Decent, but not good or great

Rating: 6/10 (20 February 2017)

The reason why I say that Baz Luhrmann's adaptation is terribly overrated is because this movie is supposed to be based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel but the movie doesn't stay true to the book more than book to film adaptations normally do even though I am not normally a person to criticize a movie because of those factors, though I won't give anything major to this film away in this review. This time around the movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby who is a well known businessman and is one of the richest if not the richest person where he lives. There are a lot of key major differences between this movie and the Robert Redford version that was made 39 years earlier. This movie also depicts Gatsby as a man who has parties in a modern fashion but another key problem I had with this movie is also that it didn't completely stay true to the period in which the story was supposed to be set in.
Also this movie despite having such a good cast the movie is horribly over-acted, and the only thing I liked about the film was the production design and the costumes.
Also in this movie are the accurate characters such as Daisy (Carey Mulligan),Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton),George Wilson (Jason Clarke) and his wife Myrtle (Isla Fisher), as well as Gatsby's good friend that he met in the beginning of the movie Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire).
However there are some things that director Baz Luhrmann actually got right, such as the love affair between Gatsby and Daisy, the "old sport" exchange between Gatsby and Tom, and many other scenes.
In the end I didn't like or dislike this movie but even though the movie deserved the two Oscars that it won three years ago. I happen to think that if it stayed true to the period, and wasn't over-acted, that it could have been a better movie (even though it was good) with a hell of a lot better storytelling it was an OK movie even though I do agree with what Roger Ebert once said about accuracy in movies to Gene Siskel in which he said that "A movie doesn't have to be accurate in order to be good."