Atlas Shrugged: Part I’s opening reminded me, ironically, of one of those low-budget evangelical Christian movies in which undiscriminating C-list actors find themselves left behind after all their Jesus-loving pals are Raptured. Atlas Shrugged and Christian tribulation movies are both primarily works of proselytizing thinly masquerading as popular entertainment. Everything feels hopelessly ersatz and artificial. There’s an alternately tragic and comic gulf between their Herculean ambitions and their limited resources, creatively and commercially.
Atlas Shrugged Part I desperately wants to be a genuine Hollywood movie, just as badly as Christian filmmakers want to replicate the look, feel, and production values of their godless would-be peers/cultural enemies. It proves just as unsuccessful, yet Atlas Shrugged: Part I gets close enough for its efforts to be poignant, comic, and a little pathetic.
As with Christian tribulation movies, there is no place for nuance or understatement in Atlas Shrugged: Part I. We are not being seduced; we’re being sold with the hardest sell imaginable. Both films depict peculiar persecution fantasies in which the dominant ideologies of the day—Christianity and capitalism—are hounded relentlessly by the one-world-government brigade and the nefarious forces of encroaching socialism, respectively. These movies give victors an opportunity to feel like victims. What do you give a demographic that has everything? The righteous opportunity to feel like they have nothing, and like what little they have is on the verge of being taken away.
Nathan Rabin writing at the AV Club about Atlas Shrugged: Part 1
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