I am someone who has read Ayn Rand's famous novel. With its myriad of characters and often times excessive preaching, it's not for everyone and that's too bad because there are some great lessons about self-reliance and perseverance found within its pages. But it's an overly long book which meant one of the interesting things would be to see just how they would cut down the story and still retain the book's fascinating characters. The bad news is that they didn't or maybe just couldn't.

I don't think the problem is with the acting or direction. Instead, the issue is there is just too much story to relay even in a trilogy of movies. This story is much better suited for a mini-series. Heck, maybe even a Summer-long series. Unless you are familiar with the book, there is just no way you are going to get the motivations and intricacies of the plot or the characters.

The movie itself looks good. There's just too much story to cover and too little time to do so.