Atlas Shrugged: Part I Reviews

There's a whole lot of declaiming here, with people talking at, and not to, each other about their political viewpoints, and with none of the characters changing at all from beginning to end.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5

Lifeless as entertainment and incoherent as ideology.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5

Even the staunchest Objectivists will object to a final product that is, for all intents and purposes, little more than this decade's "Battlefield Earth," albeit with fewer Dutch angles and somewhat neater facial hair.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

However controversial, Rand's ideas deserve better than this watered-down, uninspired bilge.

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This comically tasteless and flavorless adaptation of Ayn Rand's bombastic magnum opus delivers her simplistic nostrums with smug self-satisfaction.

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... succeeds in creating heroes of the main characters, making the mystery of John Galt... compelling, and setting up the remaining two parts of the trilogy.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0

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.

Full Review | Original Score: D+

For decades, Atlas Shrugged has been considered unfilmable, too long for one movie and too didactic for mass appeal. The version that finally emerged - based on the book's first 10 chapters - doesn't do much to alter those perceptions.

Full Review | Original Score: C

Kudos to Atlas Shrugged for bringing Ayn Rand's iconic novel to the big screen at long last. Now, about that script ...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

[A] DIY megaproduction... whose ambition vastly exceeds its technical command.

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Ayn Rand's monumental 1,168-page, 1957 novel gets the low-budget, no-talent treatment and sits there flapping on screen like a bludgeoned seal.

Full Review | Original Score: 0/4

The first in a proposed trilogy, "Atlas Shrugged: Part 1" is nearly as stilted, didactic and simplistic as Rand's free-market fable.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

Though 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.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Don't hold your breath for parts 2 and 3.

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A low-budget film with more than a whiff of amateurism in its writing and direction.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Sitting through this picture is like watching early rehearsals of a stage play that's clearly doomed.

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Atlas Shrugged. I arched eyebrow, scrunched forehead, yawned.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

About to lose his long-held rights to Ayn Rand's novel, and perhaps to cash in on apparent Tea Party interest and support, producer John Aglialoro ... rushed this film into a low-budget production and it shows in every frame.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

The 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 (though if you're a devoted fan, you'll perhaps be more forgiving).

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5

This movie is crushingly ordinary in every way, which with Rand I wouldn't have thought possible.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4