Railroad executive Dagny Taggart and steel mogul Henry Rearden form an alliance to fight the increasingly authoritarian government of the United States.
Atlas Shrugged: Part I is in many ways charmingly oblivious to its inherent contradictions and the fact that its capitalist titans appear to be squatting in old, abandoned Dynasty sets, eating food-court baked potatoes.
IGN DVD
January 29, 2012
Atlas Shrugged is a passionless experience that feels like a TV movie/miniseries. It's flat, poorly plotted, thinly performed and dull to its core
The 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.
Apart from its deficiencies as fiction, whatever its philosophical limitations (the rich and able should only help themselves in Rand's "Objectivism"), the book proves proudly indigestible on film.
Although it's not as bad as its trailer might suggest, this first part of a projected three-part series will probably please the already converted but bore and annoy just about everyone else.
Made on the cheap with no-name stars, this is no better than a stilted anachronistic curiosity, a low-rent version of the eighties' prime-time soap Dallas, with the industrial concerns and sexual mores of 1950s, all, somehow, set in 2016.