My Short Review of The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by R. Scott Fitzgerald was a required book to have read in my high school sophomore year; I enjoyed the book so much I read it three times start to finish that year. Think of my excitement when I heard they were making The Great Gatsby movie. Luckily, I was able to go see the movie last night with a group of friends. I walked in expecting to be amazed and love it. I didn’t.

With Leonardo Dicaprio as Jay Gatsby I expected an amazing performance

As the title states, this is a short review, thus I shall touch on my main “likes” and “dislikes”.

What I Liked:

• Dicaprio as Jay Gatsby, he fits the character perfectly and plays this mysterious, nervous, but luxurious man very well.
• The sense of how grand some scenes were such as Gatsby’s infamous parties as you could just see that every walk of New York City life came to them
• The historical accuracy of the movie down to every small detail

What I Disliked:

• The soundtrack was quite possibly the worst part of this movie. The parties had a band playing, but you never would hear them since their music was covered by Jay Z or Kanye. I’d prefer hearing 1920’s swing music in a movie based in that time period over Kanye West.
• Some scenes were poorly designed as you could easily tell it was some cheap green screen or made entirely on a computer
• The constant narrating by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) and odd scenes were it his words being written on screen.
• A lack of details compared to the book, granted this a movie.
• The surrounding cast. I never felt drawn to them as they were just simple characters thrown into the movie to accompany Gatsby and very few were given any explanation as to who they were.
• The movie as a whole just felt poorly made and had a “cheap” vibe surrounding it.

Overall, I left the theater very disappointed. I’ve always heard that books were always better than the movies based on them and never did I believe the people who told me that. This one time though, the book has the movie beat by light years.