When I saw the name I was like,“Didn’t he win (or at least final tabled) the USPC a few years ago?” Yup, same guy!
It looks like they’re on track to make the sequel.
I still haven’t seen it, ironically enough. 
In fact, I had totally forgotten about it. Maybe I’ll have to see if the local Best Buy has it in the bargain bin or something.
-XT
I missed this thread originally, and I missed seeing any theater listing for this movie. Was it released in theaters, or was it cable, or where did it show?
Roddy
Not in the bargain bin yet. Maybe by year’s end, but I know I just saw it at Fry’s for $24 on Blu-ray a couple of day ago.
In fact, when I saw it I went “oh yeah, they made a movie of this and it came out sometime last year.” I’m thinking it must be pretty bad to be forgettable before I’ve even seen it. 
I saw the original. It was released in theaters, but it wasn’t out for too long. I am a big Atlas Shrugged fan and have been for many years, and I thought the movie was…meh.
It was okay. It was nice to see them try to make an AS movie. But it was obviously a low-budget affair and the screenplay wasn’t very good. The acting ranged from pretty good (Hank Rearden) to kind of wooden (Dagny Taggart).
I will go to the second one when it comes out, but I won’t see it more than once and I probably won’t buy the DVD.
Do zombies shrug?
I saw both Pt’s 1 and 2 today and didn’t want to start a new thread about the films, so here we are… Please be warned that I will be mixing scenes and lines from both movies at will, so if you haven’t seen both, you have been warned. Spoilers lie ahead…
It’s odd… the movies are both a success and a failure. A success because they do a pretty solid job of rendering of the world of the novel into a more contemporary setting, a success because they hit all the high points of the book, hell, even a success because it humanizes some of the better lines in the book – upon reading, Rand’s characters do nothing but intone, so it was refreshing to see her words delivered with actual emotion behind them. Hell, I’m glad that the producers were audacious enough to shoot for a trilogy, one we’ll likely never see finished (and I’m sorry, but I think that’s a shame.)
But the movie itself wasn’t engaging and I think they tried to keep too much of the book in the film. The world was a little too similar to ours for me to buy the concept that removing a few people would cause a societal collapse the scale of what happens in the novel (I have always considered AS to be a piece of science fiction, or at least apocalyptic fiction set in an alternate Earth, possibly the only novel in the genre where civilization collapses because of a philosophical crisis.) In addition, John Galt’s appeal is heavy-handed and clumsy, and at one time I burst out loud laughing (When he said to the guy in the train station “Are you tired of being taxed? Want to go build your business in my magical country of no taxes?” (I’m paraphrasing, but not too much.)) I also don’t like the fact that they used dates – if they would have just said “September 2nd, 20XX” instead of “… 2016”, it would have removed the impulse to compare and contrast on the part of the viewer.
Lastly, I also think they should have gotten rid of the story of Robert Stadler, the head of the science institute, completely. They could have used his time to spend more time setting up the philosophical debate that is key to the novel.
I guess the big problem is that it wasn’t developed as a movie, but as a means of bringing a piece of propaganda to the screen, and the producers apparently had such a list of things that had to be in the movie that the screenwriters were really just relegated to stringing along a vast number of plot points into a coherent script. They did an admirable effort, but the damn thing just doesn’t flow the way even a competent b-movie does.
It would be interesting to see what people thought who had never heard of the book and didn’t come into it with a pre-formed opinion… all 4 or 5 of them. 
In regards to THINGS THAT WERE DIFFERENT, I had already built my mental image of the characters but oddly, the fact that the brunette Dagny became a blonde in the movie doesn’t really bother me. I actually think the actress did a pretty good job and only wish the rest of the movie equaled her. However, the film’s version of Francisco was greatly at odds with my vision of him: I see Francisco as a far more dapper and worldly person than portrayed, somebody who exuded an Old World courtliness even when being a complete dick. I would have preferred it if the movie had stayed in that quasi-40s/50s setting as the book, but that would have just blown up the budget to Titanic-sized portions.
