Ebert reviews Atlas Shrugged
Hank. Hank, Hank, Hank. Don't you know you're all I dream about though I don't actually do anything about it until page five-hundred?
I have no intention of seeing “Atlas Shrugged,” because, who gives a shit? But Roger Ebert’s review is highly amusing:
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.
It’s a few years in the future. America has become a state in which mediocrity is the goal, and high-achieving individuals the enemy. Laws have been passed prohibiting companies from owning other companies. Dagny’s new steel, which is produced by her sometime lover, Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler), has been legislated against because it’s better than other steels. The Union of Railroad Engineers has decided it will not operate Dagny’s trains. Just to show you how bad things have become, a government minister announces “a tax will be applied to the state of Colorado, in order to equalize our national economy.” So you see how governments and unions are the enemy of visionary entrepreneurs.
If you’ve never read Atlas Shrugged, spare yourself. Read this instead. Priceless.
7 Responses to “Ebert reviews Atlas Shrugged”
-
votermom says:
Laws have been passed prohibiting companies from owning other companies.
Be still my heart!April 15th, 2011 at 6:10 pm EST -
gxm17 says:
Everything I know about Ayn Rand I learned in The Public Works Trilogy.
-
propertius says:
If you’ve never read Atlas Shrugged, spare yourself. Read this instead. Priceless.
Alas, it’s several decades too late for me. I hope the young will save themselves while they can. ;-)
-
myiq2xu says:
If Rand was right then Somalia would be a paradise on Earth.
-
Swannie says:
Too late for me too , being a compulsive reader since infancy . I have read some great books . Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon is one of them . I still think wtf over Atlas Shrugged … lets face it, Ayn Rand is no Anais Nin
-
propertius says:
Now this is frightening:
-
Adrienne in CA says:
propertius, the thought of Ayn Rand fans dating each other is hilarious. That site is a gift to everyone else.
*****A
