Atlas Shrugged Part 1 Movies (2011)

Watch Atlas Shrugged Part 1 Starring Edi Gathegi and Taylor Schilling (2011)  One live Streaming Being a big fan of Ayn Rand's great novel Atlas Shrugged, I expect a less-than-stellar movie version of the book. Happily, I was very pleased with the first installment of the film.

With the length and scope of the story, it requires either an incredibly long movie or a division into different parts, which they decided to do here. While I've heard plenty about the overall low budget of the film, it is still very well done and they spent some good money on CGI effects for the John Galt Line. Taylor Schilling is actually very good as Dagny Taggart - she projects the high-end efficiency and passion of the character, and she is appropriately sexy as well. Grant Bowler as Hank Reardon turns out to be a decent choice as well.

Bottom line, though: I brought along my 16-year-old daughter to see the film, and I expected her to find it "boring" or otherwise uninteresting. Big surprise, though: she loved it! She likes the story and was very drawn to the character of Dagny Taggart. Dagny is such an inspirational role model for women, and I'm glad to see my daughter was inspired as well. 

This movie is Part 1 of three parts; and it covers the first part of the book.

The movie is well made - the quality is actually quite good. Acting was generally good to excellent. Camera work was good; although the low budget resulted in a missing camera angle here and there. Special effects were consistently well done.

The story, of course, is exceptional; and it is well-told in this movie.

Numbers I've seen indicate 80% of the audience (more than 12,000 people were polled) give this movie a thumbs up. And yet, only about 13% of professional movie critics gave this a thumbs up. By voting it down, the professional movie critics really got it wrong. Why? I don't know . . . I am truly surprised that so many movie critics would allow their own political bias to influence their review - but I can find no objective reason for the critics' poor grades.

Some people would say that those of the liberal persuasion would not enjoy this; as the message is counter to the socialist perspective. But regardless of the message, we are today living in the world of Atlas Shrugged; and thus, I urge you to watch this movie. If you are to open your mind to new and different ideas, then this is certainly a movie that will challenge you.  

As an avid Ayn Rand fan I drove 2.5 hours to Kansas City, which had the nearest theater showing the movie. It was fantastic. I smiled throughout the movie and left the movie with that smile. After watching the movie I finished reading the novel that I had previously started.

I do however have one chief complaint and that is that the movie was too short and did not cover some major topics that the book did. One glaring oversight is that the movie does not have any coverage of the relationship between Eddie, Dagny, and Francisco and how they were childhood friends. In more depth the movie only briefly hints at the teenage romantic relationship between Dagny and Francisco. In addition there is no mention of Dr. Robert Stadler in the movie even though Hugh Akston is portrayed.

I hope that this glaring oversight is corrected in the second part and more depth is added to the movie. Don't get me wrong, the first part was great. But I feel it could have been even better with the extra depth of the character relationships to each other. Watch Atlas Shrugged Part 1 Starring Edi Gathegi and Taylor Schilling (2011)  One live Streaming