Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike (2012)

Ayn Rand's visionary Science Fiction novel Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike (2012) is highly relevent and timely. The year is 2017 and the country is in serious trouble. See if any of these sound familiar:

1) Unrest in the Middle East, causing the cost of oil to be ruinously high.
2) Serious double-digit unemployment.
3) Rapid inflation of the dollar currency.
4) The flight of manufacturing jobs offshore.
5) A sickly auto industry, not viable without government sponsorship.
6) Banks that refuse to make loans.
7) A corrupt major political party determined to redistribute wealth from those that earned it to those that refuse to work.
8) A positive cabal composed of corrupt politicians, labor leaders, scientists, educators, and industrialists.
9) The exploitation of oil shale to replace conventional oil wells.
Etc. etc.

The accuracy of Ayn Rand's 1957 novel in predicting the America of today is truely astonishing. One could easily see today's trends actually making things this bad in five more years.

Ayn Rand (pen name of Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum) saw first hand the flaws with the creed of the Russian Revolution ("From each according to his talent, To each according to his need"). She sought to warn the citizens of her adopted country against the foolishness of an economic system manipulated to ensure equal results.

Like the first part of the novel, AS II is shot in the digital domain and is best viewed in a digital theater, I saw this superb digital presentation on a Sony 4K projector at my favorite independent cinema.

For some reason, AS II was totally recast and has a different Director. The only continuity is Writer/Producer Brian Patrick O'Toole, who is also a writer for Fangoria magazine and otherwise appears to have worked on mainly Horror films.

I prefer the main characters cast in Atlas Shrugged Part 1 (2011) for the most part. I thought Taylor Schilling made a better and more convincing Dagny. Although Grant Bowler as Rearden was not especially impressive, he was way better than Jason Beghe in AS II, whose dialog was often mumbled and never crisp (the man sounds like a lifelong heavy smoker). Because some of you probably want to know: Esai Morales plays Francisco d'Anconia in AS II (a bit of casting I thoroughly approve of) and his famous "money speech" is present, although much abbreviated to possibly 1/4th the text in the novel version.

The plot picks up with the disappearance of Ellis Wyatt at the end of AS I, then ends when Dagny meets John Galt. Reportedly AS III is in pre-production.

Timely, interesting, and thought provoking, I reccomend you see this one before it disappears. I was one of seven people (all over 50 years of age) in the theater only thirteen days after the premiere.

This is a thread about the movie Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike. I was carefull not to make any political comments when I wrote the original message.

To everyone else: your comments about the book Atlas Shrugged are not only wrong (it's one of the most famous books of the 20th century, it has been continuously in print for 65 years, and among other things it was chosen by YOUR professors to instruct all of YOU - who otherwise were so blinded by ideology that you never would have chosen to read it) they are off-topic to this thread.

Your comments about Atlas Shrugged, Part I are also off-topic to THIS thread, unless you are contrasting the two films.

In fact if anybody else has actually SEEN THIS MOVIE and is therefore qualified to have a valid opinion, please speak up. I would be gratefull if you would express your opinions about the accuracy of my review.

I happen to think that Ayn Rand was eerily accurate in her projection of the modern world, written more than 65 years ago. The movies both suffer from a low budget and a hasty, abbreviated shooting schedule. Yet so strong was the original work that the quality shows through the script, the less-than-perfect acting, and post-production.

I sincerely suggest you watch this movie, and if you do, I'll be glad to discuss it. Otherwise, please keep your obviously ignorant, uninformed, and blinded-by-ideology comments to yourselves.

I despair for our country, that people would display such hatred for someone else they do not know over a simple ideological difference. All Ayn Rand ever said was that people are entitled to whatever they earn, and that if they don't earn it, they are not entitled to it. It is the essence of what makes America great.

Their names were John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan. These were the men who built America as we know it today. Their empires rose from the ashes of another great ideological conflict, the Civil War. Their time spanned the period from the Civil War up to the First World War. These men took what up until then could only have been described as a failed experiment in Democracy, and turned it into the greatest country the world had ever seen.

Then in another part of the world, the writings of an obscure pair of German philosophers (Karl Heinrich Marx and Friedrich Engels) inspired the Russian Revolution. Witness to the bone-chilling violence of the Bolsheviks was a young Russian girl, Ayn Rand. She had the misfortune to be Middle Class, and thus her family lost everything.

Some claim that the world-wide economic conniption we call the Great Depression was the result of large central banks in America and Europe manipulating the economy to prevent the spread of Russian-style Bolshevism to the rest of the Western World. Whatever the truth may be, it had that effect.

Meanwhile the policies of FDR had the effect of adding many Socialist ideals into the American consciousness. The philosophy of "entitlement", meaning that I am entitled to a share of somebody else's earnings because we both live in the same country. American Socialism is the light version of European Socialism which is the light version of the philosophy of Marx and Engels as expressed in their books Das Kapital and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

The ideological divide grows ever greater, as you have read here in this thread in this Forum. I say to those of you with the patience to have read this far, that no one is entitled to the rewards for the work of another. You need to think this through in your own head, and make up your own mind. We are all among the most fortunate of men, to have lived in this time and in this country, and to have enjoyed the greatest freedoms and the greatest wealth that have ever been known in the history of the world.

The time of plenty is ending with the end of cheap fossil energy. There are today seven billion and more humans on a globe that can sustain less than one billion, long term. We are about to enter an era when more people than have ever lived in the history of the world will perish in a relatively short period. We enter this period sharply divided into the two ideological camps I have described.

Make up your own mind about this. Viewing this pair (soon to be trilogy) of films will start that process.