In “Atlas Shrugged,” it’s 2016 America. The Dow has fallen below 4,000, gasoline prices are through the roof and infrastructure is falling apart. High-speed rail looks like the future. Government denounces selfish corporate interests and concerns itself mainly with dividing the dwindling wealth.
This isn’t loony-bin stuff: Attention must be paid.
Though a bit stiff in the joints and acted by an undistinguished cast amid TV-movie trappings, this low-budget adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel nevertheless contains a fire and a fury that makes it more compelling than the average mass-produced studio item.
“Atlas Shrugged,” a mega-fable that is to capitalists roughly what “To Kill a Mockingbird” is to liberals, centers on the struggles of a railroad exec, the beautiful and exacting Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), to overhaul a line with a controversial, untested new steel alloy produced by an equally arrogant industrialist, Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler).
Rearden is being forced to sell off his conglomerate bit by bit because of a new law that no one can own more than one business, while Taggart’s brother (Matthew Marsden) believes the railroad’s most important source of innovation ought to be collaborating with the government on tightly state-controlled enterprises.
The movie covers only the first third of the book and ends on a cliffhanger without fully resolving its central question: “Who is John Galt?” — a shadowy figure who seems to be linked to the disappearance of many leading business figures.
The subjects the film deals with are fascinating, important — and almost completely ignored at the movies. Even “The Social Network,” the most acclaimed business movie of last year, placed the building of one of the world’s most valuable companies in the background of a personality dispute and some whining about club membership. “Atlas Shrugged” wants to start an argument with you, to force you to (in Rand’s often-repeated words) “check your premises.”
It would be easier to do no such thing, to laugh off the stilted dialogue and stern, unironic hectoring, so that’s what most viewers will do.