User Reviews

This film captures the energy of the time when people were ardently seeking solutions to the ills that faced society. The film covers the context of the time in which she wrote her novels. She is a visionary that has hits and misses. It was really not easy for a woman of that time to step out in the public eye to have a thousand tomatoes thrown at her (figuratively) for speaking her mind. See the PBS Documentary called "The Warning" with regards to her most famous student, Alan Greenspan. Her theories are as controversial today as they were a half century ago. Even today, there are scholarships given to students who will read her books and submit essays on them. She has remained relevant even to this day due to her ardent followers.

This film does a decent job of providing an overview of how Ayn Rand zealots see the work. Seeing the world in black and white is what objectivism appears to be all about. There is no subtlety, externalities, random luck, economies of scale are all swept effortlessly under the table with the heavy hammer of the Rand dogma. One simplistic single sided argument after another tumble out of the mouths of the speakers. Facts are cherry picked and there is just an avalanche of criticisms of Rand's the critics rather than answering the real substantive questions about her ideas. I became quite bored watching a parade of cheerleaders whooping it up for Ayn. Objectivism is anything but objective in its world view. I think the first Harry Potter book sold a lot more copies than Atlas Shrugged and with good reason.

The documentary is a good summary of "Atlas Shrugged," and the ethics and politics that inform it. It also has some biographical information about Rand up to the book's publication. It would be a good introduction for people new to the book and her ideas. I started reading Rand about 30 years ago and I wish the documentary would have gone deeper. I would have preferred 30 minutes less of cheerleading and 30 minutes more of exploring her ideas and their ramifications.

That the documentary didn't go into Rand's personal life and the Objectivist movement's ups and downs was a mixed blessing. I was surprised that Leonard Peikoff wasn't in the documentary but Amy Peikoff was, and that it completely ignored 9/11 and what I consider Objectivism's hysterical response to Islamic terrorism, which continues to this day.

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 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.