- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
30The acting is so poor and the story so badly told that the viewer's feelings about Rand's novel - an epic ode to free-market fundamentalism - are almost immaterial.
-
38With a plot devoid of suspense and characters without complexity, Rand's iconic line elicits merely a yawn, or a shrug.
-
Apr 19, 201130Lifeless as entertainment and incoherent as ideology.
-
25Now I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone's vault.
-
25This movie is crushingly ordinary in every way, which with Rand I wouldn't have thought possible.
-
Apr 21, 201140The book proves proudly indigestible on film.
-
63Though a bit stiff in the joints and acted by an undistinguished cast amid TV-movie trappings, this low-budget adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel nevertheless contains a fire and a fury that makes it more compelling than the average mass-produced studio item.
-
38It's not a bad looking movie, with Deco design touches that remind me of the earlier Rand film adaptation, "The Fountainhead." But the acting's flat and the script is absurdly cluttered with characters whose purpose may only truly become clear if they ever are allowed to make the other two films they have planned.
-
50Speechy and preachy and just a teeny-weeny bit naughty.
-
0Who's the idiot responsible for this fiasco? You can't blame the Tea Party, an organization of 9 million that the film's producers are exploiting to get butts into seats. There's an object lesson in objectivism for you.
-
50The story, a dystopian tale with heroes and villains and lots of triumphs and reversals, is so busy and so inherently interesting that the movie is entertaining until the finish - or the sort of finish. As only the first part of the story, Atlas Shrugged doesn't end, it stops.
-
50As a cinematic effort, Atlas Shrugged: Part I is competent; in service to Ayn Rand's epic novel, it's less so.
-
33The film is curiously sterile and lifeless, hardly the stuff of revolution. It feels more like an ideologically reversed "Tucker: The Man And His Dream," written and performed by robots.
-
40The central battle between fearsomely independent corporate mavericks and hostile big government has been updated in a half-baked, unconvincing way that's exacerbated by button-pushing TV-style direction, threadbare production values and blah performances except for that of Taylor Schilling in the central role.
-
Apr 28, 201130The resulting film, directed by Paul Johansson, feels rushed, amateurish and clumsy. It's not just the ideologies that feel oddly out of step with the present day, but the clothes, hairstyles and interiors.
-
Apr 12, 201140Campy but never dull, this first of three installments ends on a fiery cliffhanger. The completion of parts two and three would represent a victory for irrationality.
-
Apr 10, 201140Part one of a trilogy that may never see completion, this hasty, low-budget adaptation would have Ayn Rand spinning in her grave, considering how it violates the author's philosophy by allowing opportunists to exploit another's creative achievement -- in this case, hers.
-
20I wanted to give this movie a fair shake, though I can't pretend to be an admirer of Ayn Rand's writing. But the movie, the first installment of a projected trilogy, doesn't give the book a fair shake.
-
Apr 16, 201138Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 is nearly as stilted, didactic and simplistic as Rand's free-market fable.