There’s a money line late in Atlas Shrugged: Part I where Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), a high-powered executive at a railroad company, examines the rubble of a once-promising manufacturing outfit and wonders aloud about the altruistic policies that brought it down. The question is meant to be rhetorical, but she sounds a little like a robot in a science-fiction movie asking, “Why do humans cry?” The concept just doesn’t compute. This is the major problem with Atlas Shrugged: Part I, the first of a proposed three-part adaptation of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel: Its ideas are squandered by aesthetics. Given the novel’s centrality to the Tea Party movement, which has made “going Galt” its call to arms, 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.
