Atlas Shrugged
This entry was posted on 4/18/2011 9:03 AM and is filed under Movies.
Jay and I went and saw Atlas Shrugged the other night.
I loved it, he hated it.
The movie has no big names in it and having read the book, I was curious as to how they would update it. The script managed to explain the importance of trains in the first minute, using the instability of the middle east, the strangle hold of regulations on the domestic energy producing industry and the astronomical price of gas to make rail service once again the primary method of delivery in the country. Problem solved. It would have been tricky to pull off five years ago but today it seemed not only plausible but inevitable.
Jay thought the acting was awful but I didn't.
Grant Bowler of True Blood (I found him extremely attractive) played Hank Reardon.
Taylor Schilling, as Dagny Taggart was very pretty but so flat throughout that her breakdown in the last scene came across as almost a parody.
Alexis Carrington. Now theres a business woman you can root for!
The dialogue is heavy handed but only because it's true to the book.
Jay said he hated it but he hasn't stopped talking about it for two days. He admitted to me last night that he thinks he wouldn't have hated it if he'd read the book. He said if I hadn't given him a synopsis of the story beforehand, he wouldn't have had any idea at all what was going on. Part of the problem there is that the book has been broken down to three parts and this movie only deals with Part I.
The ideal format for such a large book is to do it as a mini series and take six to ten hours to tell the story but to do that, you need to make a deal with a studio and this story is so pro-capitalism and anti big government that the idea of HBO doing it justice is laughable. Which is a shame. As it is, I hope they finish the story because the first part makes little sense without the rest.
Viewers unfamiliar with the book will either be intrigued or confused.
"And there wasn't enough explosions in it for me." he added.
We do like it when stuff blows up in movies.
Anyway. I loved it.
