Got free tickets to see this. Even with very low expectations I came away sorely disappointed.
I'm not a fan of the book, but it's at least popular enough to warrant a legitimate adaptation. Instead, this is a clearly rushed (the producer started production just days before he lost the rights to the book) hack job with no-name actors delivering soap opera performances in a story they've muddled despite only covering roughly a third of the ground of the novel. Updating it to modern times, but keeping the industry as railroads and steel feels weirdly anachronistic and is explained via a rather absurd backstory. The stakes are low, the suspense about Galt is practically nonexistent despite the frequent interjections intended to remind the audience "Hey, there's something mysterious and important going on!" and the constant, blatant preaching of the dialogue which seemed egregious on the page seems doubly so when read aloud in the context of a "drama." No one talks like that ever and it comes across as really stilted, unnatural, and force feeding an audience the anti-humanist message.
The production values are equivalent to what you get in a SyFy original movie like Sharkotpus with terrible set design, CGI that looks like it was done in MS Paint, and lazy, static camera-work. The director's previous work was on One Tree Hill and the screenwriter's background is working on straight-to-DVD horror movies about mutant monsters with names like "Evilution" and "Cemetery Gates." That should tell you everything you need to know about the level of quality on display here.
For people who didn't like, were mixed, or are unfamiliar with the book I think it'll be a colossal failure. For most fans of the book, it will be a terrible bastardization. Only the hardest core ideologues of the story's objectivist message desperate to see it popularized in the mainstream can I imagine championing this. Whatever else it may be, this is by no means a quality or even competent movie.
I'm not a fan of the book, but it's at least popular enough to warrant a legitimate adaptation. Instead, this is a clearly rushed (the producer started production just days before he lost the rights to the book) hack job with no-name actors delivering soap opera performances in a story they've muddled despite only covering roughly a third of the ground of the novel. Updating it to modern times, but keeping the industry as railroads and steel feels weirdly anachronistic and is explained via a rather absurd backstory. The stakes are low, the suspense about Galt is practically nonexistent despite the frequent interjections intended to remind the audience "Hey, there's something mysterious and important going on!" and the constant, blatant preaching of the dialogue which seemed egregious on the page seems doubly so when read aloud in the context of a "drama." No one talks like that ever and it comes across as really stilted, unnatural, and force feeding an audience the anti-humanist message.
The production values are equivalent to what you get in a SyFy original movie like Sharkotpus with terrible set design, CGI that looks like it was done in MS Paint, and lazy, static camera-work. The director's previous work was on One Tree Hill and the screenwriter's background is working on straight-to-DVD horror movies about mutant monsters with names like "Evilution" and "Cemetery Gates." That should tell you everything you need to know about the level of quality on display here.
For people who didn't like, were mixed, or are unfamiliar with the book I think it'll be a colossal failure. For most fans of the book, it will be a terrible bastardization. Only the hardest core ideologues of the story's objectivist message desperate to see it popularized in the mainstream can I imagine championing this. Whatever else it may be, this is by no means a quality or even competent movie.