by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2012
Making a movie of Atlas Shrugged was always going to be a big challenge. Sadly, this second installment drops behind the first in meeting it. The movie's premise falls even further from the book's, and the portrayals of heroes and villains gets deeply confusing. The heroes come across as crony capitalists who are engaged in a turf war with the villains.
This wasn't Ayn Rand's goal, and the result is a low-budget cheesy movie.
The biggest problem this movie faces is that Atlas Shrugged was written as near-future science fiction sixty years ago. We've lived through the technology age she was writing about and we're decades beyond it. The technological heart of the book version is heavy industry: railroads, coal and steel. But we've moved on. These are background industries today, nothing we think much about when story telling. This presented a hard choice to the movie adapters: Should they film this as nostalgia and stay with these industries, or should they update the technology -- have the Taggerts running a mobile phone network and Reardon making smart phones?
Their choice was to "muddle through" and try to explain a backdrop scenario where railroads and steel come back to center stage because times were so hard. It didn't work. And their problems spread from there. Their portrayal of the recession going on around the principles didn't work, either. I couldn't feel much for the sufferers because they looked more like street people than displaced middle class people.
In the main part of the movie the writers' failure to understand business became painful. The heroes came out acting like crony capitalists -- granting special favors to their buddies -- just as much as the villains did. In the middle of the movie I was watching a turf war. The explanations Reardon gave as to why he wasn't being a crony capitalist left me cold. The writers had a hard topic to start with, Ayn doesn't write simple stuff, they were not inspired in their interpretation.
The government dictate in the middle was bizarre: don't change anything until this situation gets better. Eh? If you can't change anything how can you improve the situation? The save-the-world engine Hank and Dagny found at the end of Altas 1 was handled as a trope -- solo mad scientist investigates it in a secret lab. The jet plane chase and subsequent crash at the end were also a trope.
In sum, it's a cheesy film for Ayn Rand fans, and it deeply fails at portraying the theme of its source material. Sadly, no surprise there. This is why there's been no Atlas Shrugged movie before now.
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