Credit for Trying

A while back Debby and I watched the third movie of the trilogy based on Atlas Shrugged. When a friend asked me what I thought a couple of days later, the best thing I could say was that I gave them credit for  trying.  It and the two others before it were not awful. They just were not very good. They were done on low budgets with generally unknown actors and directors and no continuity of either actors or directors from one film to the others. However, I wonder if a good director with a Lord of the Rings size budget and the same cast and crew  throughout would have done much better. I think it would be really hard  to make a good movie  from a very long, tightly interwoven, and philosophical story such as Atlas Shrugged.

The most unfortunate thing about the movies is that they reinforced the false impression  that the book is mainly about politics.  In the book, while the political conflict and ideas are important to the story, they are also clearly only a part of larger and more fundamental issues and a much bigger set of ideas.  It would be easy for someone who had not read the book to come away from the movies thinking the political story was all there was.

Atlas Shrugged is hard enough for many people to understand anyway. A basic thing to grasp is  that it is not a book about real life or the real world despite its generally realistic setting, but rather a book about how the world might  or would be if people followed their beliefs and theories though to their logical conclusions and reflected them in their behavior pretty much without reserve.  I fear the movies miss conveying that point almost entirely.

I also doubt if someone unfamiliar with the book could have followed the plot of the movies very well.  Things seemed to get a bit sketchy from time to time. Still, I enjoyed watching the films even while wishing they had been better. I have two of them on DVD and will buy the third.