This is brilliantly biting, man. I know I should read Atlas Shrugged. It's just that everything I've read about her and her writing is just so bleh to me.

Atlas Shrugged is one of those books that's considered a challenge of endurance to read. Especially if you can get through John Galt's 75+ page monologue towards the end.

Yeah, you really should read it before you judge. I am often curios how many people have actually read the book.
As most, if not all of the reviews I have read miss the mark by such a margin that I am skeptical that they have actually read it.

Eddie Willers was an affluent white male. The movie was horrifically inaccurate. You can't change the race of the character, then say that the character was fitting to highlight racial undertones. It is not fitting, it is projection.

Eddie Willers's fate was deliberately left undecided. This was Rand's Stated intent.
His fate was to show that the common good man is at the mercy of the state, not that he didn't get an invite to the country club. Every conversation Eddie had with Galt when the had lunch in the basement cafeteria of the Taggert building was a stubborn affirmation of Willers to remain at the railroad until the end of time. And yes, Dagny did tell Eddie not to take the train. The book ends before Dagny and Galt even get to Atlantis.

And the movie..
Gah.. it was the worst adaption I have ever seen. Galt going around asking people "are you ready?"

Like the scene where Ellis Wyatt just burns his life work over a paragraph from Galt.. "Gee, I never thought of it that way, time to commit arson, and follow this dark figure to Atlantis" Huh?

I see why she was never satisfied with the adaptions, and died writing one. The message, like all philosophy, has to be specific or it can be horrifically misconstrued.

In either of the times I've read the book, my issue has never been that Eddie didn't get invited into Galt's Gulch. My issue was that Eddie was just left in the desert. Whether or not he chose that fate for himself, I would like to think that Dagny and/or John Galt (or for that matter Francisco or Hank), would, in the end have had enough humanity to try and find out where Eddie was.

Whatever Eddie's faults might have been (such as blabbing too many things to Galt in the cafeteria, for example), he was nevertheless a good and loyal man, and even if he wasn't brought into the Gulch (seeing as he wasn't yet at that place, where he could simply drop his ties to Taggart Transcontinental), Eddie is still the sort of man that would have been very useful for rebuilding society.

As for the racial overtones, I am referring to the places in the book, where Rand stereotypes Indian society as being run by "Idle Rajahs fondling gems while sticking knives in the bellies of peasants in order to take their meagre rations of rice, in order to turn that into still more gems". There is also the matter of having Irene Starnes being a practitioner of Buddhism, yet nevertheless being one of the biggest villains in the entire book.

Likewise, the many times she stereotypes Africans as warlords and cannibals, amongst other things. Now, with the principle of charity, I am fully aware that such ways of thinking were common amongst white people at the time, (and in many cases still are). Nevertheless, all of that being coupled with the fact that every one of the heroes (with the arguable exception of Francisco d'Anconia), is described as having the chiselled, Aryan features of Norse Gods.

Hence, was the casting of a black actor as Eddie Willers (and my reaction to it), a projection? Absolutely, and even in the poem, I make that pretty clear. I am mainly chuckling at the (even if unintentional) ironic symmetry of it.