Much more interesting in the second half.

Rating: 6/10 (15 March 2020)

This movie did some justice to the book I feel. Leonardo was a good fit for the character of Gatsby, as was everyone else who was casted. Perhaps Jordan felt different in my mind. Toby Maguire was a mixed bag really, Ih haven't taken him seriously in other movies, but his performance was ok.
What really lets this movie down is the CGI and the music. Both stick out like sore thumbs and are hard to get by. The CGI was terrible, many of the backgrounds reminded me of the images you could use on Apple products in Iphoto. The whole movie had an odd translucent glaze over it and the quality of the CGI for 2013 was woeful. The music was also a huge let down. Why were they playing music from the 2000's? Rap and club songs in the 1920s? It looked and sounded more like a college fraternity house party, than what would've been a reality in 1920. It felt like giving machine guns to Ancient Greeks and expecting them to treat it normally. This did not fit, it was a missed opportunity to bring to life everything that a book can only do in imagination. The costume design was a better fit and did not distract as much.
I disliked the first half of the movie strongly for those CGI and music reasons alone, which were especially obvious during the party scenes. The movie was much more interesting, as was the book I found, when it came to the big conflict in what was Daisy going to do, and the fall out of the events that followed.
This was done much better and my opinion and saved the movie from being a complete fail.
Overall a missed opportunity on what could've been a great film.