Review of The Greatest Showman (2017) by Andrea A — 11 May 2018

The Greatest Showman, in all its bright-shiny-appeal-to-today's-audiences basic story, music, and performances, fails in nearly every aspect of creating a modern-day musical based on a historical event/person. Attempting to ride on the coat tails of modern masterpieces of the musical art such as Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen, The Greatest Showman provides the theatrical audience with bland music, a scattered plot, and confusing messages.

Star Hugh Jackman as P.T. Barnum gives a bland performances, paling in compassion to his other performances. Zac Effron and Zendaya serve as a perfect example as to what modern mainstream audiences want to see in actors: Eye Candy. Many people see both these actors as amazing, stunning performers, while when compared to others "Fade into the shadows" as the movie liked to say. Keala Settle gave by far my favorite performance, as it appeared she actually had emotion in her scenes and melted into her character. It's a shame though, the beard prosthetic looked about as realistic as the toy Barnum's child had in the beginning. It took away from her performance, and distracted me throughout the film.

A small victory this movie pulled out was through its costume design and lighting. The costumes reflected the characters well and provided for some fun visuals. The lighting was good, providing interesting techniques and juxtaposition of shadows.

With music coming from one of my favorite modern composers, Benj Pasek, I was appalled at how bland the music was. Each one sounded nearly identical to the next, offering old rhythms, chord progressions, and melodic lines we've all heard before. Though I was disappointed by the soundtrack as a whole, the fact the "Rewrite the Stars" becoming the big hit of the movie is terrible! A tried and told basic love story spitting out another bland love song gave this movie a huge publicity boost, even though it was perhaps the worst song on the whole track. At least some others tried a little something new. But this song, I found myself humming another song during the middle of it due to it sounding so similar! I much prefer "This is Me", because it's empowering message and fun visuals, and it even offered some powerful vocals from Settle.

The Story that this film attempts to pull out is much less entertaining than the actual life of Barnum. Immediately after the movie I turned to my sister and told her: "I wish this film did something more like The Dark Knight, where it makes the villain the real star. Barnum was such a terrible person, they could have portrayed him as the hero, but made it clear that underneath was a terrible person. It would have a much more interesting dynamic.".

This movie makes you care very little about the characters, to a point where I completely forgot that Zac Efron and Zedaya's characters, whose names I didn't even bother remembering, even existed. Barnum's character was over dazzled and I got bored of him a quarter of the way through. His family left much to be desired, and his 'affair' was 100% not real and never actually happened, making the already unrealistic plot an even harder pill to swallow. As soon as it was over, my mother and sister started vigorously clapping, as if they had just seen the Godfather for the first time. My mother said, "Oh, I really liked it." I turned to her shocked, and asked "why?". She proceeded to say that the music was really good and that the message was beautiful. I then thought "oh, lie, cheat, swindle, and otherwise scam your way through life, disregard your loved ones, and look down on those who are different, even if they're trying to shine?" But, I guess that was just another perfect example of modern audience expectations. I'm sorry, I didn't realize that a movie had to be of good cinematic equality to appeal to the masses. Its quite a shame. It seems that the movies like this always get the most publicity, while beautiful, artful pictures such as Boy and Seraphine get next to no appreciation and publicity. I guess that's asking too much. I'm done talking about this dumb movie.