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.

I don’t know that he didn’t, or didn’t offer to do so (the article doesn’t say), but it seems like the obvious thing to do for a guy with a passion and a couple billion dollars in the bank. Indeed, a sponsorship arrangement with NASA would have been a coup for both. Trade Cameron the rights to market the resulting imagery in exchange for underwriting the camera, let him produce a theatrical 3D documentary using it, and both win: Cameron cleans up at the box office, and NASA gets a great PR and education/information outreach opportunity.