Pun Salad

It's been awhile since this movie came out on DVD, and it got dismal ratings from "everyone" (viewers, critics). Worse, my Netflix queue-management algorithm keeps high-rated movies at the top of the queue; even Netflix thought I'd hate it, awarding it 1.9 stars.

So I manually placed it at the top of my queue, and it eventually came, and I eventually got it. And you know what? It's not great by any stretch of the imagination, but it ain't as bad as everyone says.

I read Atlas Shrugged back in high school, somewhere in the late 60s. So I only remembered the broad outlines of the plot, but the movie stirred up some dormant memories. It's the story of a world mired in depression; for not particularly convincing reasons, the only reliable mode of freight transportation is via rail. Taggart Transcontinental, a railroad company, is dealing with unreliable infrastructure. Dagny Taggart takes over from her ne'er-do-well brother James, and bets the company's future on rebuilding with a revolutionary new alloy invented by Hank Rearden, owner of Rearden Steel.

Difficulties: while Dagny, Hank, and a handful of other businessmen are competent, strong, decision-makers, they are beset by a government that's turning to increasingly coercive collectivist tactics to maintain its grip on a dying economy. And (worse) Atlas is (you might have guessed) Shrugging: many like-minded individuals are simply dropping out of productive activity.

The movie has some obvious problems: it's cheap, with the look of a TV miniseries. Most of the movie is simply the characters talking to each other in plot-advancing speeches. The actors are adequate, not great.

But let's give the moviemakers some credit: they could have wimped out and delivered Ayn Rand-lite. But they didn't; this is, as near as I can tell, a faithful adaptation of the novel, in tone and content. It's not reluctant to challenge the viewer: here are the good guys, here are the bad guys. Admittedly, both sides are props meant to illustrate Rand's philosophy. Still, the blunt challenge to the viewer is: whose side are you on?

This is part one of a trilogy. Part 2 came out last year, and it appears that Part 3 will show up on July 4, 2014. Cool. I'll be there, at least for the disc.