All in all a decent adaptation of an “unfilmable book”, but not a very good movie.
Who is John Galt?
The third part, “Who is John Galt?” just wrapped filming recently and will be released later this year. They’ve recast everybody again. 
I just told myself that everybody aged 10 years, which helped a bit with the continuity issue…
I loved the first Hank, hated the second Hank. And I didn’t like either Dagney! Hopefully they’ll finally get her right in the third installment. (Angelina Jolie? Please???)
And I always thought that Antonio Banderas was the ONLY possible choice for Francisco.
The film raised money on Kickstarter last fall: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atlasshrugged/atlas-shrugged-movie-who-is-john-galt
The producers claimed it was a promotional exercise, a way to generate buzz. The budget for the 3rd film is reportedly $10 million, which makes it a B level movie. It’s being directed by a guy who has worked mostly in advertising. Talk of putting any A-level actor in the film is unrealistic. You can’t offer them a share of the gross, since it will probably be well under half the cost of the film. Wikipedia: However, on February 2, 2012, Kaslow and Aglialoro announced Atlas Shrugged: Part II was fully funded and that principal photography was tentatively scheduled to commence in early April 2012.[90] The film was released on October 12, 2012,[91] without a special screening for critics.[92] It suffered one of the worst openings ever, 98th worst according to Box Office Mojo, among films in wide release.[93] Final box office take was $3.3 million, well under that of Part I despite the doubling of the budget to $20 million according to the Daily Caller. Those figures should be treated as tentative as the Internet Movie Database estimates Part 1 budget at $20 million and the Part II budget at $10 million, while Box Office Mojo says Part 1 cost $20 million and Part 2 data is “NA”.[94][95] Critics gave the film a 5% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 21 reviews.[96]
And here’s the page on Part III: Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who Is John Galt? - Wikipedia
JohnT: How did Part I compare with Part II?
Rob Morrow as Hank Rearden? Really?
Though Joaquim de Almeida as Francisco is nice casting.
I liked Part I better, largely on the strength of “Dagny’s” performance. Part II didn’t start off well - it began with the plane crash to Galt’s Gulch, but the actress’s rendering of Dagny’s cry of “Oh, hell! Who is John Galt” was completely at odds with how I visualized it. Then I learned that all the actors were different, so that didn’t help either.
Both movies are surprisingly short, hovering about 90 minutes in length.
I haven’t been happy with the casting in any of the three, with the exception of the first Hank. I’m particularly unhappy with what they did with Ragnar Danneskjold in Part 3 (he is supposed to be a ‘pinnacle of blond Nordic human beauty’ type, and they cast a guy who looks like Kelsey Grammer’s blond love child).
Perfect. I think he’d bust the budget, though, not to mention Angelina.
I read Atlas Shrugged in college, mostly because of some girl (she saw it as a feminist thing or something) and I thought it was painfully long winded and boring.
I thought the movie adaptation was much better than the book.
How anyone can read that book and adopt it as a philosophy is beyond me.
And thus it came to pass that the less-than-teeming mass of Ayn Rand followers did not feel they had any obligation to spend their money on repeated viewings of the *Atlas Shrugged *movies just because it was Atlas Shrugged – which is fully consistent, mind you. 
(Though as for the more numerous mere lip-service fanboys/fangirls in the “Conservative Movement”, who’d plotz at what she thought of religions, they may just be holding out for a version with big stars and big budgets and merchandising tie-ins that replaces excruciating philosophical monologues with big explosions under big waving American flags.)
I enjoyed here books when younger, but I skipped over a lot of the boring parts.
Shooting on Part III ended this month: it had lasted 17 days. The director conceives of Atlas Shrugged as a love story. It will be, “a very different motion picture than the first two. You can’t even compare them… Unfortunately, the first two installments … should have been set up so the love story was anticipated.” No problem, they will be tacking on a prologue in the beginning of the film to clue the audience in.
This could be memorable.