This made very little sense in the age of corporate dominance of our government and society. Unions? what unions. Railroads? Coal? Steel? and a few saintly industrialist, oilmen and bankers save the day! Does that sound right to anybody? Does any of this make sense in the 21st century? This is only for people who believe in the Rand books and their internally consistant yet naïve 'philosophy'. Otherwise it is piss poor movie making, story telling, acting etc. And when did Francisco D'Anconia become a fat 70 year old dude?? And Danejskold is like a WWF dude...? Rand was a huge narcissist who like a lot of unreflective novelists, made herself (as Dagny) the center of a phantasy where she is like the male characters and is also desired by the many ideal male characters. Its so sad that people don't outgrow this fandom after high school.

Dagny Taggart the female lead, struggles to run her railroad company when the United States is in an industrial and electrical grid collapse.

She and steel mogul Henry Rearden form an alliance and install his high strength steel alloy to rebuild the Colorado rail line on her railroad. The visual scenes of the futuristic track laying are spectacular.

When Dagny Taggart looks at Henry Rearden she asks ‘how long this track will last’, he says ‘for 200 hundred years’. It made me wish this were true.

The high-speed rail system is called the John Galt Line. The inaugural trip showed the train ripping through the air at speeds approaching 300 miles per hour. Again, the visual scenes of this futuristic train took my breath away.

This movie gives two points of view. Either Success comes from hard work and vision in spite of failures, or success is denied you because of others and that you need government to intervene. When you introduce government solutions to individual issues you give away your individual results.

The overall message is that our progress hasn’t been the result of efforts by our government. It’s because of the efforts of inventors who, through the pursuit of their own ambitions, generate the wealth we have today.

This movie moved me. Apparently, it’s based on a book by Ayn Rand. I need to know more about the book and Ayn Rand.

Turns into a terrible movie I couldn't finish. Sorry but Ayn Rand's ideas are so bad, it's shocking anyone would make them into a movie and sad to see Taylor Schilling was in it. She was just starting out, so I guess she took what she could get but it's still sad to see she did this.

All Rand's ideas weren't bad, just most of them. 90% or so. She was an overly simplistic person.

Human beings don't work this way. Ayn Rand's worldview was hard in the heart and soft in the brain, but at least she was a good storyteller. This film is pure polemic. If you subscribe to the notion that profit motive drives human excellence, look no further than this film's margin to judge its merit. $20 million in production costs and less than $5m recouped at the box office. Bravo.

This is the worst schlock. The theme is ham-fisted. The acting ridiculously horrid: sub-soap-opera quality.

Of the three parts, this was definitely done the best. The directing and casting seems better than the other two parts as well. The acting in the first two parts are superior than the third part, FYI.

(Watched all three on Amazon Prime)

However, that being said, this is definitely a story with an agenda. The story takes on a childlike quality, as if someone in high school wrote it. I would liken it to Stephanie Meyers Twilight series or the Eragon books by Christopher Paolini. Atlas Shrugged is written in a similar vain.

In a nutshell, it’s a story about Capitalism vs Socialism. Yet, often framed as conservatism vs. liberalism, which is not nearly in the same ballpark...

Politics aside, it had potential, but the antagonists seem wholly unrealistic, and the protagonists are hyper ideological.

This story, the book and these movies, belong in the category listed as pure fantasy...

James Taggart is the most implausible person I have ever come across in literature.

However, contrastly, his sister Dagny Taggart, and Hank Reardon seem plausible, and understandablely likeable.

Simply put, it’s a wet dream for some, and fortunately fictional for others...

Or to put it another way; It will float some boats, while seemingly feel like the Titanic for others...

BTW, the other two parts I would rate Two Stars as a movie, as a book Three Stars...

Great movie ... about freedom. If you are a liberal, leftist, socialist or communist you probably will hate this movie. It is about government getting out of control and trying to dictate to the people what the government thinks is good for them. It is about power, control, and ego - what the government is very good at. One reviewer said that it is dated. There is nothing dated about freedom. The founding fathers of the United States of America viewed government as a necessary evil. And rightly so. This movie presents a simple truth ... these government controlled systems never work. Look at Venezuela and Cuba for example.

I read the book, so I was hoping the movie wouldn't be too bad... The story, predictably, took 3 movies to cover, and of course it had to be vastly simplified to fit, even so. Several sub-plots were dropped entirely, but this is generally true in adapting a book to a movie. They did cover the high points of the original story, while successfully adapting it to a more modern era. The biggest problem I had with the 3-part movie adaptation was: The cast was entirely different for each DVD! It was very distracting and disconcerting to pop in part 2, then part 3, and take a few minutes to get used to the new actors. So, continuity was completely broken. I now appreciate the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies, and the pains they took to avoid just this potential situation. It kind of ruined the flow of what could have been a really good trilogy.