A Revolta de Atlas: Parte I

I had some time to kill and no wet paint to watch, so I decided to see what all the #libertarian fuss is about. This is one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and don't get me started on the utter vapidness of the story.

This movie should have to give ME five stars for sitting through it. This movie is a cinematic hate crime. This movie is like having your brain eaten slowly by monkeys with rusty spoons.

...and WTF? "Part 1?" There's more?

I was prepared to cringe at this Atlas Shrugged, universally panned by the critics for its low budget and no-name cast. Instead, I was pretty impressed. The story was faithful to the book, and the message and narrative clear, with the producers wisely sidestepping most of Rand's stilted polemics.

Yes, the budget did confine most shooting to interiors, but there was enough "big sky" material, railroad operations, and steel mill shots to give the film some scope. And the SFX and CG used in the supertrain shots, which probably absorbed half the budget, were worth every penny.

The cast, and especially Taylor Shilling, who played Dagny, and Grant Bowler (Rearden) did a great job.

Overall, I liked AS, and look forward to the sequels. I just hope the producers can raise the financing to make them.

Though I'm not, nor have I ever been, a proponent of Ayn Rand's philosophy, I have to admit the woman wrote great books -- and books that accurately predicted the state of the world in years to come. The Fountainhead predicted the rise of mediocrity and the corruption of art, and Atlas Shrugged, seen with today's eyes, seems so accurate it's scary for a novel published in 1957.

The film of The Fountainhead, despite starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, is not good. For years people have tried to get Atlas Shrugged on the screen, and now here it is, using a small budget, and divided into three parts. This is Part I.

The story concerns Dagny Taggart, a railroad executive fighting to keep the family railroad alive. Railroads are the only form of transportation due to the lack of oil. The world is in a fast state of decay; government agencies are corrupt, and thanks to her brother's inefficient running of the family company before she took over, her best workers are gone. People feel helpless. And now, the strongest industrialists are disappearing, their businesses being taken over by those with political interests, and a question is repeatedly asked - "Who is John Galt?" No one seems to know.

Surprisingly, while I recognized a few people in the cast, the majority of the stars were unknown to me (which I would have told you is impossible). Nevertheless, they do a good job. The beautiful Taylor Schilling is an effective Dagny, and like the main female character in The Fountainhead, she seems a cold woman without emotion. At the end of Part I, we finally see some. Grant Bowler is excellent as Henry Reardon, as is Graham Beckel as Wyatt. Rebecca Wisocky has all the right stuff for the evil Lillian, and we'll be seeing more of her later. Michael Lerner was certainly familiar, and he's Mouch. It's an effective cast in difficult roles, because each character represents a philosophy. Giving them flesh and blood is tough.

I look forward to parts 2 and 3.

Ayn Rand's motto was "Check your premises" before entering into any logical argument. The screenwriters of ATLAS SHRUGGED failed to heed her advice, resulting in an antiquated, self-destructive show that plays like a cliffhanger TV episode (think: "Dallas") posing as feature film.

Rand's '50s novel is updated to 2016, with an intro montage informing us that gas at the pump costs over $39 per gallon, commercial air travel is no longer feasible (we do see a private jet later in the film, when convenient), the Dow is at 4,000, and railroads are back in pre-eminence in America. Add to that a mythical domestic steel industry in full flower, ignore the rest of the world and you have the idiotic starting point for this science fiction (minus the science) exercise.

The best-selling novel with its legion of fans deserved, even at this late date, a first class treatment, perhaps by Oliver Stone (in his WALL STREET mode) or by Hollywood's right of center statesman Clint Eastwood. As an indie production perhaps Mel Gibson as director, but his right-wing credentials include religious fanaticism, a no-no for the atheistic Objectivist cult.

So we get a fan-based production, with executive producer Mike Marvin, who I remember well from HOT DOG...THE MOVIE. If that sounds a bit odd, while watching ATLAS SHRUGGED I recalled my favorite similar film, going back to the '70s, Harold Robbins' THE BETSY, which had a plot line of family dynasty in the auto industry and the industrial wars therein, parallel to ATLAS' story involving a family railroad dynasty of the Taggarts.

