![]() ![]() James Taggart keeps buying inferior metal for his railways, but Dagny knows that the future is in partnering with similarly bold and fearless Hank Reardon, CEO of Reardon Metals. You get the feeling that Ayn Rand was a really chill person, fun to be around and to be loved by. She is a likable hero, especially when she says things like, “I’ve never felt anything at all.” There is a warm current of real human emotion flowing through the entire story. The Taggart Transcontinental Railroad is crumbling under the mismanagement of the lazy and incompetent James Taggart, and it’s up to his sister Dagny Taggart to save the company through bold and fearless action. “Ragnar the Pirate keeps hijacking ships and stealing treasure and recruiting adventurers to his cause, but first: tons of board meetings.” What a tease, to throw out something so fun. There’s no way to know, because we never once get to see Ragnar the Pirate. I wonder if he has dreads in his beard, a wooden leg, or a hook hand. “Ragnar the Pirate” is an intriguing name. The year is 2016, and America is in disarray: Gas is $37.50 a gallon, trains keep crashing (trains are so important, FYI), and somebody named Ragnar the Pirate is raiding things, as pirates do. ![]() But I also have a feeling the book is not great and perfect.) I am not reviewing the book I’m reviewing the movie based on its first half. “Some people just want to watch the railway burn.” (Keep in mind that it’s entirely possible that the book Atlas Shrugged is just so great and perfect. What kid wouldn’t love a good superhero story about how an average entrepreneur transforms into a powerful mining CEO after being bitten by the bug of corporate ingenuity? It reminds me a lot of Batman, another popular and compelling superhero story. Cool plot, and definitely one I really connected with. The movie is about how hard businessmen work, how lazy people are lazy, and how bureaucracy gets in the way of making a good train. To whomever it was that told me many years ago that Atlas Shrugged is basically a superhero story, you are basically an idiot. If a novel can inspire an entire movement based around something with as boring a name as Objectivism, it must be pretty good, right? When I was a kid and saw ads for Dianetics, I thought it was a book about lava, and that seemed very exciting. (I also avoided it because the people selling me on it tended to be the sort of people who would start sentences with “I’m not racist, but …”) I never did get around to reading it, but I thought watching the recent definitive movie adaptation of the first half would turn me on to Ayn Rand’s -ism. This is what Atlas Shrugged is about? So many people tried to sell me on this book in college, and I avoided it because my busy schedule of drinking beers and eating sausage, egg, and cheese sandwiches (my, how things have changed) did not allow time for reading a 900-page novel about how it’s good to work hard at your job or whatever. Who It’s For: Assholes and metallurgy buffs. What It’s About: A couple of humorless dicks face many boring obstacles in the course of building a slightly faster and safer light-rail system. ![]()
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