Everyone had a sneaking suspicion that Steve Gukas was a master storyteller.
Unfortunately, ‘A Place in The Stars’ came in with so much promise, so much hype, and proved itself possessed of so much unrealized potential that it came crashing down under the burden of a million expectations.
And in the cascade of bad reviews that followed, we forgot to make a crucial point: Steve Gukas was an important voice, and everybody already knew it. But everyone basically jumped the gun so hard – “He is supposed to be so good, so why wasn’t this good enough, and we are going to hit him hard for it – that they generally forgot to give him any credit.
To get a feel of just how horrid the reviews here, see the first link under ‘critical reception’ in its Wikipedia entry. Yes, that’s YNaija there, our film reviewer at the time “faulting everything with the film.”
His conclusion was brutal and it particularly mentioned Gukas: “But Gukas, whose profile is enough to inspire certain lofty expectations, proceeds with this effort, to dash every single one of them. Nothing inspiring, entertaining or admirable about this [film]”.
So it must be sweet revenge for Gukas to have taken in all of that anger (for a project that apparently took his heart, his soul and about half a decade of his life) and then invest it in proving a point with 93 Days – a movie that is a masterpiece in every single way (I mean, see our Editor-In-Chief just GUSH about the film here).
This has to be personal for him.
All those expectations Okiche spoke about in ‘Stars’? Well, Gukas met every in 93 Days. And then he superseded them, and then he set a new standard.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you make a comeback.
Leave a reply