Terrible right-wing novel to become terrible right-wing film

Denizens of the internet, prepare yourselves for a new wave of insufferable psuedo-intellectual teenage-Objectivist keyboard-warriors, because Ayn Rand's philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged is being made into a trilogy of films, the first instalment of which is due to be released later this month.

Part overblown literary trainwreck, part grotesque ultra-capitalist ultra-individualist philosophical text, Atlas Shrugged describes a world that is in crisis because wealthy capitalists (whom Rand calls the "men of mind") don't have enough wealth and power, and expounds a philosophy (called Objectivism) under which poor people deserve to be poor, rich people deserve to be rich, the working class are powerless because they are stupid and lazy, and in which the right to own property is the most important and fundamental of all human rights.

Much loved by right-wing "libertarians" and narcissistic middle-class teenagers alike, Atlas Shrugged is essentially the 645,000-word story of strike by capitalists which causes the US economy to collapse, teaching the reader that the capitalist Übermensch (who are "exploited" by the "parasitic" welfare state), rather than the workers who actually make everything, are the ones who sustain industrial society.

"...Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel. It is also (or may I say: first of all) a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society... You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you." - Ludwig von Mises, in a letter to Ayn Rand

What's really interesting, however, about this film is its timing, coming, as it does, in the middle of a crisis of global capitalism - a period in which more and more people are questioning the ideological underpinnings of the capitalist system, asking if this really is the only way for the world to be, a period in which ordinary people across the world are taking to the streets in open revolt - with a seductive message that greed is good, one's only responsibility is to one's own self-interest, that the crisis which we are currently living through is the result of not enough unrestricted capitalist greed, selfishness and profiteering.

Lets hope it's a massive flop.