I had a hard time seeing this film as often as the awfulness of kept making my eyes roll all the way to the back of my head. Anyone else feel similarly?
shareWho is John Galt? (sorry, had to do it).
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If you look for perfection, you will never be content.
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I had to force myself to watch this as an effort to TRY to understand what I think is crazy talk from Conservatives over this book and this theme. It is very hard to watch. The plot is so thin, the dialog so leaden, the characters to flat. I try to watch it like a normal movie, but every moment of the film is so incredibly self-conscious and artificial I can barely do it.
I finally made it to the end of the second part, only to find out now there is a third part ... argh!
I have just waited for them to appear on Amazon or NetFlix as I refuse to send money or energy this way for the bad karma.
If you want to know what conservatives are talking about when they reference the book, you'll have to read the book. This movie just won't give you a detailed enough picture for it to make sense. It's not just that all the philosophical speeches have to be shortened for the screen, it's that the book worked by piling incident upon incident to really convince you that the world was falling apart.
That just doesn't happen in the movie. We get the highlights: government regulations to stop Rearden Metal or limit production, and the focus is on characters we know, like Ellis Wyatt or Ken Danagger. But the book was filled with little vignettes of small businessmen being driven under, and conversations between good and bad people we never get to know, who flash into view for a second then disappear. It builds a more detailed view of a world that's dying. So when the speeches come, we already feel like we've got a lifetime of experience to put against the arguments.
I guess it's probably a money problem - we never get a sense of the vastness of the problems. The crowds of protesters are very small (and the signs seem to be recycled throughout). What's needed is a sort of scale someone like Roland Emerich can pull off - BIG crowds, big landscapes, lots of disaster to make the drama seem very life and death.
Flat, drab passion meanders across the screen!
I read the book a long time ago long with "The Fountainhead" ... I thought they were both terrible. I never understood the themes as they were described, they never made sense, and the silly names she came up with you could tell who was supposed to be good and who was supposed to be evil just by their names, it was the most superficial nonsense. The straw man of the government doing their evil deeds and the business people always the angelic humanists ... the whole train of through, no pun intended, made no sense.
shareI'm not qualified to summarize Ayn Rand, but I will try:
Your mind is what enables you to produce things of value. No one has a right to your mind, thus no one has a right to the things you produce, unless they give you something of value in return. Money is the best means of exchange we have found, to give value for value.
In life, there are producers and looters. Looters expect to produce nothing but have their needs met by the producers. They achieve this by using government (force) and guilt (how can you let people starve?) to get the producers to support them.
Ayn Rand makes an extreme case of what happens when the looters reach critical mass, and the producers can't produce enough: Society begins to collapse; because too many people are in the wagon, and not enough people are out front, pulling it. In retaliation, the producers remove their minds and their production from society, speeding up the collapse so everyone realizes how screwed up the current system is.
I used to think the villains in her bookes were two-dimensional, but after watching the movie tonight, I realized anyone in Obama's cabinet could have made comments like, "See, capitalism doesn't work!" after removing the idea of capitalism from the economy altogether.
These may help: Top 25 Ayn Rand Quotes http://t.co/fyNtm6xP9W
> In life, there are producers and looters.
Yeah, that is overly simplistic, just like the movie.
And you can just as well say people's labor is a sacrosanct as their minds.
No society has ever collapsed for the reasons you mention as well. Read
Jared Diamond's book, Collapse, and it is pretty clear that society's collapse
because their insulated upper classes do not respond in time to existential
threats because they are partying, ego-tripping and in general incompetent
at the jobs they say they are bred for. Ayn Rand is a brown-noser to the
upper class.
It is a very simplified view of the world and currently quite the opposite is true.
shareCigar Doug,
There is a concept called "oriental despotism" that may be real to some extent. Some historians believe that in "oriental" societies, which apparently include Russia where Rand came from, there is a social pattern where rich people have to hide their wealth, or the government will confiscate it. This is not necessarily communism. These historians claim that it was characteristic of China and Mesopotamia as well as Russia. One of them calls it "hydraulic civilization," where for agriculture to work, the government had to force citizens to help build large irrigation systems. That doesn't fit Russia, though he attempted to claim it did. I think the tendency towards despotism in Russia is due to other things. It preceded communism. Czarist society was very despotic, too.
America has never been that sort of society. Even when the top tax bracket was 90% under Eisenhower, hard working and talented people were always able to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
As I said on another thread, I believe Rand's mind was thrown out of whack by the experience of the Russian Revolution. All her life she imagined the government was going to come and seize her hard earned wealth.
I have to say I find this movie hilarious. Every time someone says, "Who is John Galt?" or one of the other cliches of the film, it cracks me up. I can't wait to get Atlas Shrugged III.
"Extremism in the pursuit of moderation is no vice."
Your post should be required reading for anyone dissatisfied with the movie. Having read the book a couple years ago and watched the first 2 installments of the movie, I 100% agree with you, and you've explained your view well.
There are multiple issues with making AS into a movie. One is the anachronistic nature of the technical side of the story. So much has changed with technology, communications, and transportation since 1957! Then there's what you described so well, what I'd call the sweep of the events in the book. Then there are the long speeches.
And, if you can somehow rise above all of those things... the Final Boss problem is that the story is rather parable-like to begin with; even just reading the book, I never had the sense that Rand was a "believer" in the story itself, in the sense of believing that it might all really occur this way. I think she was planting a stake in the philosophical ground, and using a novel to do it.
I think she was trying to jump-start our minds into some new patterns. In that, at least, she did achieve some success; many have found her writing to be thought-inspiring, including some critics. I don't consider myself a disciple of hers (though I agree more than disagree), but I do find AS to be very thought-provoking, and a decent read, if intermittently ponderous. I don't envy anyone the task of making it into a movie, and doing that will probably get even more difficult as time goes on, due to the tech side of things.
I concur. The novel/story is simply a platform for ideas but doesn't, in itself, lend well to good storytelling. This is why Jesus' parables were usually a short column rather than 1100 pages. You don;t need that much story to get a few points across. And so when one wants to apply these ideas to real-world situations, they must apply to the real world of the audience. This film endeavor has tried to do that, but it is very difficult in the corporate/government regulatory environment.
I suppose if it was going to be an easy task, it would have been made a long time ago. I do appreciate the effort and am awaiting the conclusion. But in the long run, this film cannot be what I think the makers aspired for it to be.
"De gustibus non est disputandum"
#3
Ayn Rand has been proven wrong by history.
Oh by the way - guess what - she subsisted on social security - the government program she was so against on paper. What a hypocrite.
Read the book and it will make more sense to you.
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