The Atlas Shrugged trailer stars a bunch of people yelling about the railroad industry

[villager]

The Atlas Shrugged trailer stars a bunch of people yelling about the railroad industry

Cyriaque Lamar — The first trailer for Atlas Shrugged: Part I director Paul Johansson's big-screen adaptation of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged has hit the web. In all honesty, it looks like a slightly duller remake of Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. That being said, I'd watch the crap out of Atlas Shrugged if Steven Seagal played John Galt (Johansson plays him in the film, pulling double duty).

Whatever your feelings happen to be about Objectivism, this isn't a particularly effective trailer. Sure, it's jam-packed with lines that ooze significance if you've soldiered through the book's 90,000 pages, but for those audience members who don't know Ayn Rand from Emo Phillips, it looks a movie about a bunch of randoms angry about Amtrak or yammering about metallurgy or something. What's your verdict, readers? Can anything be salvaged here, or will this be an objective stinker?

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http://io9.com/#!5758767/the-atlas-shrugged-trailer-stars-a-bunch-of-people-yelling-about-the-railroad-industry

[MineralMan]

1. Poor Novel = Poor Movie

Pretty generally. I read the book, but I can read any damn thing. Horribly written.

[Boswell]

33. will the last half hour or so be

Galt giving his "I am so special" speech?

[uncle ray]

34. that's planned to be parts 16-18 of the series.

[Ozymanithrax]

2. I felt the Joker was a more sympatheic character than John Galt...

I saw nothing that will drag me to the movie theater.

[boppers]

3. Great quote:

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html

[Xipe Totec]

5. ROFL! I wish I could recommend this reply!

:rofl:

[WCGreen]

40. I heard that one before...

I figure after you have had your first non self-inflicted orgasm, Ayn Rand falls, well limp, in the great intellectual arena...

[Curmudgeoness]

4. Part I? I wonder how far this movie goes before it ends.

I would prefer to see a movie "Life After All The John Galt Groupies Disappear". When I read the book, I kept thinking that they didn't have a clue how well the world would survive without them there to bleed the working classes.

[Hannah Bell]

6. or how poorly the supposed titans would survive without anyone to, for example,

harvest their food source for them.

puerile trash is what ayn rand wrote.

[Curmudgeoness]

21. Oh, but did you read the book? These particular titans

were accomplished in just everything, and willing to do all the grunt work. They were totally competent in everything. I guess a lot has changed since Atlas Shrugged was written.

[Hannah Bell]

23. i never could get past the first 100 pages, i confess. however, i doubt that after

doing the grunt work required to feed and house themselves they had much energy left to think their great thoughts, let alone develop them.

[Curmudgeoness]

25. My thoughts exactly. I did trudge through the whole book,

mostly because I believed it was too important to know what was in it. I had to try to understand where these Rand fans were coming from. Try again to read it, I consider it a comedy in that I was laughing at the silly ideas proposed (like how the titans did all the grunt work).

And you really do have to know what they allowed to happen to such an incredibly devoted employee like Willers. I was shocked. What that taught me about how the bosses think of people who are such good employees has freed me in my opinions of my "job".

Read it.

[Hannah Bell]

26. what happened to willers?

[Curmudgeoness]

32. Read the book.

OK, the bitch Dagny Taggart disappears from the face of the earth (so to speak) and Willers, her very competent and completely devoted assistant, goes on a train to try to save the company because everything is falling apart (because there are no titans to save us). Now she already knows that she is abandoning the company and the world as we know it, but she lets him go. Well, like I said, everything was degenerating in the country and he isn't able to fight the battle alone.

Editted to add from Wikipedia:

Edwin "Eddie" Willers is the Special Assistant to the Vice-President in Charge of Operations at Taggart Transcontinental. He grew up with Dagny Taggart. His father and grandfather worked for the Taggarts, and he followed in their footsteps. He is completely loyal to Dagny and to Taggart Transcontinental. He is also secretly in love with Dagny. Willers is generally assumed to represent the common man: someone who does not possess the Promethean creative ability of The Strikers, but matches them in moral courage and is capable of appreciating and making use of their creations. He sticks it out with the railway to the bitter end, even when the old world is obviously collapsing and Dagny has shifted her attention and loyalty to saving the captive Galt. In the end, he stays with the broken-down Comet in the middle of the desert, like a captain going down with his ship. It is unclear whether or not the strikers or anyone else will return to save him.

[Tansy_Gold]

35. Early in the novel, Eddie compares himself to a

medieval serf. And he takes pride in it.

The secondary characters are much more interesting than Dagny and Hank and Galt. Cheryll Taggart is a fantastic study, again of a "real" person that Rand couldn't figure out how to deal with.

There are essentially no children at all in the novel, despite the fact that Rearden has been married for a number of years and Dagny has been having sex since her late teens or early 20s at least. And though written over a roughly ten-year period prior to its publication in 1957, it contains no reference to television.

