I could have answered the question....because I just watched Atlas Shrugged (again) night before last. There were several things that annoyed me about the movie(s) and things that they could have done better, but overall I enjoyed them.
The movies were fine efforts.. What annoys me more is Atlas Shrugged has 3 parts and 900 pages . It would be a much more influential novel if it were 230 pages, and there is no reason it couldn't have been. Much of the book is redundant, and parts 2 & 3 exist so Ayn Rand could flesh out her wish fulfillment fantasy of a strike . Rand was full INTJ and she wasn't willing to let the reader infer anything, and felt she had to spell out, multiple times, every point she was making in great detail ( It takes one to know one) . If someone had prevented her from doing that, maybe our entire society would have been different and maybe Firefly would never have been canceled.
The story should end with Eddie Willers ( the hard working man of average talent) sobbing on railroad tracks. He really is the person most people can relate to in the story..and it would probably benefit from being told from is perspective as personal assistant to Ms. Taggert.
I don't think part III adds anything at all to the story- and it should go entirely. . The 20th Century Motors story is funny, but doesn't add to the work in a meaningful way- and should be reduced to a few paragraphs - mostly about some guy there, who didn't like the socialist polices, and instead left.. with some revolutionary idea for a motor he had ...
Ayn Rand's sex fantasy about the love triangle and multiple partners- that could be excised as well. It has valid elements to it that advance the point, but its also distracting -- its edgy so that could be a hook thing, but for me when I was reading I am thinking " oh, this again- yes, MS. Rand, I get you want to have lots of sex with multiple men.."
Much of the conversation with Stadler and the intrigue surrounding spies at Reardon Steel, and the stuff with the Taggert wedding could be shortened to mere exposition - hearing the news reported in notes Dagny was dictating to Willers. IN fact the only parts I would keep intact from part 2 are Reardon's trial, the money speech ( perhaps said at Reardon's Anniversary party) , and the painful tale of incompetence resulting in the the closure of the last line over the Rockies..and Reardon, then Dagny should just disappear with no explanation like all of the rest of the industrial titans. The reader should be left to infer that the titans are on strike, that there is someplace in the world where Galt is gathering them, and the rest of the world is not invited... left to languish under directive 10-289. Let the weight of that world fall on a lesser man like Willers, and have it crush him.