5. Altruism - Atlas Shrugged
It's difficult to pull off making an
idea the villain of your story. It's even more difficult to vilify "generosity and compassion." The Ayn Rand novel this movie is based on is already pretty controversial subject matter, so the undertaking of creating a movie trilogy based on it is not one to be taken lightly. Setting aside the obvious social and political undertones, though, the movie adaptation consists mainly of two things: business stuff and complaints about altruism. To drive the point home, the following lines are spoken, verbatim, within the movie:
"Why all these stupid altruistic urges?" "My only goal is to make money." "You really don't care about helping the underprivileged, do you? "No, Philip, I don't. But it will make you happy."
Let's set aside, just for a moment, any disagreements the reader might have with the economic philosophies (there are a wealth of arguments that could be made for both sides), the point of this story is to advocate the idea that it's acceptable for business owners to pursue profit as the highest goal, that corporate accomplishment should be championed, and that altruism is fine as a choice, but should not be required of the wealthy. This idea is portrayed in such a way, however, that the main charactersour heroes!come off as distant, cold, emotionless and entirely unsympathetic even to their own families and loved ones. The "villain" is compassion. It does less to advocate an alternative viewpoint and more to demonize anything else. It's polarizing at best and ineffective at worst. Of course, that may be a matter of taste, but "Being sympathetic and generous is bad" will probably be a hard sell for a large portion of the population.