The trailer for part 1 of the upcoming movie Atlas Shrugged is out, and if I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought I was watching the trailer for a James Bond flick.

The look of everything in that trailer is altogether too nice for the Dystopian feel of Ayn Rand’s novel. Particularly, the lighting on everything is too warm and appealing; it ought to look colder and bleaker.

Leaving aside all my disagreements with the book’s philosophy itself, it seems to me that if you’re going to adapt it for screen, you may as well do it properly.

Oh, well, it should at least be funny, at all events. And it did sound like they’ve improved on Rand’s rather poor dialogue.

All that said, I predict that what’s going to kill this movie is: failure to trim enough of the text. The cult of Ayn Rand (as brilliantly mocked by Murray Rothbard in his play Mozart was a Red) is still going on and might very well have already convinced the filmmakers that they are adapting a sacred text, and must change as little as possible.

To be fair, most adaptations of books to movies make that mistake. (And most of the rest ignore the text completely and become a disaster) A story that first appeared as a book is optimized for book form. If you make it a film, it will likely suffer, unless (and this often just isn’t possible) you are able to tell a similar story and optimize it for film.

But most movies don’t do that. They just try to stuff  in as much of the popular stuff from the book as they can.

(Hat Tip for the trailer to the Conservative film site Big Hollywood)