Brendon Jones
It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.
Arianna Moses
Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.
SnoopyStyle
Ayn Rand came to American in the 20s as her family's business gets confiscated by Soviet Communists. She would become the leading voice of individualism and the virtue of selfishness. Her opus Atlas Shrugged would be critically panned but gains a small devoted following.This is a well produced movie by fans to praise Ayn Rand. The most compelling parts are her and her personal history. It's a fascinating journey that could probably use more research and more of a spotlight. The other noticeable thing here are the talking heads. They are all fans. In fact, some are friends. It would really help to give light to who some of these people are. Basically there are too many nobodies giving expert opinions. The other noticeable talking head group are businessmen. Certainly, they are the obvious group who considers themselves as makers and everybody else as takers. The corollary effect is to place her philosophy strictly as the philosophy of the corporate world. It limits the audience into thinking that she is the patron saint of the super rich. It's an unintended consequence that may be unwise. Instead of former heads of big corporations, it would be useful to have working small business owners who actually is facing these regulations. Overall, it's a slick movie with limited appeal and with limited depth. It's a good introduction for new converts.
jeffrey-falwell
My comments here are not on specific content or delivery, like some critics my pose. I simply want to express my fascination with the overall content and that this documentary kept me transfixed on the screen for the entire time. I couldn't look away and my mind raced for hours after watching it. Thinking about what all I had just learned and opened my thoughts in new ways to view society. Ayn Rand's life is discussed so you can understand why she wrote the book and how her early life gave her the philosophy she presented in her books. The discussions about how critics hated her book and called her vile names, including comments that it was an ill-spirited book and gave the impression that she was mean and soulless gave an additional perspective to the way literary elites viewed the world in the 1950s. Definitely worth the time.
Robert J. Maxwell
I'd been hoping for a more or less balanced account of Ayn Rand's life and her influential novel, "Atlas Shrugged." It's getting harder to ignore both of them, what with our current Vice Presidential candidate having become a convert to objectivism in his youth.It was a disappointing movie, coming across as a hagiography, something like the life of Jesus. Ayn Rand, a Russian émigré, seems to have predicted the panic that grips so many of us today. There's a lot of philosophical fluff, and some of her writing is nicely done, but you know what's at the heart of our despair? Too many regulations, that's what.The world is divided into creators and looters. There are those who make and those who take. The government is the chief taker and its instruments are tax collectors and Wall Street thugs. The government imposes regulations and then imposes regulators on the regulations and it all multiplies like cancer cells. Among the looters would have to be counted those of us on food stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, anyone who received help from Mother Theresa. That's about it. If it begins to sound a little familiar -- "Let's free the job creators", and so forth -- that's because it is. I DID say the philosophy was "influential."Rand, judging from what I've read elsewhere, was a more complex, and a more interesting person than this well-done propaganda gives her credit for. Her philosophy attracted a number of bright and eager young people in the 1950s and Rand became a sort of cult leader, tolerating little in the way of dissent. She bedded one or two of the more devoted males, with which I find absolutely nothing wrong, and threw out some dissidents. I didn't recognize any of the many talking heads. I'm not a philosopher nor a follower of any, except for a loose commitment to science and a notion of humanitarianism that's rapidly becoming antiquated. I guess I'd have been dismissed from the group. I think, though, that I may have heard of Harry Binswanger. He's a smart guy. He was teaching at CUNY at the same time I was. But I don't think any discussion with him would be very fruitful because he's so orthodox. For instance, he would throw open the borders of the United States and allow all the immigrants to flood the country. Ayn Rand, after all, was herself an immigrant. And Binswanger wouldn't worry about terrorism. If there were a threat from, say, Iran, he'd invade and conquer the country and eliminate the threat. Simple, no?There's a recurring problem with straightforward and simple analyses of the world around us, however appealing they might sound. The problem is that the world hasn't been structured in a way that's deliberately designed to facilitate our understanding of it. It's pretty complicated. That's one of the reasons it seems to me that charter documents like the Constitution are worded so vaguely. It's good that they're inexact. They can be interpreted in ways that fit the problems of the times. Imagine if one of the Ten Commandments read, "Thou shallt not allow any money-lending institution with a capital base of more than ten thousand shekels to lend money at a rate greater than 3.6 percent per annum." Imagine if the Second Amendment read, "No guns allowed for any citizen under any circumstances." Imagine a philosophy that says flatly, "Let's get rid of taxes and make the government impotent."Eric Fromm once observed that thinking was an irritant and it was Charles Sanders Peirce who defined "belief" as "thought, at rest."
James Eatroff
This film does a decent job of providing an overview of how Ayn Rand zealots see the work. Seeing the world in black and white is what objectivism appears to be all about. There is no subtlety, externalities, random luck, economies of scale are all swept effortlessly under the table with the heavy hammer of the Rand dogma. One simplistic single sided argument after another tumble out of the mouths of the speakers. Facts are cherry picked and there is just an avalanche of criticisms of Rand's the critics rather than answering the real substantive questions about her ideas. I became quite bored watching a parade of cheerleaders whooping it up for Ayn. Objectivism is anything but objective in its world view. I think the first Harry Potter book sold a lot more copies than Atlas Shrugged and with good reason.
