+4
I read Atlas Shrugged many years ago, saw the film yesterday with a friend, and today I took the book off my shelves again, rereading it, and am a little more than half-way through of a 1069 pg. book. I think Will is absolutely right, Rand was a terrible fiction writer. Her more interesting books were in the non-fiction realm and I think that suited her better.
Much of Atlas Shrugged as I'm reading it now, and as it was portrayed in the film, is dinner parties and sometimes 30+ page speeches. As I recall South Park, who the creators share some of her ideals, even stated through the Sheriff that, "I just finished this book and it was one of the most boring things I've ever read, I will now hereby never read again."
My thoughts on the movie were that this was really ill-conceived. Its nice to get another perspective, but this perspective is rather unpopular, even amongst most typical conservatives and some libertarians, and especially amongst a very liberal media. How it even got to see the light of day is somewhat beyond me. Knowing what they were going to go up against, I think they were either really naive or had confidence in themselves that it overshadowed their poor judgement. It's not a "bad" film, it's much like the book, but it's not a really "good" film either, because of those same reasons. To be honest, I always hate saying, "the book was better..." but in this case it was. Film was not a good medium for it. Atlas Shrugged plays out like a "fiction textbook," it's really hard to describe, so indeed, it feels as if you are watching a "fiction textbook" and it doesn't work on any real or philosophical level. It just is.
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Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?
-Stan Brakhage