Atlas Shrugged film to be released in 2011

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/

by marilyn • 16 years ago

30 79 16 years ago

imdb.com

Artifex• 16 years ago

Right in time for election season.

grandalf15• 16 years ago

Do you think one particular party would benefit? I don't.

jbooth8• 16 years ago

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

lionhearted• 16 years ago

It's got some flaws, but it's one of the most pro-individualism, pro-production, pro-creativity, pro-persistence, pro-hard work, anti-politicking, anti-corruption works of all time. Her characterization of the people she's opposed to is a bit juvenile, but there's a lot of really good and valid stuff in there too - it's the only book I know of that acknowledges the phenomenon where a man works really hard to provide for a bunch of people who think he's not doing enough (Hank Rearden). Also, the opening chapter where everyone is looking to cover their ass and Dagny says she'll accept responsibility if something goes wrong introduces a very strong female protagonist who does business, travels, and lives her life in a strong way.

It's not high literature, it's got some flaws, but it's got some great messages - it'd be a shame people who have contradictory politics just throw all those great messages out.

jbooth8• 16 years ago

Ecch.

Let's stick with the Lord of the Rings comparison. If Ayn Rand wrote it, Aragorn and Gandalf would have just hopped the first boat west and let the world fend for itself, because hey, what's the world done for them?

If you were born in America with access to a good education, you're in the luckiest 1% of anyone who ever lived anywhere, and that's all before your 10th birthday. The message of Atlas Shrugged, that these people are 100% self-made and the world owes them something for their hard work, is entitled bullshit.

mhd• 16 years ago

> where a man works really hard to provide for a bunch of people who think he's not doing enough

Isn't that the plot of every Charles Dickens novel ever?

LargeWu• 16 years ago

If that's all you took from her philosophy - being an individual is good, working hard is good, etc. - then you missed a lot of the detail.

To Rand, the ultimate measure of one's self worth is how much money you are making vs. how much you could be making. Building a company up, then offshoring all of your labor to China is more moral than keeping your operations local, because it will lower your costs, and therefore increase profits. And profits, to Rand, is the only thing that matters, as long as you aren't stealing from somebody else.

Similarly, in Rand's book it would be moral for, say, hedge fund managers to make risky bets on bad mortgage-backed securities, even if such a house of cards would eventually cause huge harm to the world economy, as long as the hedge fund managers make money doing so.

In Rand's world, there are no such things as externalities. There is only black and white, good and evil. It is a fairy tale land where everybody is always capable of making rational decisions with perfect information. Markets are always perfectly efficient.

Within the context of her writings, her philosophy works because she gets to define the axioms. But it all falls apart when one realizes that the world is far more complex than she imagines it to be.

ojbyrne3• 16 years ago

I read Atlas Shrugged and immediately followed it by (re)reading The Grapes of Wrath. Both are horribly doctrinaire (with opposing viewpoints), so it made for an interesting contrast. Steinbeck can at least put a sentence together.

grandalf15• 16 years ago

Example of a particularly bad sentence? I'm curious b/c although I'm a native English speaker I was not put off by Rand's prose.

grandalf15• 16 years ago

Note that most people who aren't fans of Atlas Shrugged resort to making dumb, belittling jokes about it rather than articulating an argument.

The internet is full of parodies, etc., but there really aren't many people who dislike the book and are also capable of persuasively arguing against it without resorting to religious authority or mocking sneers (or both).

Why? Probably because most people haven't read the book. It's not the easiest read. There are great audio versions, but audiobooks are generally viewed with disdain by literary types...

lzw5• 16 years ago

When I first read the book, I started looking for criticism to see if I'd been tricked, or if she'd played on my emotions to make me think something was reasonable or logical that wasn't.

I have found some obscure philosophical arguments that seemed to be based on a misunderstanding or different interpretation, or making a mountain out of what I think is a molehill. But those are in the minority.

Almost all the criticism I've found seems to take a very shallow, "soundbite" perspective. eg: to presume that the book opposes charity, advocates meanness or evil, etc.

Near as I can tell, there is a huge cult who hates Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged, and the reason seems to be that her book clearly and logically demolishes the philosophy they espouse.

They cannot address it honestly because that would bring up the actual issues in their philosophy and likely many people would see that Atlas Shrugged shows them to be fallacious.

So, instead, they attack her with ad hominem and derision and refuse to be honest about what the book actually said.

secretasiandan2• 16 years ago

This phenomenon isn't isolated to Ayn Rand/Objectivism. And it doesn't occur with Objectivism because Atlas Shrugged/The Fountainhead are hard reads.

Its because most people don't spend time objectively studying topics/philosophies they don't have a positive bias towards.

msie• 16 years ago

On the other hand, many of her proponents probably haven't read the book either so it sort of evens out.

yummyfajitas9• 16 years ago

True, though there is a perfectly good criticism to make - Rand is simply incorrect when she claims you can use reason to derive morality (either her specific kind, or any kind).

You can use reason to evaluate actions based on moral principles of low complexity, but you simply can't derive those principles. In terms of formal logic, you need at least one true statement about the morality predicate in order to derive other true statements about it, you can't start from nothing.

dublinclontarf• 16 years ago

Read Atlas shrugged, liked it, so here are some critical comments.

Galts speech is too drawn out, I skipped over it after 2 pages (it's like 20 pages). Way too much repetition.

Characters are fairly stiff.

For a good month or two after reading I was a selfish shit. In this I think I'm not alone.

It's pretty difficult to find issues with the philosophy espoused in the book, I think the only thing worth criticizing is how poorly it is as a novel (as a political treatise it's a pleasant read).

msluyter• 16 years ago

A good place to start would be "Why I Am Not an Objectivist," by Michael Huemer:

http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/rand.htm

gamble• 16 years ago

The sequel is already covered:

http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif

aaronbrethorst2• 16 years ago

Five weeks of principal photography on a five million dollar budget (http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/07/20/atlas-s...).

Sounds like it's going to be hilariously bad.

malloreon• 16 years ago

The director is also an actor who has to date only directed 12 episodes of the WB tv show he starred in.

lurkinggrue• 16 years ago

Going to have a separate film for that long-ass speech?

yummyfajitas9• 16 years ago

This movie is supposedly part 1 of a trilogy, so yes.

cparedes• 16 years ago

Here's some arguments against Ayn Rand's philosophy that aren't exactly shallow: http://noblesoul.com/orc/critics/

lzw5• 16 years ago

Any worthy philosophy will have academics debating the meaning, meerits and logic of it. That bothers me not in the least.

If any of the critics you see from leftists who attack it used these arguments than I'd respect that. However, they just assert some nonsense and then engage in adhominem and it is really pretty tragic.

shadowfox• 16 years ago

Are you making this statements with regard to criticisms from the link above or in general?

Hates_• 16 years ago

The cast seems awfully young considering how I had always imagined them to be while reading the book. I had pictured this early 20-century group of "captains of industries" to be mid-forties to late-fifties at least.

Atlas Shrugged film to be released in 2011

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