Every once in a while, a movie adaptation of a somewhat well-known book comes out, and it's not an accident. The other day I saw an advertisement for Ayn Rand the Movie: Atlas Shrugged Part II. I learnt only after a little bit of research that it's the second part, and that the first part was not only released last year, but it is on Netflix. It couldn't possibly be better timed for this year's election season.
Before I talk too much about the movie, let's talk about how the movie came to be. The project, or at least the idea, began in the 1970s when Albert Ruddy asked Ayn Rand if he could produce a cinematic version of the book, focusing on the love story, since "that's all it ever was." After a few more owners, and much entertainment industry drama, the project finally gained traction, began filming, and was released on Tax Day in 2011.
I can't actually confirm this based on the wiki page, but my wild guess is that the movie was pretty heavily funded by some pretty extremely conservative folks. I'm not going to call them crazy directly, but I definitely don't think they should be running the country. The first movie (which you probably hadn't heard of) was mainly advertised in these Tea Party circles, and mainly talked about by people at least as conservative as John Stossel.
And now, let's talk about the actual movie!
The movie was either well-funded, I have low standards, or it's just simple enough that it's easy to make it look good. Some combination of these things means that the movie is fairly good from a technical perspective. It doesn't really over-do the special effects, which is good since it is set "in the near future," and the effects it does use are fairly tastefully done, in my totally non-expert opinion. As you progress through the movie, there are even several really interesting bits of scenery porn.
The story gets off to an interesting start, and immediately you can tell that there's going to be a few love triangles, a billionaire playboy living on the fortune his father and other ancestors had built, and a few ridiculously hard-working people, working against a system to make something happen. For most of the movie, I was able to suspend disbelief and place these events in some horrible alternate version of the universe where stuff was going way more wrong way earlier.
For as much as I actually enjoyed much of the acting and even some of the plot, it was almost too much at about an hour and fifteen minutes in when one of the characters more or less starts listing components of the Communist Manifesto, and then says "and that's why everything is horrible!" Characters in love stories just don't do that.
All of that having been said, I'm in now and I don't know if I'll be able to live with myself if I don't eventually see the second part of what might eventually be a trilogy. To that end, I might be going to the movies this weekend.