Atlas Shrugged Again...

...and everyone shrugged back again.

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=atlasshruggedpart2.htm

Oh, and they recast the entire movie because nobody wanted to come back from the first!

Cue the "It's not that the movie sucks, it's because Hollywood's can't handle the truth!" apologists in five, four...

Damn. I think a movie about teeth could do better than that. Rand fans just need to accept that they are a VERY tiny fan club.

Based on the trailers alone, the movie looked awful with poor production values and no-name actors. No wonder if flopped.

Robert Picardo does too have a name.



Loved him in Innerspace.

Star Wars would have sucked with a $5 budget and actors culled from Bumfuck, Michigan's summerstock, too.

I'm pretty sure that a competent writer/director could have done an interesting take on the book by squeezing it into a single movie and making the ideas the star. The basic plot doesn't have that much going on: Dagny is running her railroad, Henry makes his special metal, the moochers descend, the great capitalists disappear, eventually Dagny and Henry do as well, and every great capitalist finds his or her way to Galt's Gulch where they carve out a utopia based on self-interest and free trade. Also, there's some sex along the way. The end.

It's not the budget of Star Wars that made it a great movie. And the actors at the time were basically the equivalent of actors culled from Bumfuck, Michigan's summerstock. Alec Guinness was a semi-name, I guess. We know Harrison Ford as obviously and hugely talented NOW but at the time he was fresh off doing carpentry work to make ends meet if I remember correctly. Mark Hamill wasn't well known before and really has only had his voicework as the Joker aside from playing Luke. His range is, shall we say, limited. Carrie Fisher is alright. But she certainly wasn't a great actress.

Hmmm... the first Atlas Shrugged earned $4.8 million on a budget of $20 million.

And they made another one?

Its almost as if capitalism wasn't the driving factor here.... LOL.

Sure seems like everyone involved in making the movie was a moocher and a leech.

Didn't even realize there was a part 1, let alone a part 2.

Why? Were you an expert consultant on the film?

I see it the same way I see the Left Behind movies. A small group of people with avid ideology push that ideology in the most hamfisted way possible, and consider it brilliant, while the rest of the world looks at said movies as what they are; films made to evangelize for the benefit of the true believers.

Exactly. Contrast these films with The Fountainhead, also from a Rand script, and considered a classic.

Of course, starring Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper didn't hurt...

I really wanted to like the first one and, truth be told, there were some decent parts, but it was really, in just about all ways, a sub-par production. I think the producers were too slavish in their adherence to Rand's opus; they forget that a movie isn't merely a filmed representation of the book.

I probably won't see the current one (don't think it's even playing in my neck of the woods), but I'd like to hear from someone who does.

It's just really poorly written fiction. Why anyone bothers to base their entire world view on a work of fiction I don't know.

Atlas Shrugged and the bible have a lot in common.

Indeed.

No, they made that movie, it was (1980) Flash Gordon, and it kicks ass.

Well, it explains so much! It answers questions and is very neat and clean and easy to understand. It's interesting that the most slavish adherent of Rand that I know barely has two nickels to rub together and is a retired government employee. But he BELIEVES!

I find the obsession with Rand, both from people who like her and from those who hate her, to be amusing.

Yet another movie that's much, much better if you watch it stoned.

First time I saw it sober, I was

Whereas some of us just dislike mediocre film-making...

Some of us didn't even know the film existed, and since we have no emotional investment in the book or the movie, don't even really care.

I haven't seen either movie (and won't- reading the book was pain enough) but clearly what this movie needed was not a translation to the big screen, but an adaptation based on her ideas. Sort of like how Philip K. Dick's shorts get made into movies that keep the kernel of the idea but are substantially different end products.

The book is too long, too clunky, and too dated to make a good modern movie.

/thread

I've yet to see it, and I have no excuse.

I watched the first one when it came out on Netflix (mainly because I like trains, and I like Armin Shimerman). It was heavy, plodding, and felt like celluloid molasses. Some parts just didn't make a lick of sense, some things were just oddly connected, and the behavior of the characters were what you'd hear with an ideologue shoving words in their mouths. None of it felt natural.

I feel the story could be a solid movie, if they wouldn't have been, as you mentioned, so slavish to the source material. They took themselves way too damned seriously, as if they were afraid to step away from the book in any way, and the movie really suffers for it.

I finally got to see it when I was about 6 years old, and I loved it. So yes, watch it either stoned, or as a small child.

On the upside, the theme song began my lifelong love of Queen.

Anyone who fondly remembers the 1980 camp classic Flash Gordon simply MUST see the movie Ted (the one where Mark Wahlberg has a real living teddy bear). There are some hilarious references to Flash in it.

I saw it perfectly sober (ironically the first time for a film class), and I have to admit I found it pretty hilarious in a "so bad it's good" way.

I saw the porno parody Flesh Gordon before I saw the original. The pacing was better, but the acting was a bit wooden.

Refrences? Sam "Flash Gordon" Jones was in it!!!!