In time for the movie’s opening yesterday in Toronto, a (largely negative) review in Canada’s National Post begins:
We are all familiar with the concept of damnation with faint praise. Atlas Shrugged the movie (Part 1) invites praise by faint damnation. It could have been much worse. Although the film, which opens today in Toronto, has a made-for-TV, daytime-soap feel about it, its slightly off-kilter, futuristic, film noir look does capture — at least to some degree — the wonderful weirdness of the book on which it is based.
Anyone attempting to take Ayn Rand’s philosophical doorstop to the big screen faced massive challenges, not least in rendering her Objectivism comprehensible and her radical individualism palatable. The problem has never been Randian villains, who are still recognizable everywhere; it is her heroes, whose adherence to Objectivist rectitude inevitably renders them about as human as marble-on-a-plinth.
The indomitable Ms. Rand had wanted Farrah Fawcett and Clint Eastwood to play Atlas Shrugged protagonists Dagny Taggart, a railroad executive, and Hank Rearden, an industrialist. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were at one time interested in the roles, but in the end the parts were given to less-than-famous Taylor Schilling and Grant Bowler, who do a creditable job in roles without a trace of potential for Oscar nomination.
See the full review for much more in this vein.