I'm not a psychologist, so I'm not qualified to diagnose Rand, but given her personal history and the philosophy incorporated into her magnum opus, the woman comes across as extremely anti-social, narcissistic, and totally without a conscience. Read it either before or after reading Altemeyer's "the Authoritarians" and you'll know how and why the wingnuts believe Rand has written the true gospel.


TG, TT

[christx30]

43. I've been listening to it

on CD since the end of December. I'm on disk 33 of 45. I expect Galt's speech will be at least 2 disks. It's a great way to turn your brain off and get the story while you drive.

[jpak]

7. Stoopid Fiction, Stoopid Movie

yup

[edhopper]

8. Which has the dumber premise

Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead?

[bluestateguy]

9. The railroad industry?

When is the movie set? In 1885?

[Boojatta]

10. The novel was published in 1957.

[edhopper]

11. Yeah

That's an industry that is all about individual ownership.
Forget about land grants, right if ways, Transportation laws and regulations. And the thousands of workers.
It's all about the individual.

[bluestateguy]

12. Not to mention the generous government support it received for decades

nt

[leftstreet]

15. +1

[treestar]

20. The RR industry was once the designated big business evildoer

They were in the place of todays corporations and insurance companies.

[Kingofalldems]

13. Freepers love this book--even though 95% of them have not read it

[Boswell]

16. but they have been TOLD they like it

and being natural sheep of course they do...

[Boswell]

14. I am sure this will be a good as

"Battlefield:Earth"

[boppers]

18. The production costs look pretty top notch.

Maybe it will enjoy similar success.

[AzDar]

17. Fuck Ayn Rand.

:)

[Forkboy]

19. Ayn Rand is a serious thinker compared to Cornell West.

Or at least that's what I just read here a few minutes ago. :crazy:

[chillspike]

41. Maybe they meant Kanye West

:)

[Tansy_Gold]

22. As one who has read the book more than once,

I think it's a good trailer. It hits a lot of buzz lines. It features clips, not someone talking about the moving. Visually, it's effective.

It doesn't have to be a good movie to sucker people in. Americans aren't trained (pun intended) to think critically. Americans believe in HEA ("happily ever after") which is the moral of virtually all American-style popular fiction, whether print or film/video. No one asks what happens after "The End."

If the left doesn't come up with a counter to the movie, it will just create another generation or two who are totally enamored of the doctrine of selfishness.

Several days a week I get to listen to recordings of people being interviewed after they've been involved in traffic accidents. Sometimes I only get one side, sometimes I listen to both parties or maybe a couple of witnesses. Unless there's something in the first account that raises red flags, that is the version usually assumed to be the correct, honest, accurate one. When a later version contradicts the first, there is resistance to believe the second account, unless it makes a much stronger case for its veracity than the first.

Atlas Shrugged the novel made the first statement, unanswered. Now it will get to make a second, unanswered. That's a propaganda campaign almost impossible to overcome.

The left has never mounted any campaign against Atlas Shrugged in the popular media. It has a chance now, but I'm quite sure it will pass up that chance. The left will criticize the story as banal, the characters as cardboard, the writing as pedestrian and pedantic. All the criticisms are true, but the impact remains: more people have read and believed in and trusted "Atlas Shrugged" than have even heard of "It Can't Happen Here."


Tansy Gold

[Curmudgeoness]

24. And when they say banal, pedestrian and pedantic,

the eyes of the population will glaze over, the Repugs will call them elitists, and the people will be willing to agree. Of course the RW will use lots of folksy talk when they criticize the criticisms. Some times, we dig our own graves.

[lumberjack_jeff]

29. Part two should be "Atlas laughed"

Normalization of psychopathy should be pretty funny to anyone who has the luxury of watching it from a distance.

[Erose999]

36. I always thought the humanism of Kurt Vonnegut was a good counter to the "objectivism" of teh Rand

roids.

[boppers]

39. The left didn't respond to "Battlefield Earth" either.

Not all movies made by delusional ranting hypocrites need a response.

[chillspike]

42. Please see the link in my signature

:)

Plus I really think there is no need because reality has always been the best response to Ayn Rand. As people grow up, they realize Miss Rand's philosophy just doesn't work in the real world.

[TomClash]

27. It's great fiction

All of it. :rofl:

[Liberal In Texas]

28. Part 1? How many friggin' parts are they goiing to put people to sleep with? n/t

[Bluenorthwest]

30. If this creature ever sees the light of day, it will be a train wreck

on so many levels. An impossible adaptation of a crappy novel by a not so known director using himself in the starring role. Part One, no less. Even if it was a book I liked, those things absolutely promise a bupke in the making.

[Ikonoklast]

31. I'm willing to bet it will never recoup production costs.

It will get killed by critics, and will be a ten-day ticket at the box office, never to be seen again except on disc.

[6000eliot]

37. Since the book sucks ass, I don't expect much from the film adaptation.

[Safetykitten]

38. Ayn Rand story shot with MTV pacing. Now that's gonna be REAL good.