Atlas Shrugged Part II – Either Or

I went to see the second installment in the projected ATLAS SHRUGGED movie trilogy, and my reaction was mixed. Let me divide my reactions into the good, the bad, and the indifferent. There are some minor spoilers in this review, so read on at your own peril.

For those of you not familiar with the story: the United States of the near future is suffering from an economic depression brought on by the greed and corruption of the allegedly altruistic and upright populist and socialist reformers in all walks of life. Those whose work allows the society to continue to function, from artists to jurists to philosophers to inventors to entrepreneurs, are mysteriously vanishing one by one. Dagny Taggart, the ambitious and ultra-competent Vice President in charge of operations of an transcontinental railway, sees her nation and her company disintegrating in the rising tide of irrationality, culminating in the imposition of Directive 10-289 which outlaws normal economic activity. She seeks to find the mysterious figure behind the disappearances, the man who vowed to stop the motor of the world. Who is he? Who is John Galt?

The first good is that this movie was ever made at all. It seems that all my favorite books of my childhood and youth are being made into movies that are faithful to the original work, and as trilogies or series. That would have been (as Vizzini would say) inconceivable even a decade or so ago.

I am embarrassed to admit to my Catholic friends that this is a favorite book of mine. Yes, I actually like Ayn Rand’s monomaniacal hammering of her points and her overblown vitriolic rhetoric, which veers into self parody. I like it for several reasons.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.