I went and saw Atlas
Shrugged Part II about a month ago so that I could write a review on the
move for the paper that I write for here on campus, The Terrapin Times
(umdtimes.com). Now that the review has been published, I’d like to share it
with all of you, with some slight modifications from how it appeared in print.
I highly recommend this movie to everyone and I also recommend you go back and
watch part one. It can be found on Netflix or can be purchased on iTunes for
just $6.99.
Atlas Shrugged Part
II is the second in a trilogy of movies bringing Ayn Rand’s 1957 New York
Times bestselling novel to the big screen. Set “sometime in the near future”,
the United States as depicted in Atlas
Shrugged is quite simply falling apart. Brilliant and creative minds are
vanishing left and right, unemployment has climbed to over 20 percent, gas has
reached over $40 per gallon as energy prices skyrocket, more business are
closing every day and the government is asserting more and more control as it
all gets worse.
One of the movie’s characters, Francisco d’Anconia,
played by Esai Morales, explains the title perfectly about halfway through the
movie when he says, “If you saw Atlas, knees buckling, arms trembling, but
still trying to hold up the world with the last of his strength, what would you
tell him to do?” He goes on in that sequence to say that he would tell Atlas to
shrug, to just let it all fall away.
Central to the movie and trilogy as a whole are two key
pieces of legislation: the “Fair Share Law” and “Directive 10-289”. The Fair
Share Law makes it so that all companies are to produce the same amount as any
other company in an industry regardless of size, with what is produced being
distributed according to need. The penalty for breaking this law is 10 years in
prison and a fine of $50 million. Other parts of the law prevent businesses
from moving from poor states to rich ones and implement a federal tax on the
state of Colorado, undergoing an immense and very profitable oil boom at the
time, to redistribute the wealth to those states which are struggling. People
are only allowed to own one business. Owning the entire manufacturing process
for a good is now impossible.
Directive 10-289, introduced in the middle of the movie,
goes even further. It fixes the quantities of materials companies are allowed
to buy and produce, makes it illegal for anyone to be fired and freezes all
forms of income at current levels. After this law was signed, a news anchor
added, “With the stroke of a pen, the nation of life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness has been altered forever.”
What makes this movie relevant is just how close this
country appears to be to something like what is depicted in Atlas Shrugged. No, we aren’t at 20
percent unemployment, but U6, or so-called “true” unemployment, is stuck around
15 percent. No, we haven’t collapsed into socialism yet because capitalism has
proven superior time and time again. However, there is a real “Recovery Czar” in
the current administration, who has duties very similar to those of the
“Recovery Czar” and “Unification Board” from the movie. As the news anchor in
the movie rightly said, it only takes the stroke of a pen to fundamentally
alter the path of a great nation.
Although Rand’s 1,168 page novel was first published 55
years ago, she wrote the story without giving any specifics as to the time,
giving the story a quality of timelessness that allowed the movies to be set in
the future beyond 2012 without any problems.
The movie definitely could have used a major boost in its
special effects budget, but that problem really did not take away from the
story as a whole. The movie features a host of well recognized actors,
including Robert Picardo from Star Trek:
Voyager; Jason Beghe and Arye Gross, recurring actors on several television
shows including Castle, CSI, Law and
Order and NCIS; and Kim Rhodes,
probably best known by our generation as Carey Martin in The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. It is worth noting that all the
roles in Atlas Shrugged were recast
between parts one and two.
Most film critics have given Atlas Shrugged Part II incredibly negative reviews. Rotten Tomatoes
gives the film a 0 percent rating, despite users on Rotten Tomatoes giving the
film a rating of over 80 percent. Users on IMDB have given the film a 5.4 out
of 10 rating. In this case, the critics should not be believed in any case. Atlas Shrugged is an excellent story and
it could not be any more relevant than it is right now. It shows in a very
accurate way what happens when a government decides to redistribute the wealth
in the name of the “greater good”.
Jimmy Williams
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