I guess one has to expect many differences from the source material, given that the producers don’t have a Lord of the Rings-scale budget with which to depict the “period” setting of the book — regrettably, since the “yesterday’s world of tomorrow” flavor of the book would have made for some noir/Deco/raygun gothic eye candy. The question is how well they’ve handled these differences and how consistent the differences are with the overall themes of the book — do the movies still tell the same fundamental story?

I am concerned a bit with the acting, though. It could be that the scenes shown just don’t match the urgent mood of the music used in the trailer, but the actors (particularly the one playing Dagny Taggart) seem a little too subdued for the lines they are speaking given the scenes in the book from which those lines are taken.

As for props, the one glimpse of the Rearden Metal bridge is intriguing (that has to be the single hardest object from the book to visualize, based on Rand’s description). On the other hand, the “device” from Starnesville looked pretty close to what I expected except for size — in the book, Dagny and Hank have to struggle to free it from the junk pile, and it is later shown wrapped in a tarp in Hank’s trunk. I guess I was expecting something about the size of a car’s engine block, but perhaps something the size of a coffee pot is actually more reasonable given that the device is an early engineering prototype.

Even the most Heinlein-quoting, Ayn Rand-lovin’, taxation-is-theft Wookie suiters get all weepy when NASA takes a shot in the payroll, when the simple fact of the matter is that the only spaceships the federal government has any constitutional business building should be run by the USAF and have frickin’ laser beams on them.

It’s a good thing NASA didn’t exist from the nation’s founding, or Lewis & Clark’s canoe would have taken thirty years to build and contained strips of birch bark from 72 different Congressional districts. If we want to see progress in space, we need to tell NASA to go research airfoil shapes and just declare everything that happens above X miles to be extraterritorial and tax-free.

[hat tip: Wesley]

Update: Fixed broken link.

A few houses still stood within the skeleton of what had once been an industrial town. Everything that could move, had moved away;  but some human beings had remained. The empty structures were vertical rubble; they had been eaten, not by time, but by men: boards torn out at random, missing patches of roofs, holes left in gutted cellars. It looked as if blind hands  had seized whatever fitted the need of the moment, with no concept of remaining in existence the next morning. The inhabited houses were scattered at random among the ruins; the smoke of their chimneys was the only movement visible in town.  — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957

With this description of the re-wilding of present day Detroit:

His little Cape Cod is an urban Appalachia of coon dogs and funny smells. The interior paint has the faded sepia tones of an old man’s teeth; the wallpaper is as flaky and dry as an old woman’s hand.

Beasley peers out his living room window. A sushi cooking show plays on the television. The neighborhood outside is a wreck of ruined houses and weedy lots…

“This city is going back to the wild,” he says. “That’s bad for people but that’s good for me. I can catch wild rabbit and pheasant and coon in my backyard.”

Detroit was once home to nearly 2 million people but has shrunk to a population of perhaps less than 900,000. It is estimated that a city the size of San Francisco could fit neatly within its empty lots. As nature abhors a vacuum, wildlife has moved in.

A beaver was spotted recently in the Detroit River. Wild fox skulk the 15th hole at the Palmer Park golf course. There is bald eagle, hawk and falcon that roam the city skies. Wild Turkeys roam the grasses. A coyote was snared two years ago roaming the Federal Court House downtown.

And throw in these photoessays from the ruins of the city’s once-thriving downtown for illustration – lots more links at BoingBoing. I disagree emphatically with the BoingBoing commenter who claims that this is the result of ‘hypercapitalism having its vampiric way’ – it was capitalism which built all of these now-ruined buildings and the now-decaying wastelands of Detroit. The ruination came in degrees as Detroit’s industrial giants were increasingly hamstrung by unions and Detroit’s government increasingly fell victim to corruption and identity politics – if there were any vampires preying on “The Twentieth-Century Motor City”, they were from the union hall and the city hall.