Atlas Shrugged Part One premieres

Over the last couple of months, the Atlas Shrugged Movie blog has posted many reviews based on pre-release screenings of the movie, a new practice as far as I am aware. Most of the reviews, which were written for the most part by Randians or people sympathetic to the Randian position, were very positive, and indeed expressed astonished relief that a movie produced so inexpensively and so quickly turned out to be so good. Today the movie opens in theaters, and, based on a sampling of reviews posted at the Wall Street Journal, mainstream reviewers are absolutely panning it. Of course mainstream reviewers absolutely panned the book Atlas Shrugged when it was published in 1957. The book has many grave flaws, but is also extraordinarily powerful, original, and interesting. Mainstream reviewers were blind to all of the latter. If the movie is anything like the book, we can expect the same blindness from movie reviewers.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 15, 2011 10:48 AM | Send