Atlas Shrugged Part II: Election Edition: Rand's timeless novel is recast as a Tea Party fable.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Film adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged Part II: The Strike - Movie review

ATLAS SHRUGGED Part II: The Strike, the second installment of a film adaptation of Ayn Rand's classic novel, was released splat in the middle of election season. And the onscreen tale of an overweening and desperate government stealing from and hobbling productive industrialists certainly felt timely. The movie's TV ad campaign even explicitly asked whether it would sway the outcome of the election.

But at a Los Angeles screening of the film, one of its producers and lead financiers, John Aglialoro, stressed in his pre-film remarks that neither side of the left-right divide can uncomplicatedly embrace Rand's philosophy. Both the conventional left and right, Aglialoro said, espouse altruism, which Rand saw as a great moral evil. (Rand used the word "altruism" not in its colloquial sense of behaving benevolently but to mean, in her words, the notion that "man has no right to exist for his own sake ... that serf-sacrifice is his highest moral duty") Still, the filmmaker understood his movie's potential for ginning up anti-government (and likely anti-Obama) emotions and he urged the right to make room for Randians in their coalition, despite their atheism, which often alarms religious conservatives.

Atlas II is tonally aimed at a rightwing audience, the sort of people who thought Mitt Romney was right-on when he dismissed nearly half the country--those who are "dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it." Romney didn't use the Randian term "looters and moochers" for that now-famous 47 percent, but he might as well have.

The film features Fox News' Sean Hannity in an as-himself cameo arguing Atlas' theme, as the government tries to confiscate metal magnate Henry Rearden's amazing alloy, Rearden metal. Rearden, Hannity insists, is "a hero, an innovator, a job creator" and the "Fair Share" law hobbling him "is more big government" and "will result in failure" But as he rose to national prominence, Mitt Romney's vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan still chose to retreat from his reputation as a Rand fan.

Given the care with which Rand raveled her tale, it's surprising that Part II is fully understandable with zero explicit recapping; some smooth bits of dialog early set up the world in which railroad chieftain Dagny Taggart (Samantha Mathis) and metal master Hank Rearden...