I’ll bet there is no intention to make the other parts, especially with this team. It will be like Roger Corman’s 1994 “The Fantastic Four”, which was a place-holder to keep the rights to enable to make the somewhat less awful (but still awful) 2005 “Fantastic Four”.
I’m confident a real version will be a single film of no more than two and a half hours. This one may be intended as proof that the public will not stomach making the Rand doctrine version.
It’s definitely Armin Shimerman, who played Principal Snyder. I thought I also saw Principal Flutie in the trailer, but it turns out it’s Ken Lerner’s brother, Michael – what would be the odds of having two former (and eaten) principals of Sunnydale High in an Ayn Rand movie?
I have never read any Rand, so I can’t speak to the fidelity to the source material. (I never slogged through the LOTR books either, but I love the film trilogy.)
The trailer looked like it had every soap-opera cliche of how TV writers think their audience thinks business and government work - many large steps away from the reality of how they do work. Maybe that’s in the book. Maybe the book was more accurate to the reality of when it was written.
Setting a train movie now is problematic. I agree with panache45 and Musicat that they should have set it in the 1930s. Or they could set it in a near future where high-speed intercity rail in the US is common, and private railroads are big business. That would take explaining.
Yeah, I recognized Quark in the trailer. Maybe an all-Ferengi version could work.
Nothing in the trailer made me interested in seeing the movie. If it were very well reviewed I might add it to my Netflix queue.
I’m sure some teabagger types will be eager to see this, but it strikes me as being akin to a Kirk Cameron Jesus movie, or Ben Stein’s creationism thing - low budget glurge for a small and intellectually unsophisticated audience. The book itself is garbage, so I don’t see how the movie can be any better. It’s like trying to make a movie out of one Glenn Beck’s nutball, chalkboard screeds. The kiddies aren’t exactly going to want to flock to see it.
This, I would pay good money for.
That would be brilliant.
Screaming liberal Democrat here, but I remember liking the book for a variety of reasons. Besides, “know thy enemy” is always a good policy, and putting this book into a film might actually bring up some interesting discussion.
Not sure if I will go to the movie theater to see this, but assuming all three eventually get made, I can see myself watching them on cable.
And that trailer didn’t look any worse than many other movie trailers I have seen recently.
Will there be orcs in it?
Depends on the casting.
Another voice for the all-Ferengi version. That would work so well, and might be the only context where it could make sense. Is it possible the Ferengi were originally a parody of Rand’s philosophy?
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Screaming liberal Democrat here, but I remember liking the book for a variety of reasons.
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I tried to read it, and found the writing so turgid that I couldn’t finish it, which is rare for me. The best description I’ve ever read of Rand’s prose is “…characters hacked out of concrete with a blunt ice-pick.”
The book is extremely long and tedious. In the same way much of the reality of the workings of business and government are.
I felt that the problem with the trailer was that there was very little to justify how very tense, dramatic and ominous it was trying to be. If I didn’t know anything about the book, I would assume it was just a bunch of rich folk and government officials brokering business deals.
It looks like it might make a good made-for-TV miniseries on A&E though.
Okay, I watched the trailer this morning and have been struggling to work out where I’ve seen one of the actors before.
He’s the guy at 55 seconds saying “yes but you shouldn’t say it” and 1.38 “who is John Galt?”
Where the HELL have I seen him before? It’s been driving me out of my mind all day!!!
I saw the movie version of The Fountainhead on TV, and thought that the characterizations were thin. Not quite like the cardboard characters in many movies, but just as thin - say, cut from wood veneer.
It looks like he’s been in a ton of stuff.
I remembered him as Jimmy Barrett in Mad Men, and from the last season of Lost.
THAT’S where I saw him. Thank you Sam Stone, you’ve just saved me from the synapse purgatory I was in. 
Its really only a problem if they want to keep it in our universe, and not an alternative universe where passenger planes never really became the thing, WW2 never happened and material science took longer than in our time.
Declan
Setting it in present day is most likely a budget thing. It takes a lot more money to do a period piece.
Suppose you’d never read the book and knew nothing about it.
Do you think you could discern from the trailer what the hell it’s about? I honestly don’t think you could.
No, but that’s true of a whole lot of trailers. The role of a trailer is to bind together a bunch of scenes into an exciting 30 seconds minute that can grab the attention of people. That’s about it.
Anyone who has read the book knows what the movie is about. Anyone who hasn’t isn’t going to get an education on the principles of the book in a trailer.
I’d like it if this movie was a major success, just to get people talking about the original book.
I had a preview written up, but it was very long and very tedious (and most people would probably skip it anyway).