Posted on 04/28/2011 11:29:15 PM PDT by fight_truth_decay
I’m encouraged by this news. I saw the movie last week and found it faster-paced than I expected. My wife claims the acting was sub-par, but maybe I was too wrapped up in the characters to notice. I found Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon quite credible and attractive characters. And even though Rand is often criticized for this, I didn’t find villians like Wesley Mouch to be any more “cartoonish” than real-world politicians such as Barney Frank, Henry Waxman or Nancy Pelosi.
My single criticism is that the John Galt Line train scene was the least heart-pumping part. The characters are saying the train is moving at 250 mph, faster than any train ever has run in America, but the actual visuals of the train in motion strongly undercut that claim. It looked like it might be going 60 mph at best. I don’t know enough about special effects, but it seems to me they would have been better served creating the long-distance images of the train as digital images rather than filming a real train (though for all I know, what showed up on screen actual was nothing more than a digitized train).
I missed the back story about Dagny and Francisco. It’s too bad they couldn’t make the movie 15 minutes longer and include flashbacks or something to help those who didn’t already know the story to understand why the two behaved with each other as they did. Likewise, Francisco’s refusal to even meet with James Taggart is WAY more a slap in the face if you understand that the two previously had known each other for years during childhood. But I understand that a limited budget and limited film time precluded every important detail from getting onto the screen.
The one thing that I thought the movie did better than the book was making the connection between John Galt and the disappearance of strikers. You see the mystery character intercepting various people such as Midas Mulligan followed immediately by a news flash to the effect that individual had disappeared. In the book it took me way longer to make that connection. Similarly, filmed as it was, Galt’s repeated appearance is much more obvious in the movie than it was to me in the book. I do think it helped a lot for me to have just re-read the book to better appreciate just what was and was not included in the film.
Anyway, I look forward to the sequel and hope they retain the same characters for the sake of continuity.
Will see if they come through with Part 2 and 3 as the makers said will happen. For the amount of capital they had, they did well by it.
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