Christians sometimes sit around hoping that if we just had a hit movie that would communicate the Biblical worldview we would impact the culture and bring the secularists to Christ. Ayn Rand fans, despite their atheism, apparently have the same fantasies. The much-anticipated movie version of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s novel on the virtue of selfishness, has come out. Apparently, like other “message films,” including those about Christianity, it doesn’t really work. So says conservative film critic Roger Simon, who then offers some specific critiques:
Regarding character, the two leads are less than paper thin. We know little of them other than their willfulness and their pro-business ideology. No much for the actors to play. This is fine for subsidiary characters but fatal in protagonists. Still, this might be okay if this were in the service of a compelling plot. But the plot of the film is worse than silly. It is politically wrong-headed. A movie about super trains in the American West in 2016? Unlike when the book was written, these days that is the very thing that Barack Obama is proposing – with government subsidies – and conservatives are currently opposing for good reason. Super trains don’t work in the Western states economically. We need better roads. But not in this movie, which seems stuck in those fifties while pretending to be 2016 (a weirdly non-technological 2016 I might add). As a business movie, it fails. The whole concept needed rethinking.
via Roger L. Simon » What Conservatives Can Learn from the Atlas Shrugged Film Fiasco.
Have any of you seen it? Would you agree on its badness?
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