Few novels have ever given me greater enjoyment than Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged. And, yes, that says as much about me as it says about the novel – but doesn’t it always? I first encountered Rand’s 1957 opus, along with
The Fountainhead, when I was in college, reading it for fun, intrigued mostly by its length and narrative subject matter, with only a hint of interest in its underlying philosophy. I’m smarter now, more aware, but I wasn’t stupid then.
Atlas Shrugged didn’t win me over by romanticizing my worldview. It hooked me through a story that’s packed with melodrama, mystery, discovery, betrayal and passion. It enchanted me with its epic imagery: decaying cities and a mountainous utopia; westward trains and a lone figure hiding in the shadows. It tantalized me with characters who desperately try to adhere to their own moral codes, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, regardless of the toll. Objectivism? It was a factor in as much as it affected how the characters behaved. And while Rand may have intended otherwise, I never felt the novel demanded my obedience – not even when John Galt delivers his ideological speech that lasts 55 pages, although admittedly I only skimmed that part. I loved reading
Atlas Shrugged because it’s a good yarn, full of action, dialogue and evocative settings. I loved it, in other words, because reading it felt a lot like watching a movie.
That’s why it’s too bad that the film version is paper thin. Adapted for the screen by John Aglialoro (also the film’s producer) and Brian Patrick O’Toole, and directed by TV actor Paul Johansson, who also appropriately plays Galt, mysteriously pulling the strings from the shadows,
Atlas Shrugged: Part I is inept in almost every way a movie can be. The acting is flat and tone deaf: although Taylor Schilling has a cold allure that makes her often robotic delivery somewhat appropriate for the often frosty and always calculating Dagny Taggert, Grant Bowler (as Hank Rearden) and Matthew Marsden (as James Taggert) give the oversized yet underwhelming performances that you’d expect to find in a low budget soap opera pilot. Speaking of low budget, many of the sets are unconvincingly fabricated: the walls of mighty Rearden Steel look as if they’d topple over if you leaned against them, and scenes inside the Taggerts’ polished-wood offices are dominated by a hollow ambient hum that made me think of a Brock Landers flick. Which brings us to the sound design: in one scene in which Dagny’s assistant stands mostly still in the background, we can hear his dress shirt gently rustling against his suit; nuff said. To go on would be to belabor the point. Johansson’s film is so inert and frequently cheap looking that it’s impossible to take seriously, which makes either embracing or rejecting it based on its underlying philosophies a foolish exercise. Not that it’s kept people from doing just that.
