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Human Events...
Atlas Endures
Why a clumsy little movie that critics hate is one of the year’s most
powerful films.
by John Hayward
04/25/2011
The new movie Atlas Shrugged: Part I did well enough in limited release
to warrant wider distribution this weekend, but critics absolutely hate
it. It’s currently standing at 6% on Rotten Tomatoes, a website
that collects ratings from many different sources and computes an
average score. This is the same aggregate score earned by The
Adventures of Pluto Nash, the 2002 Eddie Murphy box-office disaster
that is widely considered one of the worst films ever made. It
should be noted that Rotten Tomatoes’ readers appear to view Atlas
Shrugged in a much more positive light, giving it an 85% reader review
score.
Some of the criticism pouring from big-time critics is patently unfair,
even ridiculous. The production values take a lot of ribbing, but
they’re really not a problem, especially in light of the miniscule
budget. This is a fine-looking movie. It doesn’t have the
special effects that will shortly be deployed to show us the Norse god
of thunder battling frost giants, but it doesn’t need them.
Most professional reviews savage the acting in Atlas Shrugged, and here
the critics stand on firmer ground. When a seasoned pro like
Armin Shimmerman turns up in a short but crucial scene, he provides a
rather sharp contrast with the rest of the cast. There’s a
cringe-inducing scene near the end that tosses in Rand’s “sin of
altruism” concept as a bit of fan service for Objectivists, using one
of the most unintentionally hilarious voice-over conversations ever
recorded.
Still, I’ve seen A-list stars turn in worse performances that Grant
Bowler’s oddly compelling Hank Rearden, Graham Beckel’s blustery Ellis
Wyatt, or Matthew Marsden’s loathsome James Taggart. Taylor
Schilling, heading the cast as Dagny Taggart, grows much more
comfortable with the character as she goes along, but she’s painfully
stiff at first.
Let’s face it: nobody is going to spin Ayn Rand’s dialogue into Oscar
gold. This could fairly be blamed on the script, since the
screenwriters could have made it smoother. If Rand purists can
handle her story being updated to 2016, surely they could handle the
characters talking more like the real inhabitants of early 21st-century
Earth. I don’t think there would have been any strong objections
to making John Galt sound a bit more seductive, instead of coming off
like a robot relaying Ayn Rand’s text messages from beyond the grave.
The key to appreciating the violent media reaction to this film is to
understand that while the critics complain loudly about the stiff
dialogue and wooden acting of Rand’s heroes, it’s the portrayal of the
villains that really bothers them… and every damn word they say is
completely realistic and believable.
Some of the dialogue in this movie was ripped from today’s headlines…
and by “today” I mean last Friday, months after filming was
completed. If you know the story of Obama’s National Labor
Relations Board, and how it’s using government power to force Boeing
back into the waiting arms of Washington State unions instead of
opening a plant in South Carolina, there are passages in Atlas Shrugged
that will make your hair stand on end.
The Armin Shimmerman scene illustrates the determination of politicians
to conceal objective reality beneath layers of ideology. Replace
Hank Rearden’s simple, devastating question – “Is Rearden metal good?”
– with “Do Obama’s solar shingles work?” or “Does America have abundant
domestic oil resources?” and try them on Administration flunkies who
cannot answer such questions with a simple “yes” or “no”… because they
know the answer, but it is politically impossible for them to say it.
This is a movie set five years in the future, based on a book written
sixty years ago, but it captures the rhetoric and reality of modern
American crony capitalism perfectly. It’s almost ironic that
liberal reviewers hate the film so passionately, since it’s a story
about people trying to build the high-speed rail that President Obama
wants to blow fifty billion non-existent deficit dollars on.
You’d think they would be happy… but instead they’re furious, and it’s
because the things done to thwart the improbable heroes of Atlas
Shrugged are dangerously, subversively realistic.
If you want to see a ridiculous polemic stuffed into a preposterous
political fairy tale, go rent out Rob Reiner’s laugh riot The American
President from 1995. Then see Atlas Shrugged: Part I and tell me
which film is more believable. Tell me you can’t imagine laws to
prevent profitable companies from firing anyone… or re-distribute
wealth away from booming states, in the national interest… or forbid
evil tycoons from owning more than one company... rolling out of a
White House very much like this one. Tell me the ham-fisted
ministries and agencies humming away in the background of Atlas
Shrugged are unthinkable to a government riddled with unelected,
unaccountable “czars,” reporting to a President who defies lawful
Congressional directives to defund them.
Let Obama pour all those billions into the guaranteed failure of
“high-speed rail,” and you might just find yourself watching scenes
from this film come to life in a decade or so, when we’re told what the
benevolent State must do to “protect the people’s investment” in all
those new passenger rail lines that just can’t seem to turn a
profit. The “solution” proposed in Rand’s tale is an allegorical
fantasy, but the problem it identifies is all too real.
That’s why a surprising number of people have been buying tickets to a
long, talky movie whose special-effects climax depicts people riding on
a train, with a cliffhanger ending for sequels that might never be
produced. Atlas may never shrug, but Atlas Shrugged endures,
because Dagny tells us the correct answer to “Who is John Galt?” right
before she hops aboard a machine industry has created in defiance of
politics.
Read it at Human Events
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