For a detailed look at this movie, see my brother’s in-depth review above.
For an emotional review from a stunned and tantalized woman, read on.
America, 2016, is deep in the throes of a devastating Great Depression, far worse than the first one, in no way comparable to the little tiny down-dip in which we find ourselves today. Commercial air travel is no longer available. Gas costs $37.50 per gallon. The Dow Jones closes in the three thousands.
Enter a government that wants to smooth things over, distribute what little wealth is left, make things fair and even on the backs of the wealthiest citizens.
Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, run by brother Jim and sister Dagny Taggart, is in trouble. Trains are derailing by the dozens, leaving manufacturers without raw materials and retailers without finished goods. The economy, such as it is, is hanging on by a thread. By partnering with Reardon Metals, Dagny hopes to revitalize the nation’s hopes—new rails in their hundreds of miles will ensure on-time service, dependable deliveries. When businesses can trust the railroads again, hope will be revived. Jobs may follow.
Maybe. Only maybe, because some oily Washington-types are doing their best to thwart innovation, capitalism, and incentive with a “make-it-fair” One-Man-One-Business Act. Add to that this frightening complication: the best and brightest are disappearing. A bank CEO is suddenly missing. A few weeks later, a trusted engineer. A little while later, an oil magnate. What is going on? No one knows. A man-in-the-shadows approaches someone and the next day, he is reported missing. No one knows where he’s gone or why. And who is John Galt anyway?
Evil CEOs, dollar-grubbing politicos, possibly-traitorous spouses populate this beautifully-crafted, gorgeously-shot story. The whole movie feels like the 1940s, even though it is set in 2016. It might be the lighting that does this, the color, or perhaps the lovely, intelligent script.
I used the word tantalizing. You can’t wait to find out what is going to happen next, and when it does, you want to know what’s after that. Even the end of the movie makes you long for more when it announces “End of Part 1.” I knew that was coming, and I still groaned when it ended. I wanted more. I hate that I have to wait for it.
Please don’t ruin this movie for your children by taking them to it. Put it on their list of things to do at 25. It requires more backstory than you can spoonfeed them, even in your evangelistically-capitalistic home. Because, yes, obviously, this is an anti-socialist movie, and it shows an encroaching socialism/communism (let’s leave the niceties of differentiation out at this point) that is nothing but an impending and inevitable disaster on every level. But if you take the kids and then sit them down and say, “See, communism is bad!” you will ruin it. Give them Ivan Denisovich first. Teach them about 1937. Show them the real thing first, then, when they’re ready, show them this one and say, “Wouldn’t that be horrible? What do you think?”
I sat open-mouthed through the credits until the tension was broken by a funny, to wit: the woman down the aisle and I, at the same moment, said aloud: “Food stylist?”
One thing must be said: the destroyed American economy shown here—even though we recoil at its imagining and are horrified by the mere thought that through bad management and foolish choices, we could arrive at something like this—is nothing compared to what hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people literally suffered under the monstrous regimes of the real 20th century tyrants Stalin and Mao. Our worst imaginings don’t come close to what real people suffered in the very recent past. Still, it is a warning.
And a lesson—sometimes you can teach something so much better by story than by lecture . . .
A stunning movie. Truly remarkable. Not for children at all. They won’t understand the intricacies of the story, and there are a couple of restrained-but-obvious sex scenes.
I am definitely getting the book the minute I can. Happily, I wasn’t forced to read this in high school (I would not have understood it except on that dogmatic, I-know-everything level that 15-year-old kids achieve when they think they understand something like international macroeconomics, bless their hearts.)
The thing I fear about Atlas Shrugged among evangelicals is our blind endorsement of anything…anything…anything that is politically to the right. I certainly support Ayn Rand’s political opposition to socialism. But her capitalism is but the offspring of her more global worldview of objectivism. And objectivism is morally disastrous. I haven’t read Atlas Shrugged, but have read Fountainhead, her less political but still objectivist prior masterpiece. Without God, capitalism places self concern (read that, selfishness) at the pinnacle of human pursuit–and that is the exact, blatantly stated aim of Ayn Rand’s objectivism.
I’m not denouncing the film or even denouncing the cheering of it. I intend to see it, and I’ll cheer the anti-socialism message. I’m just saying that people unfamiliar with Ayn Rand should be aware of her intended promised land.
Thanks, Dan, I appreciate that. I haven’t read any of her works at all–I think they were considered worldly or even scandalous in my Christian-school upbringing. I want to read the rest of ATLAS SHRUGGED before Part 2 comes out. There are a lot of loose ends waiting to be tied up, and, having not read the book, I don’t know how they are tied.