"Atlas Shrugged" - Review

I would say my usual line about guaranteeing no spoilers, but seriously, I can’t in all honesty recommend this film anyway, so I am going to toss in a couple.

You've been warned.

Normally when an independent film is in limited release, I can either drive up to Los Angeles to see it or hope it’s somehow found its way on the only two screens in all of Orange County that plays “art” films.  The trouble is, there are more art films than screens in OC and that means quite a few great independents get squeezed out and I have to make the drive into LA.

Imagine my shock, shock, when in ultra-conservative OC it was playing at no less than 5 different theaters!  Considering it’s only playing on 300 screens nation-wide, I think that speaks volumes as to who Atlas Shrugged considers its key demo.

Walking into the theater, I felt like Peter Lake going under cover to do a bit of investigative journalism.  The theater was better attended than one would expect for a Monday, 11:45 showing.  Mostly old white men, but a smattering of women and a couple of families typical of OC, that is to say extremely white bread conservative.  I may have been the only “dude” of the 30 or so people in the 500 or so seat theater.

I will admit right here that I fully expected a train wreck going in and not just because there’s a train wreck in the first five minutes of the story, but because of the history of the project.

Written in 1957 by Ayn Rand, the rights and options to produce the movie have been in development hell since 1972.  The rights eventually ended up in the hands of John Aglialoro a businessman and poker player.  In a last-minute-before-the-option-runs-out deal, he hastily threw together horror screenwriter, Brian Patrick O'Toole and director, Paul Johansson, who plays the always-in-shadows-face-never-seen, John Galt.

Ok, I’ll admit I read the book, all thousand plus pages of it, about 30 years ago most probably for the dirty bits.  I do not remember it anywhere nearly as much for its ultra-capitalistic views that most people associate it with today.  I saw it as a Harold Robbins rich fantasy type book wherein the main characters essentially got to do anything they wanted with little regard for anyone else following the alternate Golden Rule of “he who has the gold, gets to make the rules.”  There was power and money and greed and sex, oh there was lots of sex, and none of the people at the top ever really had to pay for their immorality because, well, they were rich.

Pretty much my fantasy at the time.  Of course, I was young, stupid and naive at the time.

Today, the film is held up as a sort of “oh what a burden it is to be rich” sort of Tea Party wet dream, except without hardly ever mentioning the greed and the wet part of the dream.  Oh how times have changed.

Ok, so enough about history.  How was the film?

Awful.  We're talking a special kind of awful you may have experienced only if you've seen Battlefield Earth. 

I’ll grant that adapting a novel as big as Atlas Shrugged would be a challenge for anyone and the idea of splitting it up into a trilogy isn’t without merit.  That said, it still has to be a movie and not a book.  So what do you keep and what do you condense?

Well, in keeping with “modern” interpretation of the book it becomes a capitalist manifesto.  The captains of industry carry the world on their shoulders and fight against virtually everyone except their closest allies, those willing to lend them money.

Ok, I get it.  Fine.  John Aglialoro sees the story one dimensionally and damn it, he thinks he can sell that to a Tea Party audience.  He’s the Producer, the big cheese, the guy with the money and if he wants it a certain way to spout his philosophy that’s the way it’s going to be.

Unfortunately, that also makes it boring as hell.

Exposition coming from news report after news report, one of the biggest cheats in the game.  “We have stock footage and we’re not afraid to use it!”

Stilted expository dialogue in diatribe after diatribe.

Ok, maybe Aaron Sorkin can get away with two people sitting across the table from one another talking for five minutes at a time, but Brian Patrick O'Toole cutting and pasting Ayn Rand’s book dialogue into a MOVIE simply doesn’t work.

What acton there is, well, somehow, the director managed to make a new super train made of new super metal, going 250 mph, what is supposed to be a breath taking achievement, into both a boring and hilarious moment.  I was unaware a train, a short five years into our future, would be able to take corners like that at 250 mph and defy the laws of physics.

Even the art direction was bad with far too many ham handed signs reminding you of exactly who’s office you’re supposed to be looking at.  I ask you, really, does the CEO of most companies actually have HUGE signs in their offices?

Why the hell is there a waste paper basket there?

Who the hell keeps letting all these people just walk into my office?

Where the hell is security?

Where’s my body guard?

Other strange touches in this dystopian world are things like old white man paper boys.  Really?  Five years from now we’re still going to have printed newspapers being sold by “paperboys” at train stations?  We’re all giving up our iPads and going back to print?

Another great touch was the selective blacking out of the name of a newspaper machine in one scene to read: “--- Angel-- Times.”  Yeah, subtle huh?  Nothing like good old fashioned attempts at subliminal messages indicating “the end times” are here.

Is it bad all the through to the end?  Yes.  It even ends on a cliche so trite I could not help but laugh out loud.  “NNNOOOooo...!!!”

So, what was the audience expecting?  Well, I assume like a good little audience they took their marching orders from the film’s marketing department and simply showed up.  In this case the marketing department included the likes of Glenn Beck and other Tea Party promoters.  Clearly a good number of them had never read the book.  How do I know?  Well, a little more than half way through the movie the name of a new train company is revealed.  This is a major plot point; one that can’t be forgotten even if you did, like me, read the book 30 years ago.  At that point the audience audibly gasped.

Yes, this was in large part this audience’s first exposure to the material and they didn’t even know they were being simultaneously cheated and brain washed by its producer.

Sad really.