The Greatest Showman Reviews — Page 2

mc1227 said: "So, when something like this comes out, I don’t care if someone’s voice is thin, an actor stumbles on a word, the production numbers are overdone. I am happy there is a movie out that I can watch and appreciate the attempt to recreate a stage production."

But do you care if it's AWFUL? Yes, most movie musicals that have come out in the past ten years have been highly criticized. They've also been largely awful--the terrible Nine and Jersey Boys movies were already cited. There have also been the hideous Les Mis and Phantom movies. I may be alone on a limb here, but I also despised La La Land. But my point is that I'd rather audiences not get the impression that musicals are terrible by going to really dreadful film musicals. There have been exceptions--Dreamgirls, Chicago, Hairspray--and those movies were justifiably praised. I LOVE a good movie musical. But The Greatest Showman isn't one. It's the worst excesses of Baz Luhrman mixed with a personal worst score from Pasek and Paul (by a mile) and a script that is an atrocity. Support musical movies, sure. But support the good ones.

I just got out of the theatre so I want to write my intial thoughts down before I sleep on it.

1. The movie is visually stunning. It was absolutely beautiful and I think they did an incredible job with it.
2. The movie was too short and focused on too many things. There wasn’t enough struggle in Barnum getting his circus up and running. I would have liked to see more focus on that.
3. The score was incredible. I personally loved the all songs and genuinely hope This is Me is nominated for an Oscar.
4. This is not the Oscar winning film I think we thought it was going to be. It’s a feel good family movie that fits perfectly for the holidays. At my screening people all walked out with huge smiles on our faces and humming the songs. I think the movie did exactly what it was supposed to do.
5. I think this is a story better suited for the stage. In my personal opinion opinion, had this been a 2.5 hour stage musical they could have had more time to expand on the struggles of Barnum and dive deeper into certain story lines. It seemed liked they wanted to keep it short and sweet so it could be aimed towards families.

This is just my initial thoughts. I’ll definitely be interested to se ehow the movie performs over the weekend.

Oh, for christ's sake. Like there can't BE two musicals about the same thing? Hell, we even have TWO that were playing at the same time (I think) of Wild Party.

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The wiz and wicked? Kind of.

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Loved the score, the plot felt rushed but it didn't matter, wasn't really in it for the plot.

It's nice to see Keala getting the love in the midst of the negative reaction from the movie. But it'll be interesting (though not surprising) if This Is Me gets an nomination, that it'll be Zendaya singing it at the Oscars.

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If nominated, there is no doubt that Keala will likely sing it at the Oscars, maybe dressed as The Bearded Lady. When Hugh presented early footage and the project concept at a gathering of theater exhibitors, CinemaCon in LA, he was said to have showered praises on Keala. At the Hollywood press screening for the movie, Keala sang THIS IS ME. Also, in the story narrated by Hugh as to what happened after Keala sang the song at the February 2016 final workshop, it was FOX Chairman/CEO Stacey Snider who hugged Keala and told her that she has just booked her first film in a major studio!

Interestingly, she was not the first one to sing the song in public. In late 2015, Hugh introduced the song at his concert series in Australia, with a different set of arrangements ( because it was meant for a female vocalist). But now, if there is anyone identified very strongly with a particular song in the movie, it has to be Keala Settle and THIS IS ME!

Just watched an interview that Keala and Hugh did where Keala mentions that Shoshana Bean did the demo for "This is Me"..Boy am I hoping that recording surfaces at some point

I have read several brutal reviews, including the NY Times. Given the glut of movies all out at the same time, have to admit that I am likely to wait till it is on 'HBO.' The last scoring I saw on Rotten Tomatoes was a 45 (ouch). It is a good thing this movie didn't cost much to produce; I am betting that it is going g to be a huge bomb.

Absolutely loved the film. Everyone in the Los Angeles theater clapped after each performance and at the end. It's the musical that LA LA Land should have been. It has heart, wonder, magic and talent. It made me feel like this is what it was like in the 30s-50s when an original musical came out weekly. I highly recommend this film. It's just a happy piece of fluff that doesn't try to be anything but amaze and wonder. It does so.

''The Greatest Showman'' lacks character development and historical accuracy, and is a ridiculous whitewashing of a 19th-century showman who exploited human ''oddities'' and instead tries to rebrand him as a champion of human individuality. In the movie, P.T. Barnum's story is as fake as the bad CGI. Things are totally fictionalized, like Carlyle (a business partner played by Zac Efron); ditto, for an interracial romance with a trapeze artist (Zendaya). No one ages in the film. And totally missing from Barnum's movie is his first success: Joyce Heth, an elderly African-American woman he promoted as George Washington's 160-year-old nurse. She put him on the map, but is ignored and forgotten.

If you're proud of what ''The Greatest Showman'' is, so be it, but Twentieth Century Fox isn't. Back in October, Jeffrey Wells, who writes the Hollywood Elsewhere column, says their execs basically told him that they didn't think this movie was best-picture material. As Deadline.com reports: ''As we got deeper into awards season, Fox got cold feet, and we hear that’s because they knew critics weren’t going to warm to the pic (now at 50% Rotten at Rotten Tomatoes).'' Which is why reviews were embargoed until the day before it opened, and Fox was right to be afraid of them.

USA Today: ''Send in the clowns. ... A disappointing circus of thinly developed characters, overly earnest melodrama and song-and-dance sequences that are more like unrelated music videos.''

L.A. Times: ''Directed with bland competence by Michael Gracey, it is both a fitful hoot and a remarkably upbeat con job. ... You don't believe what the filmmakers are selling for an instant.''

Hollywood Reporter: ''This ersatz portrait of P.T. Barnum is all smoke and mirrors, no substance. ... The interchangeably generic pop songs are so numbingly overproduced.''

Rolling Stone: ''A virtuoso Hugh Jackman as P.T. Barnum, spare-no-expense production values and a score by Oscar & Tony winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul add up to a shrill blast of nothing.''

Updated On: 12/23/17 at 10:53 AM

Who cares what the critics say!! Not every movie has to be historically accurate and in depth character development. Can't a movie sometimes be just good clean escapist entertainment? Anything that sends an audience out of the theatre smiling and humming the tunes, giving them a well deserved break of the all too "real" reality of their daily lives can't be all bad!! But I guess there will always be those who think a Rotten Tomatoes score should be the final word in whether or not a person should enjoy a movie ... I feel sorry for those people.

I will never see a movie that celebrates a man who enslaved and exploited animals.