What a disappointing Aussie-American production.

Rating: 3/10 (5 June 2013)

The Great Gatsby was The Great Disappointment of the summer. It has all the problems of Baz Luhrmann's Australia, the bad moments of Moulin Rouge (if there were ever that many in the first place) and the 20s never looked so odd in 3D, especially when Jay-Z provides some exclusive music for the movie.
Everything from the music to the characters is just wrong. The pacing is literally out of the window by the middle of the movie. It's like Baz only saw the first half of the film and didn't continue editing the film after that. It's like somebody at Warner Brothers hired another editor who followed their bizarre orders and made the film an even clunkier mess.
Now before you assume that I'll criticize every aspect of the movie, hear me out. There were some GREAT moments in the film; the scene where Daisy is invited to tea with Gatsby at Nick's house, was great. It's such a shame that the film was bogged down in an over expository monologue by the once great Spiderman star Toby Maguire. His character is just as thin as his interpretation of Peter Parker in Spiderman 3.
Leonardo was the star of the film. His performance was the only three dimensional part of the movie. He is a man who has everything except the girl of his dreams, Daisy. His character gradually lost the charm towards the end of the film and he shows the bitter side of himself. There's no real mystery to The Great Gatsby. He is a millionaire who can't buy a better life. He has to pursue his real dream, which money cannot buy. We've seen that so many times in so many other movies and stories in general. Bruce Wayne, anyone? Citizen Kane? Ring any bells?
The 3D was effective but of all the periods in history that would suit 3D, the 1920s was not the first thing that popped up in my mind. It adds nothing to the film, but actually makes it worse. It's just an empty visual gimmick that's unfortunately embedded in the Hollywood system nowadays. 3D does not add depth to character, just what's in front of the camera. Avatar showed the problems of emphasizing 3D over story. Regardless, Avatar still captured a sense of scale that is extremely hard to capture in 3D. Sometimes 3D reduces the scale of stories because everything is so close, yet the film gets smaller somehow. There's too much of an emphasis on visuals instead of the deeper meaning of the story or the characters. This smaller scale worked beautifully with Life of Pi. Everything was up close and there wasn't anything that distracted you from the story. You were there with the characters.
However, this is not the case here. The audience caring for the characters except for Gatsby is simply not there. The 3D put a dent in what could have been a better film had Baz Luhrmann NOT made it. The 3D was distracting, everything from the scale of the story to the depth of the world was completely gone. You could have watched this in 2D and it still would have been the same disappointing experience.
If there was one problem over all of them combined, it was the pacing of the film. Moulin Rouge had an eccentric pace and was edited in an eccentric manner. It worked for that movie, but by the time Australia came out, it didn't work that well. With The Great Gatsby, the editing of Moulin Rouge was there at the beginning of the film, but that energetic editing just vanished after the tea time scene between Gatsby and Diasy. The pacing was replaced with slow and many tedious false endings that followed. I refuse to spoil the movie for those of you who've never heard of The Great Gatsby, but I can say this; you're going to be bored to tears that you'll be persuaded to walk out of the cinema.
Not a good film, not rock bottom of the barrel either, but still bad nonetheless. I recommend that you wait for Man of Steel to come out, the next big film to come out this summer. Don't see The Great Gatsby unless you're interested to see what the hell everyone was going on about, and see if the fuss made any sense.