Atlas Shrugged: Part I December 30, 2012
Posted by federalist in Special Interests.trackback
Finally got around to watching Atlas Shrugged: Part I. As a movie adaptation of a book it was very well done: It managed not only to distill the first 300 tedious pages of Ayn Rand’s book into an engaging 1.5 hours, but also to deftly shunt a 50-year-old plot centering on the railroad industry to a plausible near future.
Like the book the movie hits you over the head with its anti-socialist pro-capitalist message. But the story is more salient now than it would have been just a decade ago. What was once considered an allegorical warning about Communism now plays like a historical fiction of modern U.S. politics. In fact it wasn’t until the very end of the movie that one of the socialist bureaucrats finally did something so unbelievable that I actually said, “Well that’s just fundamentally unconstitutional.” (He declared a special federal tax on the “rich” state of Colorado.) Of course most of the movie is about unconstitutional machinations of the federal government and special interests. The sad thing is that today we don’t have to think hard to find comparable real-world examples.
Two big fat thumbs up for Hollywood producing pro-capitalist work! It may be the only thing that wakes people up. (Does the under-30 crowd even read anymore?) Thanks for the review — I’ll watch it.
Atlas Shrugged Part 2 was also produced, was hated by critics (no surprise) and the DVD will be coming out in February.
I didn’t want to see the movie at first because I was afraid that it might have been butchered. I was happily surprised. Although not a slick as many productions, I thought it was really quite enjoyable. And the woman who played Dagney did an outstanding job.