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Technofiction review of

Atlas Shrugged: Part One (2011)

by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright April 2011

Summary

Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" has been a popular book since 1957. And it has always been recognized that it would be a beast to film adapt because it's a 1200 page novel with a deeply philosophical bent. Many have talked about and proposed this project over the years, and now we finally have a success. The movie has been made, but it fully demonstrates what a beast the process has been.

(Note: This 1200 pages is an even bigger work than it sounds like today. This was done before even electric typewriters were common, much less word processors. By comparison, George Orwell's 1984 novel is 376 pages.)

This movie is very different, and if you need a conventional Hollywood story structure to be comfortable with your moving watching, this will be an uncomfortable movie. I found myself expecting things to happen, such as violence, which never did.

 

Details

Doing a quick summary of the book Atlas Shrugged would do it a disservice, but not the movie. This is the story of Dagny Taggart, an ambitious young business woman, as she tries to save her family's railroad company from the sea of incompetents in both her own business, and the government, and in the competition to her business. Helping her is Henry Reardon, another competent business person who is running a steel company. He comes up with a hot new alloy -- Reardon Metal -- that is going to save Dagny's company by making the railroad rails work better, and after that it will revolutionize the world.

As they save the day, they brush up against a mystery: some of the other competent people around them are disappearing. This is not typical mystery-thriller-style disappearing -- it's not mafia or assassins or kidnappers -- they are simply quitting their jobs and then completely dropping out of the scenery. This disappearing is not at the center of this movie, Part One, but it is foreshadowing what will come up in Part Two.

This one of the hallmarks of this movie: It does violate many conventional Hollywood story structures. That said, let's get into the Technofiction review:

o The first notable thing about this movie is the story. It is framed as a thriller, but there's no violence. People walk through dark lonely streets... and they aren't jumped. The bad guys are getting frustrated... but they don't call in thugs. There is deep social unrest... but we don't see riots. A mysterious stranger knocks on a door late a night... and the door is answered without disaster befalling the answerer. We see a new railroad line with a new train speeding along it... and no one sabotages it.

This made it unsettling to watch, but this is what makes it a different story. I liked that.

o The second notable thing is that it's anachronistic -- the scenery and socializing don't match the era. This movie is described as taking place in 2016, but there are many servants and few cell phones. The director seemed to be producing a 1950's social feel, not a near future feel.

o Related to the above, I didn't get the feeling that Dagny and Henry were working. They talked a lot, we saw a lot of them in offices, but I didn't feel like I was watching competent people doing business. Neither one seemed hands-on enough, problem solving enough... it's hard to describe, but they didn't earn my business respect. One the other hand, the incompetents surrounding them seemed to do their incompetence well.

o This movie really needed a mood start. The start is a series of newscasts talking about the deep recession and crisis America is experiencing as the movie opens in 2016, but it is quick and sketchy. Yeah, it would cut out from Dagny-Reardon time, but there needed to be more, "Show me, don't tell me." concerning the deep economic hole America was diving into, and what was causing that frustration. The story would have been stronger if it was clearer the environment Dagny and Henry were reacting to.

o In the happy ending, the train running over the new Reardon Metal rails sets a North American speed record. Yay!

...Eh? Just replacing the rails lets a train run faster? What about signaling, curve designs, locomotive and car designs, and government regulations of speed limits? They have no influence?

o The role of John Galt in this movie is unsettling. He's a spooky mix of Gandhi and Bin Laden -- he's non-violent, but he's doing ten X the damage to the economy that Bin Laden did by sucking out competent people! Brrr! If you have an economic bone in your body this guy is a seriously chillin vampire!

o The Wisconsin factory scenes don't work well for me. They drive from Colorado to Wisconsin, a long two day drive, over roads that all look like Colorado roads, come to a fairly neatly cleaned out abandoned factory, that has had five owners, and they discover a secret room. Then they spend more days driving around the western US searching people down. They don't have phones, Google or staff that can be doing this detective work? More anachronism.

 

In sum, the movie's strong point is that it's telling a different story. It's also strong because it's using the thriller story-telling format, but never fulfilling the violence threats as it does so. This makes for a strange feeling movie, indeed.

And that is also it's weakness. If you need a familiar story telling format when you watch a movie, this one is going to be uncomfortable to sit through.

 

-- The End --

 

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