Friday, March 4, 2011

"Atlas Shrugged" -- the movie -- is coming

The companion blog, Quiddity, has a series of posts about Ayn Rand,her philosophy and her very long novel, Atlas Shrugged.  Apparently this will be a three-part series, a movie with two sequels,  Shrugged I, II, and III.

Shrugged I appears to be in the can (after eighteen years of development!) for release April 15, 2011, the day tax returns are normally due (though this year they are actually due on April 18th).  I think the movie is likely to suck.  I think so for several reasons.  The biggest and most telling is that there have been eight screenwriters.  "That's too many."  This book must have a "written and directed by" credit or at least a very close collaboration between the director and the writer.  By this I mean a talent like Alfred Hitchcock or Billy Wilder has got to be directing -- and that's just impossible.  If it were possible, there wouldn't have been a revolving door of screenwriters.

As mentioned on the Quiddity blog, the real hero of Atlas Shrugged is Francisco d'Anconia.  I can't believe the eight screenwriters as a group have achieved that understanding in collaboration with a director.  So, instead, we are going to have a souped-up Nickolai Tesla as the "hero," the mysterious John Galt.  I doubt the audience is going to be able to suspend disbelief.

Another thing that sucks is that the book is essentially a melodrama.  It appears that the movie is going to imitate being an action movie as much as possible.  "That's a potential train wreck."  I'm afraid this movie is going to be Executive Suite meets Unstoppable.  It is, barely, possible to make a white collar melodrama -- The Bad and the Beautiful is an example that should be the template for Shrugged I.  But it doesn't seem likely that such a thing has happened here.  If the screenwriters turned the script into one emphasizing Washington politics and "K Street," making Wesley Mouch's character the lead, and filming him the way Kirk Douglas was filmed in Bad and the Beautiful, it might work as a hair-raising, nail-biting indictment of modern lobbying.  Yet I feel sure that something else is happening here, an irresistible impulse to make a "statement" rather than make a movie.

I recommend to readers of this blog that they read through the libertarian and Ayn Rand postings on the companion Quiddity blog and then go see Shrugged I out of sheer and intense morbid curiosity.  That's what I'm going to do.

-- the blog author

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