‘Atlas Shrugged’ Trailer
By Russ Fischer/Feb. 11, 2011 4:51 pm EST
And now, after the break, there is a trailer for Atlas Shrugged Part I.
I’ll admit, after the breathless few reports about how the movie had to be made right now, and that actor Paul Johansson would both direct and play John Galt, I stopped following up on the project. So I was surprised to see some familiar faces here: Jon Polito, Michael Lerner, Graham Beckel, Edi Gathegi and Patrick Fischler, for example. They add welcome glimmers of life.
But while Paul Johansson looks like he might work as John Galt, Taylor Schilling (Mercy) seems to be far too vacant as Dagny Taggart. (She’s a far cry from Charlize Theron, Anne Hathaway or Julia Roberts, that’s for certain.) I can accept the film’s obvious budget workarounds (even though there are places where it looks like Atlas Shrugged: The Video Game) but without a compelling Dagny Taggart, this one is dead in the water. Could that just be the editing of the trailer, or, as feared when this was rushed into production, is this pure movie of the week stuff?
I’m going with the latter. Hell, if you don’t know the novel, this probably just looks like a movie about trains. You’d think this would be advertised more specifically to the large and rather rabid Atlas Shrugged fanbase. Now discuss: does this trailer seem to represent Ayn Rand’s Objectivist ideas at all, or does the trailer play like an implicit refutation of the core Objectivist belief that individuals have a moral imperative to act in their own best interest? I.e. the producer had to make the movie, so he did, and the result is…well, this. (And would Rand see this movie as hedonist? That is, a non-valid articulation of the producers’ own self-interest.)
as a bonus, here are two brief behind the scenes clips:
Thanks to /Film reader Rob M for the tip!
