Well, I finally got around to seeing the second part of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy^• last weekend. It has, in fact, overcome the few problems I noted from the first part. It was exciting, believable, and if it had any flaw it was that it was very much like a Hollywood movie. It vastly improved on the first movie, which I enjoyed, but mainly for memorable scenes (such as the train moving across the bridge) and the heart that the creators put into it.

Again, I still haven’t gotten around to reading the book (although I have read We the Living since then), so I can’t say how well it hews to the novel. But as a movie I highly recommend it.

If it has a flaw, it would be that it makes it look like the government’s actions are drastic and unprecedented; there’s no sense that some of them had already been put into place in the seventies by Nixon in collusion with a Democratic congress, and were maintained by Ford and Carter. We’ve already had wage freezes and price freezes in the United States; we know what a disaster it is—and how much the media will lie to maintain the resulting recession. While thrillers shouldn’t be history lessons, leaving that history out makes this movie more political than it really is.

Some demagogues on the left decry this movie as right-wing. But if, for example, the emphasis had been placed more on the cronyists like Dagny Taggart’s brother and less on the politicians that enable them, they’d be praising it. It’s all a matter of perspective: businessmen who use politicians are evil, and the movies that portray such evils are good; portraying politicians as complicit with the businessmen, even though the result is exactly the same and exactly as evil makes it right-wing from their perspective.

What it really is, is all too likely to happen again.

Atlas Shrugged III^• is already in my Amazon cart. If it’s half as good as part two, this will be a great trilogy, and I’m not going to wait to find out like I did with part two.