Robbins as pulp novelist had a philosophy underpinning his sexploitation works -namely hedonism. Rand's Objectivism is quite different, but strip it away from both novel and film and ATLAS SHRUGGED is a dated potboiler, Robbins-style but minus the sex.

Throughout the film it feels like we're in the '50s. Endless cocktail parties are staged with a dated look and glamor; the central concerns of aggressive captains (and a queen) of industry struggling for supremacy in a corrupt and government-intrusive environment is old-hat.

A young generation might theoretically be interested and respond to the adolescent dreamworld in which the entrepreneur is king and role model. After all, an impressionable youth in America today is likely to dream of $uccess as becoming the next creator of a Google or Facebook.

But what is the entry point for identification with this turgid film's characters? The "good guys", stalwart heroine Dagny Taggart and her romantic soul mate, steel magnate Hank Rearden, are cast with unknowns who act their roles as flatly as any pancake. It's daytime soap posing as nighttime programming.

Since a chief villain, Dagny's ne'er-do-well brother who shares ownership in their family railroad, looks like the young (with hair) Billy Zane, my mind wandered to reshaping the film as an exploitation direct-to-video effort: why not cast sister Lisa Zane as Dagny? The Zanes had teamed up in a wonderful B video 20 years ago titled FEMME FATALE which starred future Oscar-winner Colin Firth -now there's casting! Spicing up ATLAS SHRUGGED with some good, old-fashioned sexploitation could have made it watchable (it sure helped THE BETSY become a drive-in favorite).

Instead we have straw men galore to hiss at: notably Michael Lerner as a corrupt government official; Jon Polito on loan from the Coen Bros. as a scheming insider; a nonentity as a corrupt union boss who Dagny boots out of her office; a mealy-mouthed do-gooder asking Rearden for a handout (he gets a check for $100,000 to just go away) for one of his "aid-the-poor" causes; and other assorted "collectivists". This is a world of rugged individuals, and the film's laissez-faire capitalist message is laid on with a trowel.

Looming at every turn, and promising to take center stage in Part III of this projected trilogy, is the hack director Paul Johansson in the role of John Galt. A shadowy figure in trench coat and big hat, he suggests nothing more than jailbird lobbyist Jack Abamoff, reducing the film to pure camp with each appearance. Of course former movie producer Abramoff could have made a comical cameo in the role, but like Gibson, he is seriously religious and therefore from the wrong subset of the right-wing club.

Special effects of sleek new 250-mile-per-hour trains whipping along the American west are OK, but otherwise the film looks like a poverty row production and is a merciless talkathon. Called upon to spit out reams of boring dialog, Taylor Schilling as Dagny wears one expression throughout, becoming a hairdo in search of a character. She simply cannot carry a feature film on her shoulders (I know, "Taylor Shrugged"). I would have cast Cate Blanchett with '40s shoulder pads, but even a Reese Witherspoon or Sandra Bullock, among Hollywood's most bankable actresses, would have been preferable miscasting.

Grant Bowler is even worse as her romantic equal Hank Rearden -he has merely a smug expression throughout, whether batting off impudent nuisances or signing away most of his corporate empire after evil politicians and competitors get a ridiculous "anti-dog-eat-dog" bill passed through the legislature limiting every capitalist to owning just one company. That's the level of subtlety of this asinine script.

I have to admit that it's been years since I read the book (required high school reading) and while I struggled to get through it, I did appreciate the concepts of a dystopian United States, the philosophy of Objectivism and the idea that civilization and society simply cannot continue to exist where there is no creativity.

Almost none of this is covered in this first part of the trilogy. Don't get me wrong, the film covers a lot of ground, in fact it's front-loaded with heavy doses of exposition. The problem is the film is shot like a PBS made-for-TV movie (mainly a series of talking heads) and the stiff dialog is lifelessly delivered by TV actors that lack big screen presence.

Now, don't mistake me for one of those people who feel the subject matter of the book is too didactic for mass appeal, I just think this low-budget and amateur version lacks the fire and fury that Rand's novel deserves.

I'm not saying not to see it, just avoid the mistake I made. Go in with no expectations.

Hell, it might even make you want to pick up the book and give it a read.