You ever seen a movie so bad that it made you want to set an elementary school on fire? I did. Last night I went to see the film version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which is essentially Twilight for all those Tea Party people. A couple dozen shirt-tucking, pleated khaki wearing milquetoast douches with maniacal looks in their eyes filled the theatre. I was convinced it was an elaborate ruse. I could just picture the doors locking behind me, being tied up while they decried the principles of socialism and then, having my still-beating heart ripped out of my chest as a sacrifice to the Gods of Regan and Rand. What actually transpired was much, much worse.
First off, I’m pretty sure they stole the camera from the set of some Mexican telenovela to shoot this movie. That does explain why the last few episodes of “Llena De Amor” look like they were shot from somebody’s iPhone. The dialogue was equally bad. The script sounds like an infomercial for unrestricted capitalism, “So wait, the government wants me to supply the jobs, AND they want to make it impossible for me to provide those jobs! That’s just ridiculous!” I sent in my three easy payments of “HA HA HA!” right there in the theatre.
I could feel the hateful, homoerotic stares coming from an audience of Glen Beck look-alikes all over my commie skin. With every outburst I felt like fucking Che. I also had a problem with the pacing of the movie. For a whole film that revolves around trains, (which are inherently awesome) how could it be this lackluster? The movie was wretchedly slow and boring, I kept hoping for a train to transform into a giant Decepticon and start killing off the main cast. Then, a notice would come across the screen and say, “Sike! This shitty movie has TRANSFORMED into Transformers 3!” Wouldn’t that be the ultimate Transformer movie: One that starts out in a shitty guise and then turns into a bunch of robots killing people? Like, you think you are going see a movie about how unions are destroying the economy, but surprise, it’s about how Megatron finally got his hands on the allspark. Instead, Transformers 3 will be undoubtedly horrible, and Atlas Shrugged was an actual movie. That’s just the world we live in. Time to move along to the main characters.
The male lead is a guy named Henry Reardon, and he owns Reardon Steel. You know how short people like to be all aggressive, and guys with small dicks drive around in huge trucks. Well Henry is fascinated by making hard, solid metal. You can tell where this is going. He even looks like a guy in an erectile dysfunction commercial. He runs around saying shit like, “My metal is the best! Oh it’s so hard! It lasts forever!” And he actually has not one but two sex scenes! I was pretty excited about this. Tea party sex!
Scientists know more about the mating habits of Pterodactyls than about conservatives in coitus. I used to think Tea Party people would just wrap one testicle in a dollar bill and dip it into a vagina. Then they’d burn an Obama picture while jerking off. I was wrong. Apparently, you just stuff your flaccid wiener in a woman, no pumping, and just stare down at her until you hear violin music. And that’s how trust funds are born. Henry also has the vilest contempt for his employees, remarking how they are useless peons who owe their livelihoods to him. News flash: unless you’re running a fucking snowball stand, you need employees just as much as they need you.
Henry wants to be in big business, but he doesn’t want to be a business man. He doesn’t understand the world he lives in or how it’s changing. He feels entitled on the merits of his product alone. In a vacuum, that would make sense, but this is a big-boy world with shades of gray and complexities that range beyond just having a good idea. You have to adapt. Isn’t survival of the fittest one of the merits of unfettered capitalism? It obviously doesn’t apply when you are losing. It’s the government’s fault when that happens. He blatantly states that his number one goal is the Benjamins. That’s it. Nothing is above the bottom line. The zeros in his bank account are what matter, but when someone comes to offer him three times what his company will ever be worth, he haughtily declines out of principle. He says he won’t sell because the company is “his.” Well, if he sells, the money would be “his” too, and isn’t that his whole objective? None of this really made any sense to me. Reardon is nothing more than a hypocritical, self-important delusional douche. So it can be concluded that what Luke Skywalker is to nerds is what Henry Reardon is to Republicans. That should be an S.A.T. question.
Dagny Taggart is the female lead, and a cross between Ann Coulter and Victor Newman. She inherited her daddy’s Railroad and runs it as if she thought the whole thing up herself. She seems to always be one step ahead of the competition and politicians while functioning as a vehicle for the film’s philosophy. She even remarks in amazement, “Wow, altruism really just hurts everybody,” when learning about how the minimum wage scale put a company out of business. The film is mostly just a collection of scenes where she and Henry sit in their offices and mow down union/politician/lawyer shills that are sent in for the mere purpose of being verbally undressed to purport Rand’s ideals.
