The Lucas Arts game logo got a new gig.
One of the most popular and controversial novels of all time, Atlas Shrugged, is heading to theaters as a trilogy after decades of aborted attempts to film it. Heralded as a Bible by some and “a load of crap” by others, the 55-year-old tome brings a lot of baggage with it to the screen. However one cannot discuss the movie, and therefore the trailer, without briefly taking a detour into Objectivism, defined by author Ayn Rand as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
I started writing this piece with an essay about Objectivism and my thoughts on the subject. It was a ~1000 word rambling, incoherent mess, and I later abandoned it for obvious reasons. I am not a scholar in Objectivism, but I have read Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. Thus, like pretty much every other blogger, I’m going into a hot-button and divisive issue with half information and mistruths.
Personally, I find Objectivism to be an interesting philosophy that could conceivably work on an individual basis (as with Howard Roark in Rand's superior novel The Fountainhead) but not feasible on a grand scale as in Atlas Shrugged. I believe that Objectivism suffers from the same naïve idealism in humans as drastically opposite belief systems like communism and socialism. I will go more in depth into this, as well as the movie's troubled history, in the TRAILER REPORT itself.
At the start, we see that the movie is rated PG-13. While the novel itself might not be considered particularly vulgar (except by people who might take offense to its content), it's full of rich themes and adult situations that ought to warrant an R rating. However, as last year showed, plenty of filmmakers can create complex and impressive PG-13 movies (e.g. True Grit, The Social Network), so while the rating isn't immediately a bad sign, it's definitely worth noting. Of course, considering how antagonistic the novel is to the liberal media, if this movie was faithful to the book you'd expect the Hollywood elite to rate the film ‘R’ sight unseen to prevent impressionable adolescents from being corrupted by Rand's dangerous teachings.
One of the first things anyone should know about this film is that it was allegedly made with a $5 million budget. Although that's the price tag for only the first part of the trilogy, the movie has no choice but to look incredibly cheap. While plenty of movies can be made for less, making this one on the cheap does a disservice to the epic that is Atlas Shrugged. To be entirely fair, however, the movie does not look like the mammoth clusterfuck I imagined after first hearing about its pedigree.
It's unfortunate though because the scope and style of the novel would work best as an alternative history period piece. You know, in a time when trains weren't derided and mocked. Nevertheless, even with the novel updated to today's period, there's a weight that only money and/or a real skilled director can provide. This film probably does not have that director.
The director for this part, and presumably the two others, is Paul Johansson. His previous directing credits include 18 episodes of One Tree Hill, a TV movie, and a short. Additionally, Johansson plays Rand's ubermensch John Galt, showcasing a level of hubris matched only by Vincent Gallo and M. Night Shyamalan. His previous roles include nearly 150 episodes of One Tree Hill.
The opening moment in the trailer implies what could/should have been. The mysterious man talking to Midas Mulligan makes you wonder how the film (at least the Galt segments) would look as a respectable/“actual” 1950s film noir/neo-noir, with a gritty, imposing New York as the backdrop. Instead, we're greeted with the immediate visage of a film that seems to be playing noir at a community theater level. The storefronts and signs look cheap and generic. The dialogue (“Someone who knows what it's like to work for himself and not let others feed off the profits of his energies”), while getting the point across, seems too wordy. Maybe it’s because the speaker sounds winded about halfway through his delivery. The trailer then presumably cuts to the scene in the novel where children are killed in a train crash because their parents contributed to charity.
With that out of the way, the characters.
Dagney Taggart- I don't know a lot about Taylor Schilling (she starred in Mercy, that short-lived NBC series about a rogue nurse who doesn't play by the rules damn it!), but from the trailer she is no Dagney Taggart. Dagney, arguably the main character in Atlas Shrugged, should emit a gravitas, a sense of importance. She is someone whose mere presence should make one uncomfortable- not in a bad way, but because you immediately sense that she exists on a different level intellectually. With Schilling-Dags, I alternately get the sense of a Lifetime Movie heroine and The Closer. Also, she'd never say “if you double cross me, I'd destroy you.” She's not that forward; she doesn't need to be.
