The Great Gatsby - Noodles Review

Rating: 7/10 (19 December 2013)

American classic of literature... The Great Gatsby... can somebody please tell me why this movie needed to be in 3D? The Great Gatsby is a very character-based story; the story can only proceed through how well the characters are portrayed, not the in-your-face style. Thankfully, the characters are most great too. Anyways, The Great Gatsby is a pretty simple story. There's an awesome rich guy, Jay Gatsby, whose pretty much the Hugh Hefner of the 1920s (although they were probably the same age in the '20s). He's in love with the narrator's cousin, who happens to be married to a douche with a lot of inherited money. That's some simple and classy drama there, right? Well, let's just add an insane amount of noise and a lot of green screen and now we have a movie.
The first thing you gotta talk about with this movie is Leonardo DiCaprio. The guy's like one of the best in the business right now and personally my 3rd favourite actor. You just can't help but root for him in whatever movie he's in (hell, I almost even rooted for him in Django Unchained... but that would've been bad) and ya root for him in this movie. He kills it as Jay Gatsby. One thing that was great was the subtle mystery of his character (one really great film aspect is that he wasn't even shown for the first 20-30 minutes of the movie) The rest of the cast is good; especially Joel Edgerton who plays the dick so well, helping us to appreciate Gatsby even more. Toby Maguire (who we've all come to know as Spiderman) is fine in the movie as the narrator but I feel his role could've been played by anyone. Carey Mulligan, who plays Daisy (the girl Gatsby is infatuated with) overacts a little bit but I feel that's good for the character she plays and the style of this movie.
The style of the movie is really one thing that's really crucial to its likability. For me, I like where they were going with it, but it's just too much.for the movie. Baz Luhrmann is the director of this movie. If you don't know who he is, imagine what would happen if Zack Snyder started making artsy movies. He's a very visual and striking director, which sometimes works but not always. They use a lot of noise and colors for this movie. It's, in a way, visually loud. So much is going on that its just like there's noise on the screen. And a lot of this movie is shot on green screen, with a lot of visual effects that don't really need to be there. I don't think there's much need for that in a drama about love. While it does work at some times, I didn't think it did much justice to the overall film. What I really liked are the scenes that take place in one room where people are just talking or arguing. You can feel the tension and emotion of those scenes really well.
Still, The Great Gatsby puts a little too much flair into a simple character-based drama, creating an imbalance of style over substance. The acting was great and the script seemed like it was probably great too; but the way it was conveyed was a little too much. The clash between the premise of the movie and the ongoing visuals really compromised the overall quality of it. While it's an interesting and, in a respect, a unique movie, The Great Gatsby is not as memorable as I hoped for it to be