Like I said, it’s all an infomercial for being a selfish, unapologetic delusional dickface. The best part is when her little choo-choo train company runs out of money. What does Dagny do? She goes out and gets a second job. Sike! She runs around and asks all her rich friends for some cash. There is no pulling herself up by the bootstraps. There is no getting to the grindstone. Why didn’t she get a job at McDonalds and work for her damn railroad financing herself? Isn’t that the conservative consensus when they see a person asking for a handout? I guess it’s not considered panhandling if you do it in a pant-suit. I’m surprised Rand didn’t have Dagny steal the money from a family planning clinic or something. Having her beg and plead to greater, wealthier men was kind of degrading. But aren’t all those conservative women filled with masochistic self-hate? I’m pretty sure part two will have her getting strangled and raped by a burly Puerto Rican in a gas station bathroom.
One of the highlights of the movie is the setting. It takes place in the year 2016, where the Dow has dropped below 4,000 and the whole country is just like Detroit. Hunger and blight are everywhere, but sadly, Robocop is not. There will be no cybernetic savior for our future. It apparently rests in the hands of the wealthy. We are forced to see billionaires and millionaires attending fancy parties in fancy outfits drinking champagne and talking business while the masses huddle around barrel fires eating dog food.
The poor are never personified here. Mostly, they are looked at as a mere inconvenience and occasionally as a malevolent force that is shaping anti-capitalistic policy in Washington. You see, in 2016, corporations miraculously don’t control the government anymore, and politicians are passing laws that inhibit the free market. One law even States that one man can’t own more than one company. We then get a sad, violin-soaked montage of wealthy business owners signing over their excess companies. The only thing missing was the recipients of said companies all being black. That’s probably on the deleted scenes, along with commentary from Craig T. Nelson. The 2016 politicians are also corrupt and use socialistic policies for their own personal gain, as if present-day politicians don’t do that now with capitalistic policies, which leads one to understand that the problems might lay with the politicians themselves rather than the economic philosophies they employ. This simple truth is lost somewhere between a 1000 ft steel bridge with no support beams and Dagny’s lifeless, dickhole eyes.
There is a mystery element to the whole thing, and it’s so stupid I feel almost silly talking about it. Dagney and Henry stumble into Old man McMurphy’s abandoned warehouse and find top-secret plans to build a super-duper engine that runs on air. They know just from looking at four pencil-drawn diagrams that it works fantastically and will reshape the world, but ominous forces don’t want that, yikes! This is what happens when Nancy Drew fucks Glen Beck.
Oh yeah, another mysterious element is all the country’s great entrepreneurs and businessmen are tired of the rules here in the United States, so they are packing their tea-bags and starting their own country. A big problem with starting a Never-Never land consisting strictly of business owners is who will be the employees? It’s all chiefs and no Indians. You know what a whole team of chiefs gets you (3rd place in the AFC West!). No, it gets you chaos. The smart money is these wealthy business owners are starting their own country in a land that already supplies an ample amount of black/brown labor for a discounted cost. I think they’ll all relocate to Somalia: it has no government, and it’s the purest form of free-market economics on earth. It’s working out so well for them too.
I guess we’ll have to wait for the sequel to see how that turns out. In case you didn’t know, Atlas Shrugged is only part one of a trilogy. Part two is called Poseidon Farted and it’s all about a bunch of home-schooled adolescents who blow up abortion clinics while minting their own money. Part Three is called Zeus Took a Job at Waffle House and it’s about a team of ghost hunters who track down the spirit of Joseph McCarthy and fellate him to climax using science.
The thing I hated most about this movie is that it does for Tea-party assholes what The Secret did for liberal Hollywood elites: It justifies their wealth, privilege and existence. Atlas even goes as far to quell any guilt the wealthy or privileged may harbor for not giving a shit about the less fortunate. It widens the disconnection. There is a loss if humanity in the process. Not only is avarice rewarded, it’s celebrated. And there is no representation of the middle-class in the film; it’s all lifestyles of the rich and famous or gutter-dwelling proletariats suffering in the hells they deserve. Perhaps that was Rand’s vision of Utopia all along.