We did it. We went there. This past Wednesday, we girded our loins for battle and took on quite possibly the dullest, most cynical, most breathtakingly stupefyingly successful movie adaptations of Ayn Rand’s oeuvre ever created — by which I mean, it made $4.6 million gross despite a cost of $20 million. And that despite its complete lack of real special effects outside of a magical train, its obvious use of hotel ballrooms and stock footage and public domain music, its series of second-string actors. This was a movie that felt like it was made on the cheap, and it did miserably. But insofar as it was actually made into a movie, it was actually made into a movie, surprising the living fuck outta us all.
But the selfish quarter of our society really loved it, for all the same reasons as they loved the book — its putting unfettered capitalism and self-interest on a pedestal as the only way to create good in this world, its unabashed damning of straw-socialism, and its dystopian message that society would crumble if the number-pushers stopped pushing numbers because everyone below them is just lazy parasites.
You know, FICTION.