The main characters of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged were in their twenties at the beginning of protean protagonist John Galt's strike. This the producers of the film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged: Part I nearly captured. Did they and the directors, writers, actors they hired capture the spirit of Rand's intention, in the Part I film? They did so better than in Part II. Neither in Rand's work nor in the world which gave rise to the writer do men perform their greatest feats in their fifties.

Did the producers decide to shift the age of the character base upward by two decades based on an inside-out assessment that the gravitas of Rand's character base was impossible to achieve with a younger actor base?

That I would forgive, but if they made their decision based on outside criticism, or worse, the social disease commonly called "focus group," I would not.