It was a bad omen when *four* of the trailers were for religious movies.

Normally I see the AS films twice in one day. This one... I was ready to walk out halfway through. THERE IS NO HANK REARDEN.

Damn. Easily the weakest of the three films... they didn't put much effort into part three. Much of it's expository narration, they spend WAY too much time in the gulch, and the New York scenes are rushed and claustrophobic. It's almost as if they were rushing to get it done so they could claim they finished the trilogy.

THERE IS NO HANK REARDEN--even though arguably the best scene in this section of the book is his rejection of the Steel Unification Plan. His departure is the keystone setting off the penultimate collapse. They covered it by narration instead of portrayal.

Lots of recycled footage from the first film. Elia Cmiral is back for the score, but they also reused parts of the original score as well--not just the themes, but the 2011 recordings themselves.

The actors aren't even phoning it in, they're just reciting lines like they're in a rehearsal. Poor casting for Francisco, since he looks about 50 to Dagny's 20, and they're supposed to have been childhood friends. They completely neglected Ragnar, turning him into some half-wit thug instead of the raging terror he is in the book. THERE IS NO HANK REARDEN.

Galt's speech... wasn't. It's as if they took the start and finish, then filled about four minutes of space with the current TEA Party bromides instead of the positive, demonstrative statements about the right of free minds. They skipped the dinner party and went straight into Project F; no mention of Project X. Read the book for a better sense of what happens after Galt's speech.

...and THERE IS NO HANK REARDEN.

"Atlas Shrugged" has been a best seller for over 50 years. Its amazing prophecy about the current Obamanation has driven its sales to new heights. One would think it was a no-brainier for movie makers to make it. There is , however , one big catch: "Atlas Shrugged" boldly stands in opposition to the leftist culture infesting Hollywood. The Hollywood-Socialist alliance has tried to crush this movie from the beginning and up till now has succeeded in killing all such attempts. The bad guys of Hollywood did succeed in one respect : it was made without the seasoned talent of movie professionals. This tortured movie is the mangled victim of their relentless efforts of idealogical suppression.

I read the reviews. The usual enemies of liberty chimed in but it was the thumbs down from the free market folks that got my attention. "Atlas Shrugged" was a life changing book for me so I felt compelled to see the film anyways. If nothing else I wanted to reward the brave souls who finally made this important book into a movie. I was the only one in the theater that afternoon.

"Atlas Shrugged" is a long book filled with complicated philosophical ideas. It would have required minds as ingenious to film it as the mind which wrote it. No such talent was willing to touch it given the hostile environment of Commiewood . They would have become Hollywood poison , like former communist turned patriot Elia Kazan. This movie ended up being made by well meaning amateurs and it shows.

It's amazing this Hollywood thought crime was pursued to the end. All three parts have been commercial failures. You could see the production values decline as each one in turn was produced. The actors kept changing from movie to movie. They had to reintroduce characters with on screen titles. In this last movie key events were reduced to voiced over narrations done as simple lifeless news broadcasts. Like the movie "Dune" it tries to cram everything in from the book . Unless you read the book chances are you'd be totally lost by all the names and things happening.

The ideas still managed to come through but without any sparkle. They sounded more like the high school essays some kids would write. The actor they had for John Galt was not anything like I'd imagined him to be. Knowing how good the book was , watching this movie was more like attending a funeral. I'm still in mourning for this fading light that could have been great. Perhaps it will be remembered by future generations as a dying last gasp of American reason while the former nation of the enlightenment rapidly descends into the nightmare of collectivism and its inevitable tyranny.