Watch Ayn Rand & the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged For Free

Just perfect...

Great Film overall

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

My comments here are not on specific content or delivery, like some critics my pose. I simply want to express my fascination with the overall content and that this documentary kept me transfixed on the screen for the entire time. I couldn't look away and my mind raced for hours after watching it. Thinking about what all I had just learned and opened my thoughts in new ways to view society. Ayn Rand's life is discussed so you can understand why she wrote the book and how her early life gave her the philosophy she presented in her books. The discussions about how critics hated her book and called her vile names, including comments that it was an ill-spirited book and gave the impression that she was mean and soulless gave an additional perspective to the way literary elites viewed the world in the 1950s. Definitely worth the time.

This movie became an inspiring and enjoyable introduction into Ayn Rand's life. I did not read the originals and I was looking for a good summary, since I am mostly interested in her philosophical views (not the fiction aspects of the book). Now I am happy to have invested 83 minutes into the movie, which turned out to be a wonderful summary with a snappy summary of her life all the key quotes from her magnum opus. The movie contains interviews with herself, as well as sharp observations from researchers and students, such as "she was a bomb-thrower" or "America has to live through Atlas Shrugged now".I guess, the phrase "Any work is creative work if done by a thinking mind" applies to this movie - it was definitely done by a thinking mind, and made me think.

I'd been hoping for a more or less balanced account of Ayn Rand's life and her influential novel, "Atlas Shrugged." It's getting harder to ignore both of them, what with our current Vice Presidential candidate having become a convert to objectivism in his youth.It was a disappointing movie, coming across as a hagiography, something like the life of Jesus. Ayn Rand, a Russian émigré, seems to have predicted the panic that grips so many of us today. There's a lot of philosophical fluff, and some of her writing is nicely done, but you know what's at the heart of our despair? Too many regulations, that's what.The world is divided into creators and looters. There are those who make and those who take. The government is the chief taker and its instruments are tax collectors and Wall Street thugs. The government imposes regulations and then imposes regulators on the regulations and it all multiplies like cancer cells. Among the looters would have to be counted those of us on food stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, anyone who received help from Mother Theresa. That's about it. If it begins to sound a little familiar -- "Let's free the job creators", and so forth -- that's because it is. I DID say the philosophy was "influential."Rand, judging from what I've read elsewhere, was a more complex, and a more interesting person than this well-done propaganda gives her credit for. Her philosophy attracted a number of bright and eager young people in the 1950s and Rand became a sort of cult leader, tolerating little in the way of dissent. She bedded one or two of the more devoted males, with which I find absolutely nothing wrong, and threw out some dissidents. I didn't recognize any of the many talking heads. I'm not a philosopher nor a follower of any, except for a loose commitment to science and a notion of humanitarianism that's rapidly becoming antiquated. I guess I'd have been dismissed from the group. I think, though, that I may have heard of Harry Binswanger. He's a smart guy. He was teaching at CUNY at the same time I was. But I don't think any discussion with him would be very fruitful because he's so orthodox. For instance, he would throw open the borders of the United States and allow all the immigrants to flood the country. Ayn Rand, after all, was herself an immigrant. And Binswanger wouldn't worry about terrorism. If there were a threat from, say, Iran, he'd invade and conquer the country and eliminate the threat. Simple, no?There's a recurring problem with straightforward and simple analyses of the world around us, however appealing they might sound. The problem is that the world hasn't been structured in a way that's deliberately designed to facilitate our understanding of it. It's pretty complicated. That's one of the reasons it seems to me that charter documents like the Constitution are worded so vaguely. It's good that they're inexact. They can be interpreted in ways that fit the problems of the times. Imagine if one of the Ten Commandments read, "Thou shallt not allow any money-lending institution with a capital base of more than ten thousand shekels to lend money at a rate greater than 3.6 percent per annum." Imagine if the Second Amendment read, "No guns allowed for any citizen under any circumstances." Imagine a philosophy that says flatly, "Let's get rid of taxes and make the government impotent."Eric Fromm once observed that thinking was an irritant and it was Charles Sanders Peirce who defined "belief" as "thought, at rest."

This film is a must-see for any Rand fan and/or anyone who's ever been affected by her novels. Also recommended for anyone who has not read Rand but wondered what all the fuss was about. In an age where your 'best sellers' are selling 50,000 books, Atlas Shrugged - over half a century old - has been selling nearly ten times that number. Three million sold in last five years alone. This documentary does a good job of explaining why. It includes the genesis of the ideas that permeate Rand's novels and her struggle to complete Atlas. Also shows how the scenario of Atlas is being played out in America today. Highly recommended.