Atlas Shrugged

Now I can't say I've read any Ayn Rand, but I have browsed her Wikipedia page and played all the way through Bioshock, so I feel I definitely have a firm grasp of her particular philosophy: If everyone acts like selfish cockbags it'll all work out okay for everyone, except for those that it doesn't, and who gives a fuck about them anyway?

Maybe her novel is a touch more subtle than this adaptation, but rather than an outline of her way of thinking it seems to be an exercise in establishing horribly flimsy straw men. Would it not have been far more effective and cutting as an analogy if the agents of opposition had been well meaning but ultimately misguided public servants, rather than venomous cretins introducing ludicrously daft public policy purely to piss on people’s chips?

It changes the central message from what I assume is supposed to be something along the lines of "socialism impedes progress" into the slightly less worthy point of debate: "some people are dicks". It makes it entirely dismissible as a metaphor if the obstacles to our hero’s goal are purely founded upon malice.

Talking of obstacles: The plot, such as it is, revolves around the rebuilding of a railway line with a brand new metal that essentially amounts to magic. The obstacles they face in this endeavor are: people telling them they shouldn’t build it. That's it. No one actually does anything to actually impede their progress that they cannot be talked out of in the space of a conversation. They want to build a railway, some people don’t want them to build a railway, and then they build a railway. Wealthy people sit in offices and talk in dramatic terms about a financial investment they might make and others would rather they didn’t. Then they go for a train ride and everything goes swimmingly.

Now call me Mr. Picky, but surely the standard of measure for a railway track or bridge is not a single train successfully navigating it. Surely what you really want to know is that many trains, over an extended period of time can roll across them without any of them at any point going cross country.

If this is all intended as an allegory it’s desperately, desperately flawed, which only leaves the frankly worrying alternative that this is supposed to be taken seriously. Its story is nonsensical, the characters are mostly feeble caricatures with outlandish motives, and it’s preachy without any kind of clear point.

There is something of an interesting sub plot involving the mysterious Mr. Galt, but apparently the film is the first part of a trilogy which I can only assume will never see completion, and with that element never seeing development the whole tangled mess is left to stand on its own insubstantial merits. It’s a boring glossy lecture that only manages to paw vaguely in the general direction of its own point.

Despite Ayn Rand’s philosophy being reductive, amoral and demonstrably wrong I do feel it has some value as an extreme, in the same way I see Marxism as an informative concept rather than any kind of ideal, but this film is a simply a terrible vehicle for carrying its intended message. Perhaps because it’s just a terrible film.