Atlas Shrugged: Part 1

This started out as a comment at Tam’s post about target marketing fail while waiting for Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 but grew to the point I figured it should be a post of my own.


Son James made a very similar “target audience” fail remark during the previews about different movies at our location as well.


James has read the book three times and I read it once then listened to the unabridged audio version once (yes, Galt’s eight hour monologue actually takes eight hours). We both liked the movie but had some minor criticisms about the movie skipping over some points too rapidly for “newcomers” to really understand the points being made.


We both really liked that the sex scene with Dagny was not the way Rand always portrayed an ideal man/woman relationship.


The scene wife Barbara liked best was where the guy wanted Rearden’s money but asked Rearden’s name not associated with the donation.


I agree with the commenters who said the casting of James Taggert was a little off.


I was uncomfortable with a train going 250 MPH on those curves with the passengers standing up. Sorry, but I don’t think they ran the numbers through the physics equations before they filmed those scenes. And the curves had better have some appropriate slope to them to keep the train from rolling over or pushing the tracks off the railway bed.

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4 thoughts on “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1

  1. Yeah, the train scene had my inner engineer going, “Uhm, what are they smoking?” Given the altitude changes, the curves in the track, and the irregularities of the “cargo” cars at the rear of the train, that was a pipedream indeed…

  2. I’m sure that some of the people involved in creating that scene (which I’ve only heard about) were probably regulars to the thread mentioned here.

    Some people have absolutely no clue when it comes to reality and physics. Especially with how unforgiving and unyielding they are.

  3. I’ll repeat some sentiments here that I expressed in Snowflakes in Heck: This is just a movie, and the makers of the movie didn’t have the time and inclination to make their own high-speed rail. Bitter even mentioned that they had a budget of $10 million, which isn’t much to work with for modern special effects!

    So long as the violations of physics aren’t too over-the-top, I have a tendency not to mind them. I haven’t seen the movie, but I’m fairly confident that trains traveling too fast on a curved track isn’t going to phase me too much. But then, I’m a mathematician, not a physicist or engineer (at least, not yet…), so I probably have a higher “bogus-physics” threshold than most engineers.

    What potentially concerns me most about the movie is Joe’s observation that the movie had to be compressed a bit–and thus, if you haven’t read the book, you might not understand some of the goings-ons. I haven’t read the book, so I can expect trouble on that front when I go see the movie!

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