The Greatest Showman is a “musical” about a guy (I forgot his name but I do know he is portrayed by Hugh Jackman so I’ll just call him Hugh) who looks for a way to provide more for his family so he decides to find all these “wonders” (they are really just outcasts of the 19th century society) and make the first circus but in the context of the movie, he might as well made another thertre group. If I want to get all the praise out of the way, I will say that the first couple opening minutes of this film is great fun. It gets you pumped and gets you hooked which is such a shame when this leads up to the main song of this “musical” which absolutely ruins the tone of this movie for me. This is a movie that is set in the 19th century so why the hell are they singing the equivalent of pop songs for this whole movie. I mean, other musicals have the excuse of being set closer to the modern era to have these ditzy kinds of songs but when they don’t, at least they try to stick to the tone and theme of the era. I mean, look at “La Miserable”. They do the more dramatic and orchestrated pieces of musics and that’s not because they just felt like it. It’s done because it fits the tone and theme and then comes stuff like this which just reeks of low effort and I’m not only talking about the music.
Plot wise, it’s probably more bog standard then the music. I found this movie to be extremely predictable and by the numbers as you can pretty much guess each beat of the movie easy. It goes from the initial problem to solution to new problem to the climax of the problem to the solution and each plot point is dull and boring. Now, this wouldn’t be something I would draw too much attention to because in a musical, the plot is secondary as it is simply there to string each musical piece together but when the music is dull, it can’t be helped that I would be drawn towards the plot in the hopes of the entertainment I paid for and if the plot being generic wasn’t bad enough, they still somehow produce major plot holes and unnecessary scenes. Let’s begin with the first one where Hugh gets a check to fund his plans from the bank and he only convinces them with a deed to some trading ships which he somehow got from his old job before he was fired. Now, it was set up in the past scene that these trade ships have sunk to the bottom of the sea so you would expect the bank to show up later in the movie after finding out the truth but nope, this never happens and feels like ineffective use of Chekhov’s Gun (its a writing principle of when you put a plot device in a earlier act, you should make use of the plot device later down the line). Another problem with the plot is that there is this critic character who is set up as a pseudo-villain for the movie because his reviews pretty much the cause of one of the main issue which is a group of protesters barring the “circus” for some reason I forgot but after the protest get out of hand and leads to the burning down of the main building they perform in, he shows up to console with Hugh in a way to redeem his character, he admits he should of written it as “A Celebration Of Humanity” and you can’t be helped but to think “So why didn’t you do that in the first place then?” I mean, so much conflict could of been avoided if you wrote that to begin with but it seems like they only wrote it like that to just to have more conflict for the climax but it’s just so stupid as a plot device. There is more to rant about but then this paragraph would just be a massive wall of text of me ranting about this annoying plot so let’s just move on.
Speaking about the technical side of things, it’s as good as the movie’s plot which means this is so bad in terms of production value. The back drops are so obviously 2D painted backdrops and it doesn’t even try to hide the fact. I mean, it would be acceptable if this was a theater production but this is a Hollywood movie with Hollywood standards so they could of at least tried harder but nope, we get the most obvious painted backdrops for most of the scenes and if we want to talk about low effort production values, let’s talk the CGI usage. Granted the movie doesn’t use too much CGI but when it does, it’s so obvious and most of this is directed at the midget of this movie. Early on, we are introduced to this small person and you would at least expect them to hire someone real to do the job but nope, they decided that it would be easier to CGI someone’s face onto the most obvious puppet body they could find and call that their midget. Yes, it’s not that obvious to begin with but it starts to stand out quickly like at the first main song they sing at the start of the circus, Hugh sends out the poor guy in a horse and there is a tracking shot of the horse going around the little ring they have and it’s just so obvious that the horse and the midget riding it is CGI. I mean, we live in a world where Hollywood has mastered the art of CGI to the point it’s becoming uncanny to see something so real that’s just been computered generated but here, we see the equivalent of early 2000s CGI and that’s an insult to early 2000s CGI because early 2000s CGI is much better then this. For examples, look at any Pixar movie who are made completely of CGI.
If I was to get on a more personal opinion and take off my critic hat, I would still not enjoy the movie. I mean, apart from the starting part of the movie, the only other enjoyment I got from this movie was both Hugh Jackman and Zac Efron’s performances. For me, these two are the stand outs of this movie because they not only have proven their musical prowess before in early productions but the best song of the whole movie is sung by these two in a duet and that was the highlight of the movie for me which is a shame the rest of this movie kind of sucked. I had zero expectations going into this movie and I was only going to watch it because my mum wanted to see it for her birthday and I thought I could do a quick little review on it so when this movie revealed itself to be a musical, I was ready to hunker down because musicals aren’t my favourite thing in the world (which is ironic when one of your favourite movies is “Mama Mia: The Movie”) but this was more disappointing then usual. I mean, everyone who left the theatre, even my mum who loves musicals as much as she loves Princess Diana, came out with the most mediocre look on their faces and for a movie to provoke such a facial expression on the audience, that’s a bad omen.
This gets a 2/10 from me because this movie is just so dull, it’s bad. The whole thing reeks of low effort trash which serves no other purpose but to fill in a release schedule slot and leaves no impression on the audience which is why I had such a hard time writing this. It’s just so dull, the notes I made in my mind just kept slipping out and I think it’s better if we just let it sit on the shelf. If you are into musicals and I’m talking border line obsession here, you might get a kick out of it but for anyone else, there is nothing to here to watch unless you find horrible CGI, bad songs and horrible production values appealing which in that case, you must be a Oscar Voter so hello there, I hope you don’t let Chips get a Oscar nomination because if it does, you are officially too old to watch modern movies.
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