Atlas Shrugged is an inspiring flashback to a time when heroes could be heroes.

The New Atlas Shrugged Movie is a fine flashback to a time when the good guys were really portrayed as the heroes of silver screen and the bad guys were, bad.  Sadly, nowadays a misguided main character in a hollywood movie, more often than not, spends his or her time time trying to devise ever more repulsive mechanisms to chop up their victims. Or if thats not destructive enough, the more creative anti-hero might even try to recombine their victims in new and amusing ways, such as a grotesque human centipede chain, as we saw in the exceedingly curious Human Centipede movie. Or if our typical modern hollywood hero is of the more reserved type, perhaps he or she is just content in discovering through his or her own existential ineptitude that the true condition of human beings is utter worthlessness and despair. Now granted I can certainly enjoy the latest horror movie, as a form of escapism, as well as the next person.

But unlike many if not most modern movies where the hero is a total moral and mental weakling, the heroes of Atlas Shrugged like Hank Reardon, and Dagney Taggart are refreshingly different.

The new Atlas shrugged is set in an upside down world of the near future; not incidentally almost exactly like the present screwed up world we are living through. When corruption takes over, the new Atlas Shrugged movie reminds us that there still might be individuals, who uphold the virtues of hard work, honesty, integrity, ones word being one's bond, the struggle to accomplish more of yourself, and the resisting of temptation to be bullied into doing something you know to be wrong.

Unfortunately, such traits are clearly not in vogue in some circles.

Accordingly, this movie is so anathema to everything a modern moviegoer has been programmed to expect from your typical hollywood film. It is not surprising that for many modern critics, (who are often vampiric blood suckers in nature, but not nearly as cool as real vampires), Atlas Shrugged serves them a full course dinner of wolf's bane washed down with a well aged glass of fermented garlic flavored chianti. Perhaps the most surprising thing to me is that any critics were able to sit through the entire paradigm shattering movie without melting into little ecto-plasmic puddles of goo right there on the theater floor.

Of course the critics hate it! Why is this a surprise? Nearly all of them, hated the book, especially those that never read the book, and that is just as I had expected it would be all along.

Mark my words, the movie will succeed in spite the critics, because it brings out the best in us, where most movies just seek to accentuate and wallow in our faults rather than rise above them And for many a hero hungry movie goer that is something radically new and refreshing, if not paradigm shattering.