Hey, It’s The Atlas Shrugged: Part II Trailer, Please Make It Stop
“Are you ready?” growls the gruff yet nondescript voice in the trailer. Ready for what? Why, for Atlas Shrugged: Part II, of course. Yes, Hollywood has decided to continue in its noble goal of bringing Ayn Rand’s terrible book to the masses — the sniveling useless parasitical masses who exist only to leach off the Titans of Industry who are the true Movers and Creators in this world, ahem.
Where was I? Yes, so, Atlas Shrugged: Part II is a-comin’, like a runaway train that the characters can’t stop talking about for nine hours. Seriously, have you read the book? All the people in the book ever talk about is trains. Here’s the trailer. It has some trains in it. Brace yourself:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF9QT43uDQU&w=584&h=390]
Wow. If I were forced at gunpoint to summarize this trailer in a sentence, I would say: Vague, with low production values. Vague government threat! Vague explosion! Vague dialogue! Vague terrible matte painting of a railway bridge!
Not only does this trailer look sh-tty and cheap, but they also changed all the actors from the first movie, either because the original actors didn’t want to be indelibly linked with Ayn Rand forever, or — more likely — because the producers couldn’t afford to hire the same actors for the sequel.
Yes, you see, the first Atlas Shrugged was a huge, huge flop — critically and financially. Yes, the Free Market and the Sign of the Dollar spoke, and said that Atlas Shrugged: Part I really really sucked. …And if the producers of the first movie had been true disciples of Ayn Rand, they would have heeded the dictates of the marketplace and just stopped there — since A is A, after all. Or at least, the producers could have quit the movie business and moved into a nice comfortable gulch somewhere — at least until the world learned to appreciate their spark and entrepreneurial fire.
But no, the producers decided to continue, thereby bringing joy to Paul Ryan and to that guy you know who has his Ron Paul ’08 t-shirt still neatly pressed and folded in his closet. And the worst news of all for me personally — since there’s a Part II, this means that there will now inevitably be a Atlas Shrugged: Part III: John Galt Talks into a Microphone for Three Solid Hours. Yay.
Anyway, it’s the perfect movie to take the whole family to! Assuming that your whole family is made up of people whose intellectual growth came to a crashing halt at age 14 when they decided that businessmen were kind and wise and should be given unfettered control of running the world in defiance of everything we know about economics and history. …Yay. So go once! Go twice! Go three times! Buy popcorn! Support the free market! Leave crazy comments in the comment section about Objectivism! Go buck-wild.