Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 MOVIE Review

This last Friday I was able to go watch Atlas Shrugged Part 1. First of all this particular review is going to be as apolitical as possible. I hope to make this review more about the quality of the film in terms of story, plot, acting etc. With that in mind just remember that this movie is implicitly political.

So the filming of this movie is every bit as high quality as any Hollywood film. The images are well framed and artfully done. The color doesn't seems to lend to anything other than "realistic" portrayal of the world that we live in now. The book was written over 50 years ago and if I were to create an artistic version of this I would give the colors a hue that gives a little more noire and perhaps even a sepia tone...but since they placed this movie in the near future it made sense that they would use real colors and hues.

The plot was strictly following the book...which is both good and bad. Ayn Rand was over the top in so many ways and it was really hard to overcome that in her plot and the stilted and halting way the dialog progressed was unfortunately carried over to the movie. People do not speak the way that Ayn Rand wrote her dialog. On the contrary she seemed to think that people used words that were on the average over 3 syllables long. Her characters are deep but in an almost inaccessible way. People find traits that they have in common with Hank, Dagny, and others but in the end they don't identify with any of the characters completely.

After watching this movie I find the same flaws from the book. The screen writers needed to interpret Rand's novel in a way that would make it more modern and accessible. If/when they produce the remaining parts of the story they need to put more effort into making the dialog smooth, natural, and most importantly believable. If they overcome that the production quality is sufficient to give them a shot at making this a great movie rather than a passable book conversion. Because ultimately that is what this is, nothing more than a copy of the book in an audio visual form. If this is to reach the heights that are due Rand's greatness they need to allow the medium to be the message and not be subject to a strict conversion of her original text. On a scale of 1-5 I give this a 3. Have you seen this movie? Tell me what you think.