Hank Rearden- Hank Rearden is played by Grant Bowler, another television veteran whose most notable roles came on True Blood and Ugly Betty. Of the main characters thus far, Rearden seems one of the better cast. While I'd personally envision Rearden as someone more … masculine (?) and commanding, Bowler seems at least somewhat passable. Although occasionally he seems similar to the ilk of Business Man Extra seen on commercials. Also, he seems to spend a lot of time at lavish dinners.
The Government- Studio Head Jack Lipnick and his lackey Lou Breeze are reunited to represent the government, along with some other people like the Principal from Buffy. Their names, their personalities, any internal complexities are irrelevant. In the world of Atlas Shrugged, the important thing to remember is that the Government is bad, socialist, and against innovation presumably due to jealousy.
Some might find this distasteful but it this a bad thing? Not at all. We have plenty of movies showing corporations as one dimensionally soulless and evil. Hell, the quest for Unobtainium was symbolized by a guy who very well should have had dollar signs CGI'ed in place of pupils and that movie was the highest grosser of all time.
Why shouldn't The Government with its history of incompetence and bumbling be seen as the villain with the free marketeers as the hero? Is the quest for profit really that much more antagonistic to our sense of being than the quest for power or a small group of quasi-elected officials sapping the intellectual energy of its people? This isn't to say that business leaders and entrepreneurs are somehow infallible. They aren't, and one of my biggest problems with Atlas Shrugged is Rand's assumption that the best and brightest will actually be the best and brightest (e.g. best working conditions, best wages, always seemingly agreeing on everything). But that doesn't mean that they are naturally villainous either. I'd go even further and say that a movie with an Objectivism backing could be very important and interesting in an era of bailouts and TARP funds and cries of socialism against so many politicians and fascism against every single person in elected office. But will this be the movie? Can it?
This article cannot end without asking the question pondered since the book first came out: could an Atlas Shrugged movie even work? The book itself is a dense, 1100+ page novel endlessly rambling about a philosophy with characters that could best be described as “thinly drawn.” People such as Charlize Theron, Angelina Jolie, and even Albert S. Ruddy (producer of The Godfather, Million Dollar Baby, and Cannonball Run II) have been involved at one point or another in failed productions of the work. Fans have said that it needed to be some sort of multi-part HBO miniseries to allow for all the depths and complexities required. (And considering the history in and the visuals of Boardwalk Empire alone, this probably would have been the best method). The movie itself plans to be three parts, though it's hard to imagine a successful trilogy with the look of the Atlas Shrugged Part 1.
While admittedly not the best strategy, if Atlas Shrugged were to enter cinema, I actually believe that a single movie can work, provided it had an appropriate (3-ish hour) running time. Obviously, a lot of characters would need to be cut out (similar to how The Fountainhead movie basically ignored the existence of Peter Keating), but the novel was never about the characters anyway. Yet, ironically, characters would be the best way for the movie to succeed. In other words, the key to making Atlas Shrugged work as a film would be to espouse the philosophy of the book through complex characters and subtlety in place of pontification and a 2 hour radio address by John Galt. The Government could remain overtly evil and engage in its widespread stealing of man's ideas and inventions without the audience being beaten over the head about how bad it is or that they are doing it. The exchange in the trailer between Glasses Guy and Rearden (“Glasses Guy: “They say you're intractable, you're ruthless, your only goal is to make money.” Rearden: “But my only goal is to make money.” GG: “Yeah but you shouldn't say it.”) works better and feels more natural than the line at the beginning. A film featuring moments like that could easily get the point across while avoiding the worst excesses of the novel.
Or, a movie focusing almost exclusively on Galt's adventures at Twentieth Century Motor Company could really get to the core of the work in a condensed running time. That cautionary tale/parable can explain so much about Objectivism, the dangers of collectivism, and the importance of the individual while being simultaneously powerful and horrifying.
Atlas Shrugged, Part 1 opens on April 15, 2011.
