Is Ayn Rand spinning in her grave? ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a bad film

By David McElroy · May 11, 2011

If you just want to see a piece of libertarian-oriented political propaganda, you might like the new “Atlas Shrugged” movie. But if you want a film that does artistic justice to Rand’s book, this isn’t it. It’s a bad film.

I’m glad I saw it, because it reinforces my conviction that some books just don’t make good movies. But in the hands of these particular filmmakers, this book never had a chance to become a good movie. It’s a paint-by-numbers production that you might expect from an indie movie at a small film festival or maybe from a soap opera. It’s not good art.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but I want to start with someone who’s been dead for something like 35 years — Rand herself. Because “Atlas Shrugged” has been so influential for so many of us, it’s easy to overlook the simple fact that it’s a very flawed book. Those of us who love it do so because of the story it tells, but mostly the economic and social message it conveys. But Rand is a terrible writer when it comes to character development. People don’t really seem to matter to her except for whatever idea they’re supposed to represent. Good people are pretty close to perfectly good. They’re heroes. The bad people aren’t just mistaken. They’re evil. There isn’t gray area in these people. And with very few exceptions, people don’t change in her books. They don’t develop or grow. They’re more like cardboard cutouts that she moves around to make her points. As long as you understand that, you can accept the book on its own terms and enjoy it — IF you’re interested in her ideas.

Movies are driven by people. Movies are about emotions and personal change. So even if there are elements of the “Atlas Shrugged” story that are good for a movie, the people come across as flat and lifeless. They have no depth. They come across as though they’re partial sketches, not complete characters. And the fact that they don’t have much in the way of internal emotional struggles or deal with gray areas in life ends up making them boring. Francisco is the only character I can think of in the movie who’s even vaguely interesting, but that’s because it’s clear that he HAS changed in some way — and it’s a mystery as to why. Everybody else is a cardboard cutout.

Getting to the actual production, it looks and feels cheap. The movie was shot very cheaply and it feels cheap. I haven’t made anything at the scale of a feature, so I’m not really qualified to say exactly what the difference is, but it’s noticeable. (Just because of my personal background in graphic design, I’m especially appalled at the really bad graphic design on the signs. The ones for Rearden Steel and the John Galt Line are hideous, IMO.) The camera work isn’t the worst I’ve ever seen, but it’s not something you’d expect from a theatrical feature film. It’s more like what you’d expect from a quick-and-dirty TV movie or a soap opera. I’ve honestly seen very low-budget movies at small film festivals with better camera work — and if you knew just how bad most of those movies are, you’d know just how low the standard that I’m using is. There are some shots that show that some camera operator or the director of photography was at least competent, but that’s about it.

The acting is terribly uneven. Some of it is awful. Some of it is mildly competent. None of it seemed to fit together. It’s almost as though the director just told his actors to start playing the scenes without making sure everybody was on the same page. Some of them seemed to be playing their characters more like they were in a live action cartoon. As a result, the evil businessmen and government people seem more like bad guys out of Batman from the ’60s (Pow! Bam!) than characters from a serious drama. The most credible acting job was probably from the actress playing Dagny. I suspect she’s a talented actress, but she clearly wasn’t given enough direction about her role. The actor playing Rearden was competent, but fairly boring. The guy playing James Taggart was almost non-existent. I know that’s a weak role, but this actor seems to just be a stand-in mouthing the lines. Overall, the acting is just plain poor.

Anyone who’s read the book knows that the dialogue feels like something from the past. It works fine when you think of the story as being set something like 60 years ago, but it doesn’t work when placed into 2016, as this movie set the story. And that brings me to another problem. The writers weren’t allowed to rewrite the dialogue to fit the era. Instead, the dialogue in many cases feels as though it was taken straight from the pages of the book and pasted into the script. Although there are plenty of times when writers go too far in changing books in their transition to movies, there are times in this movie when it seems as though the actors are simply reading Rand’s dialogue rather than acting. Since whoever controls the book’s copyright (Ayn Rand Institute?) had script approval, I wonder how much of that might have been their insistence on slavish adherence to the book, but that’s purely a guess.

So where does the blame for this thing lie? As I said, I think Rand bears some responsibility, but she wasn’t here to help adapt it, so the major blame has to fall on the producer who rushed a cheap movie into production before his film rights to the book ran out. He hired a director who wasn’t up to the task and writers who either weren’t capable or weren’t allowed to properly adapt the book. And he shot the movie with a budget that was far too low to get the quality of people who might have had a chance to make the characters live on screen.

It’s always a scary thing to see a movie based on a book that you love. It’s very, very difficult for filmmakers to get that transition right. But this isn’t a case of me complaining because filmmakers deviated from a book. It’s a matter of filmmakers doing a poor job of adaptation AND just plain being incompetent in what they did do.

Film is an art medium. If you only care about film as propaganda, you might not mind this movie if you already happen to agree with it. But this isn’t good art. If libertarians hope to have a chance of affecting the culture, we have to do good art. And this is not good art.

I suspect this movie will do very poorly at the box office. There will be a wave of libertarians and other fans of the book who will see it early, but I can’t imagine that word of mouth will bring anybody in outside of those groups. The entire theatre where I was — which was the only one showing it in all of the Birmingham area — had only 11 people in it for the afternoon showing where I was. That doesn’t bode well for a long-awaited movie on opening day.

If you’ve seen it, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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I have changed radically about some things over the years, but probably none of those changes have been as great as the ways that I feel about people who are viewed as evil or criminal. When I was young, I was eager to see criminals or foreign political enemies killed. Today, I don’t view such people though rose-colored glasses and I don’t view them as blameless folks who are going to turn their lives around if we just think happy thoughts. But I can’t celebrate the death of anybody, even if he might deserve it in some ways of thinking about it. Even if it’s sometimes necessary to kill someone — and those cases are often debatable — I regret the death of someone who will now never have a chance to discover love and change his life. There are some evil people in this world, but I can’t celebrate their deaths.

There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

I don’t agree with everything the late Neil Postman wrote, but I would argue that no other recent scholar gives coherent structure to the last few hundred years in the way his books do. I’m currently re-reading his book, “Technopoly,” and I’m comforted to have a scholar give structure and definitions to things which I’ve observed and barely understood. I was enough of a technophile when I first read this book that I bristled at much of what it said. I didn’t want him to be right and it was easier to dismiss him as a Luddite. But as I see technology continue to enable an information glut which is changing society for the worse, I find comfort in his explanations for how we got here. I don’t yet know the solutions, but I finally understand the problems more clearly. I suspect that much of what we need to make life more meaningful can be found in things we accidentally threw away in the past to make room for technologies. I strongly urge you to read the book and think about its implications.

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