Kurt Loder Reviews 'Atlas Shrugged' at Reason

See "Where is John Galt?":

Anyone not familiar with Rand’s novel will likely be baffled by the goings-on here. Characters spend much time hunkered around tables and desks nattering about rail transport, copper-mining, and the oil business. A few of these people are stiffly virtuous (“I’m simply cultivating a society that values individual achievement”), but most are contemptible (“We must act to benefit society”…“a committee has decided”…“We rely on public funding.”) These latter creeps should set our blood boiling, but they’re so cartoonishly one-dimensional that any prospective interest soon slumps. We are initially intrigued by the recurring question, “Who is John Galt?” But since the movie covers only the first third of the novel (a crippling miscalculation), we never really find out, apart from noticing an anonymous figure lurking around the edges of the action, togged out in a trench coat and a rain-soaked fedora like a film-noir flatfoot who’s wandered into an epoch far away from his own.