especially good ones, do not adapt very well to the big screen. Short stories and novellas work much better. Fewer characters, fewer subplots, etc. In this case this movie could have completely done without several family members. The last twenty minutes or so, dealing solely with the destruction of the industrialist that disgraced Mikael, could have been taken out and left for a sequel. As this movie goes we find out who the bad guy is and what happens to him, which is what we are actually led to care about, well before the movie ends. As I recall in the book, these two plots were more parallel, with both ending at about the same point at the end of the book, I could be wrong. But the movie deals primarily, with only a few exceptions, with the missing girl, then comes back to the industrialist only after that plot line is complete.

Summary:
I absolutely loved this movie. The things I point out, like the gratuitous sex, only actually take up a small fraction of it and can be put into that perspective. The rushing through of certain areas is completely tolerable, if you’ve read the book.
So that’s what I recommend. Read the book first, then you can enjoy the ride without fretting the details as to which mumbled line of thick-accented dialog is crucial and which isn’t. Reading the book will NOT spoil this movie. The movie actually takes you there, puts you in the cold dark Nordic air, the damp back alleys, the torture pit. It gives you credible, believable face and voice to the characters, as the casting in this thing was absolutely dead-on.
Angel and Adam said they enjoyed it, but I got the impression they didn't quite catch some of the nuances, the bits that made the book a superstar. I couldn't get them to say much bad about it at all, except for the slight discomfort as mom, dad and son sat together during some really, really graphic sex scenes. Angel was pleased to find out that there are plans to bring the rest of the trilogy to the big screen.  She's got a dark side that she pretty much keeps to herself, but she does enjoy a good dark story about really evil people. She scares me sometimes.
Though with certain caveats, I recommend it. It's the best movie I've seen in a theater this year. Okay, it was also the only movie I sat through in a theater this year, but still I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, it would be just as good on a living room flatscreen , three hours is a really long time without an 'intermission'.