Roger Ebert's review of 'Atlas Shrugged Pt. 1'

[marmar]

from the Chicago Sun-Times:



I feel like my arm is all warmed up and I don’t have a game to pitch. I was primed to review "Atlas Shrugged." I figured it might provide a parable of Ayn Rand’s philosophy that I could discuss. For me, that philosophy reduces itself to: "I’m on board; pull up the lifeline." There are however people who take Ayn Rand even more seriously than comic-book fans take "Watchmen." I expect to receive learned and sarcastic lectures on the pathetic failings of my review.

And now I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone’s vault. I suspect only someone very familiar with Rand’s 1957 novel could understand the film at all, and I doubt they will be happy with it. For the rest of us, it involves a series of business meetings in luxurious retro leather-and-brass board rooms and offices, and restaurants and bedrooms that look borrowed from a hotel no doubt known as the Robber Baron Arms.

During these meetings, everybody drinks. More wine is poured and sipped in this film than at a convention of oenophiliacs. There are conversations in English after which I sometimes found myself asking, "What did they just say?" The dialogue seems to have been ripped throbbing with passion from the pages of Investors’ Business Daily. Much of the excitement centers on the tensile strength of steel.

The story involves Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), a young woman who controls a railroad company named Taggart Transcontinental (its motto: "Ocean to Ocean"). She is a fearless and visionary entrepreneur, who is determined to use a revolutionary new steel to repair her train tracks. Vast forces seem to conspire against her. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110414/REVIEWS/110419990

[Gman]

1. LOL!

"The dialogue seems to have been ripped throbbing with passion from the pages of Investors’ Business Daily."

[ixion]

2. Ouch... really laid into it

:rofl: It deserves every bad review it's gonna get. It wasn't a good idea to turn that into a movie, imo.

[Jazz Ambassador]

3. I do love Roger Ebert

And loved this:

Oh, and there is Wisconsin. Dagny and Hank ride blissfully in Taggart’s new high-speed train, and then Hank suggests they take a trip to Wisconsin, where the state’s policies caused the suppression of an engine that runs on the ozone in the air, or something (the film’s detailed explanation won’t clear this up). They decide to drive there. That’s when you’ll enjoy the beautiful landscape photography of the deserts of Wisconsin. My advice to the filmmakers: If you want to use a desert, why not just refer to Wisconsin as "New Mexico"?

[scott_d]

4. Enjoyed The Book -- Will Avoid The Movie

Unlike a lot of people a lot of people on this forum, I enjoyed Ayn Rand's novels. They're big, fun, cheesy comic books for intellectuals. Her ideology is an extreme reaction to what she experienced during her formative years in the Soviet Union. Like any extreme ideology, it won't work in reality. I think the most likely result of putting her ideas into practice would be an atheist version of Somalia. Still, her novels are a fun read with delightfully over the top characters that evoke Hollywood's "golden age".

I am going to avoid the movie as I expect it to be nothing more than a Republican Party rally. Why would a bunch of Republicans be itching to see a movie based on the works of a novelist who believed in free love, despised Ronald Reagan, was an outspoken atheist and who thought that denying women abortion on demand at any point in the pregnancy to be an immoral act? Sex scenes shown only from the neck up and in which the man keeps his shirt on? The sex glorifying Rand would not have approved.

In the later part of "Atlas Shrugged" the character John Galt makes a lengthy speech. Many readers seem to skip the speech chapter but it is the core of the novel. Rand spent over a year working on this one chapter. It is a summation of her ideology. In it she extols the virtues of rationality, turns the story of Adam and Eve on its head, singing the praises of Satan, and mocks people of faith as idiots. Without the speech the novel is not much more than a standard business drama. It must be read. Otherwise, one is reading it as so many read the Bible, simply pulling out quotes here and there to justify one's position.

That so many Republicans are embracing Rand is a sign of the intellectual bankruptcy of their movement. They are incapable of developing their own serious ideas and so must turn to a deceased writer who made it clear that she was not one of them. Too bad Rand is not alive today. She was not one to mince words, hide her opinions or suffer fools gladly. She would have eaten Glen Beck for breakfast, Paul Ryan for lunch and Rush Limbaugh for dinner.

What could have been a fun satirical entertainment, something along the lines of the treatment given to "Starship Troopers" a few years back, is going to be a ponderous collegiate business major fantasy that owes more to the Fox business channel than to Ayn Rand.

[PatrynXX]

7. Fox Pac had a Q&A session on it earlier today

darn near fell off me chair laughing. what a waste of airtime. zzzzzzz make Gigli entertaining.

[avaistheone1]

5. k&r

[GomezLives]

6. Made $860 K in 300 theaters the first day.