Coming Soon to Theaters : Atlas Shrugged part 1

Atlas
© Bob Trate 

 

Rocky Mountain Pictures and director Paul Johansson have revealed the first trailer for Atlas Shrugged: Part I, the upcoming adaptation of Ayn Rand's 1957 novel. The film will star Taylor Schilling, Grant Bowler, Matthew Marsden, Michael Lerner, Graham Beckel, Edi Gathegi and Jsu Garcia. Produced on a budget of just $5 million---the first part of a new film franchise---the release was helmed by Johansson ("One Tree Hill") based on a screenplay by Patrick O'Toole.


Plot Concept: Dagny Taggart (Schilling) runs Taggart Transcontinental, the largest remaining railroad company in America, with intelligence, courage and integrity, despite the systematic disappearance of her best and most competent workers. She is drawn to industrialist Henry Rearden (Bowler), one of the few men whose genius and commitment to his own ideas match her own. Rearden's super-strength metal alloy, Rearden Metal, holds the promise that innovation can overcome the slide into anarchy. Using the untested Rearden Metal, they rebuild the critical Taggart rail line in Colorado and pave the way for oil titan Ellis Wyatt (Beckel) to feed the flame of a new American Renaissance.

Hope rises again, when Dagny and Rearden discover the design of a revolutionary motor based on static electricity - in an abandoned engine factory - more proof to the sinister theory that the "men of the mind" (thinkers, industrialists, scientists, artists, and other innovators) are "on strike" and vanishing from society.

Atlas Shrugged: Part I will hit theaters April 15, 2011.