This is a pretty bad movie.

It’s not a bad looking movie, per se. The images are crisp and nicely composed. The lead actors are soap-opera pretty, and it’s clear that the filmmakers did their best to make a professional film with their limited budget.

The performances are also in the soap-opera ballpark, but it’s hard to blame the actors. They seem uniformly game and competent, and they do what can be done with the lines they’re given.

The real problem is twofold. In an abundance of respect for the original text, the story is still about railroad barons and steel tycoons. I think that if the director had more confidence, he could have served the ideas better by creating a more cinematic story that made the points the book makes without enslaving it to the rickety and antiquated plot. There isn’t any reason trains, bridges and magical alloys need to dominate a storyline that’s set in our near future. Like everything else in Randiana these elements are just props and the larger ideas wouldn’t suffer if they were updated.

More importantly, the characters are almost always speaking in manifestos and not dialogue. It’s difficult to imagine any group of human beings speaking to each other this way, and it takes a toll on your suspension of disbelief. I recognize that Rand wrote this way, but her bad ear for human dialogue is no more essential to the core ideas than the rail barons are. A little effort tuning the screenplay for modern ears would have gone a long way. Without that tuning, it’s just an extremely static film where all the conversations are nothing more than exposition.

[ Minor spoilers to follow. Forgive me, but if you don’t know the outline of this novel by now, you haven’t spent enough time with suburban college freshmen and I can’t help you.]

When the alphas are being collected by the shadowy figure (who I kept expecting to be Rorschach for some reason) we’re given a little crawl that tells us the date they went missing and what they did for a living. They’re all CEOs, owners and managers. That’s another holdover / oversight (holdoversight?) that could have done with a little more consideration.

When Rand was a girl, the model for CEOs and business owners might have been Ford and Edison. That is to say, men who created the products they sell. In our modern context, that’s crazy rare, and it undermines Rand’s philosophy to ignore that. These days, increased specialization and the demands of the market rarely let the people who actually create the technology run the companies they inspire. Executives these days are a special class, bred for expertise in sales,fundraising and hair management. The geeks who build the future are generally forced into the background as soon as their company has significant outside investment. Builders and sellers occupy distinct corporate strata.

So while it might have made sense in her day to collect the CEOs as the ubermensch producer types the rest of us feed on, it doesn’t now. If you wanted to get at the people who invent things, who actually push the ball down the field, you can’t look in the boardroom. I’ve got a feeling that Rand wouldn’t have picked Ballmer and Fiorina for Atlantis. People like that aren’t any less leeches than the proles Rand hated so much. A bit of energy directed toward putting the ideas forward instead of the deeply flawed novel they appeared in would likely have resulted in a better movie. I think Rand’s ideas are childish twaddle, but even I can see a dozen ways to translate them into an interesting film.

That’s what happens, I suppose, when the director has no vision of his own and insists on slavishly aping the strong vision of someone else. Rand would not have approved.