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Last week I admitted I went to "Atlas Shrugged Part 1" to get information to write a review of it. Well...here it is.
I saw Atlas Shrugged so you don’t have to
Ayn Rand was a Russian-born Atheist. She’s considered one of the founders of Libertarianism, which she called “Objectivism.” According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Objectivism’s heart is “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
If anyone can figure out what the heck that means, please tell me.
Rand made her living writing exceptionally bad books. In 1957, she released her magnum opus, a tome entitled Atlas Shrugged. At 1368 pages it resembles a wheel chock more than it does a novel, and is best used as one. Atlas Shrugged is to the far right what Karl Marx’ Das Kapital supposedly is to the loony left, except that people willingly read Atlas Shrugged while any American who has endured Marx’s nearly-as-unreadable manifesto is either a political science major or a spy.
The central theme of Atlas Shrugged is: the only people who matter are the rich. If we don’t let them do whatever they want they will disappear and the world will collapse. That’s a cute theory but it’s bull; most of us can name at least one ex-boss whose greatest contribution to the company would have been vanishing in the middle of the night.
The reality of Atlas Shrugged Part 1 and Final—they’re more likely to make a Howard the Duck sequel than another installment of the planned Atlas Shrugged trilogy—is it’s not possible to express how bad this movie is. It fails on every level. It’s not even in focus! The lighting is so bad you can’t see half of anything, which may explain why the guy couldn’t focus the camera. The cast reminds me of Cheech’s band in Things Are Tough All Over: “the heaviest dudes in town who would work for nothing” and in clothes out of their own closets. They can’t act, and it’s not like they have to: all they’re doing is standing or sitting and reciting the worst script ever written. They spent $10 million making this…and it shows. Let’s put it this way: You’ve seen The Producers, right? Or at least heard of it? The movie (which became a Broadway play and then a movie again) about the failing Broadway producer who contrived an elaborate confidence scheme around the worst play ever written, which turned out to be a huge hit and landed everyone involved in jail? If Max Bialystock would have bought Atlas Shrugged instead of Springtime for Hitler, he wouldn’t have gone on to do Prisoners of Love.
Everyone in this movie drinks like a fish. They did not, however, save any for you—which you will regret about two minutes into this atrocity.
The world of Atlas Shrugged is one of obscenity: you are either so obscenely rich you spend two hours dressing and grooming before drinking in your own living room, or so obscenely poor waitresses ask first if you’ve got any money. For some strange reason, the poor don’t kidnap the rich.
In this world where five percent live in splendor and the rest in cardboard boxes, you will find two far-fetched yarns. One is the tale of John Galt. He invented a perpetual motion machine, got ripped off by his company, disappeared in the middle of the night and now spends his days convincing the people who screwed everything up in the first place to live in his commune. You’ll learn all about this in Parts 2 and 3 if they can find another rich right-winger who’s really desperate for tax loss. (This particular abomination was bankrolled by John Aglialolo, who makes his coin producing Cybex gym equipment.)
The other story concerns Taggart Transcontinental, the mightiest railroad in America. I have read a lot of reviews of this God-awful film that describe Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling, whose last movie was so bad it never made it to video, a fate that didn’t befall Snakes on a Plane) as a “railroad executive struggling to save her company against unforeseen forces.” Wrong. The reality is, the Taggarts haven’t put any money back into the company since Great Grandpa Taggart, who founded the place, died a century ago and now the company—especially the trackage—is falling apart. When their most important customer bails on them because Taggart trains derail daily, Dagny stages a coup then decides to close their most profitable yet most decrepit route for a year and replace the rails with ones made of a supermetal called “Rearden Metal.” It’s rustproof, strong, light, cheap and completely untested, but Dagny’s determination to use it is as strong as her will to not waste money on profit-sapping exercises like putting one guy and a sack of bolts in a pickup and sending him out to screw the tracks back together. Most of the rest of the movie is a montage of government and steel-industry people conspiring to rid the world of Rearden Metal, stock devaluations caused by Dagny’s insistence on Rearden Metal rails over maintenance, and other detachments from reality.
The movie is heavily anti-government and anti-union in ways that make no sense whatsoever, such as the scene where the union rep comes to Dagny’s office to tell her forcing railroad men to run trains over Rearden Metal track violates their human rights. Apparently forcing railroad men to run trains over century-old track that derails half the trains on it does not violate their human rights.
I gotta mention the obviously-CGI Rearden Metal bridge Dagny ordered to replace one Great Grandpa built all by himself that’s about ready to fall down. It’s beautiful—but it’s a mile long with no supports in the middle. The movie is full of people complaining that Rearden Metal’s no good; they’d have justification if this bridge had been built for real because it would have collapsed on its first use.
People are going to be of mixed minds on Atlas Shrugged Part 1 and Final: half of them are going to hate it, the rest will despise it with every fiber of their being. No one could like it. Don’t go.
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