Atlas Shrugged: Part one of three posts

Atlas Shrugged is a bad movie, but far too bland to be entertainingly bad.
Roy Edroso and Roger Ebert have done outstanding reviews (and here’s Edroso’s take on the right-wing attempts to praise the movie), so I’ll focus on just two aspects: Atlas Shrugged as a movie about business, and the problems of setting a 50 year old novel five years into the future. For reasons of length, I’ll be breaking it up into three parts.
There have been lots of movies about business, along with many that just use business as a backdrop for a murder mystery, social satire, etc. I think the successful ones have certain things in common—almost none of which are found in Atlas Shrugged.
•Details. Forty-Second Street (a film which treats Broadway very much as a business) shows a lot of the work involved in putting on a show. All the President’s Men and Day the Earth Caught Fire both give a lot of attention to the daily grind of hunting down a difficult story (though they’re not business movies per se). Skyscraper Souls presents Warren Williams’ skyscraper as a bustling, complex business, and we’re given a detailed look at the financial manipulations he uses to get the money he needs.
We get none of that in Atlas Shrugged. When asked why she’s enthused about Rearden Metal, Dagny simply asserts “I see what I see” (my impression of engineers is that they wax a lot more technical about that stuff). As for business, there’s rarely any more detail than who gets paid to invest in what; the only real details is about the various political machinations being employed to destroy Rearden’s dreams.
We see Rearden glance at his mills but doesn’t do anything except sign papers and discuss government regulation. Dagny starts a new company, but other than staring down the union men who question her, she doesn’t do much running it, and takes what appears to be two or three weeks off at the end of the movie to hunt down the lost inventor of a super-motor. There’s nothing other than the film’s say so that indicates most of the people John Galt is luring away are anybody special; the most Dagny can say about one of her employees who goes Galt is that he had management potential.
•Visionaries. Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead, Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, Warren Williams in Skyscraper Souls. Jimmy Stewart trying to develop an off-shore oil well in Thunder Bay. All passionate about what they’re doing. All determined to make it to the top (ditto the scrappy hero of the low-budget newspaper drama, park Row). We get some of that here—Rearden is clearly passionate about his metal, and an oil baron gets quite enthused about his business, but nothing compared to Cooper or Welles, Williams or Stewart (all much better actors of course).