David Goyer - Yay or nay?

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

He has a concise yet broad time range of movies his pen has brought to life.

How is his writing ultimately? He's got a range of movies that ended up within a range of uber competent to crashed/burned. Does it say anything about his writing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._Goyer#Films

[Elderdog]

I would argue that Goyer's best movies are the ones where he is part of a team and not given complete control over a specific aspect of the production. For example, his best films were often done in collaboration with either an extremely talented director or with a team of writers which I will list below...
1. He was a co-writer on Dark City alongside Alex Proyas and Lem Dobbs with Proyas also serving as both producer and director, so I would argue that Goyer was probably brought in to help flesh out the script.
2. Blade, while decent, was a disaster during it's first test screening and had to be significantly cut and re-edited to make it a better movie.
3. Blade II had Guillermo del Toro (need I say more?)
4. The Dark Knight trilogy was more Christopher Nolan's trilogy than it was Goyer's with Nolan's ideas taking precedence over Goyer's ideas for the trilogy.
Basically, Goyer is probably a soft nay for me.

[Mecha82]

I agree with Elderdog. Goyer is one of those writers that works best as part of team or with some one far more talented than him. By using wrestling comparison he is basically Vince Russo of Hollywood but not nearly as bad and able to make something worth while by himself.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

Unless a script has a clear line of development or someone involved in the production talks about it, it's really difficult to parse out credit for a script that was created collaboratively. To cite just one example, we happen to know that Ron Moore wrote the last script for "In the Pale Moonlight", but he's not even co-credited for the story or teleplay. That happens all the time, and on the outside we often just don't know if a script is a writer's room collaboration or if one guy actually did write the whole thing. Sometimes the guy whose name figures most prominently in the credits is the least responsible of the writers.

One of the cliches is that tv is for writers and movies are for directors. That's not 100% true, but there's no doubt that the big name directors get what they want and can wreak havoc on the original script. Still, if you take that as a general rule, it probably says something that Goyer's best movie credits look a lot better than his tv work. And that, as Elderdog mentioned, the most acclaimed work he did, The Dark Knight trilogy, was Nolan's trilogy through and through (including the writing process).

My provisional opinion is that he's not too bad, there's nothing that obviously disqualifies him from being a good writer, but there's nothing that I see which sets him apart as a particularly good writer. Maybe a good cog in the wheel if there's other strong talent around him. He's certainly no Aaron Sorkin or Martin McDonagh.

[ChrisTheLovableJerk]

Goyer's kinda hit or miss. He has some great stuff under his belt but some disappointments as well, no one's perfect and sometimes you just mess up and what looked like a great script turns out to not work on film. And then there are times when a movie studio and producers interfere and your vision is altered for the worse, I mean just look at what happened to The Crow: City of Angels, Harvey Weinstein literally cut out almost half the movie and you can't tell me that Batman v. Superman didn't have executive meddling showing all over the place.

[Yukaphile]

Loved his work on Batman Begins.