Money can't buy quality

Rating: 3/10 (18 February 2019)

Although I'm not a big fan of musicals, I've decided to give this film a try. I had good experiences with some movies of the genre before, and actually never had a really bad one so... why not?
Since the first sequence, something started to bother me: things seem... off. Place, habits, coreographies, songs itself. The movie never tells you the year, but by the scenario, you can imagine the age it occurs, by late 1800's to early 1900's. And it's based on real characters. And it's okay to create dysthopia, but this isn't clearly a good one. So why do coreographies with Michael Jackson moves, songs that sound so contemporary and characters that act that they belong to mixed eras?
OK, the characters being so advanced and open minded are the base of the objective of the movie. So let's not sin this. But you never feel the depth of them. You got a lot of great stories that could be told and the movies focus only in it main character, an ambitious man that takes advantage of the "freakies". His actions are quite mixed up and don't make you want him to suceed - actually you do so the others can suceed, but not him.
This happens mostly because this movie have no plot. Probably they write this thing in an afternoon. You identify like three major events and the way the movie leads you to them is always cliché. While they are singing a bad song, you always know what will happens in the next 15 minutes and the duration of the music is just a torture because you just want to be surprised by something but it never happens.
The movie has a formula, a really boring one. Goes like this: music > three lines of simplistic dialogue like "oh she is mad at me" "what you gonna do?" "i have to make her happy!" > music. The actors are clearly lost in most of the scenes, completely unenvolved with the script.
And the songs are so identical, there are two or three that really stand up. Specially when they decide to give the hairy woman a space and let Hugh Jackman and Zac Effron go take a coffee. The movie needed more sequences and songs like that.
And, boy, the editing. I never get bothered by chroma key, most of the time I don't even perhaps it. But in this movie the difference in ilumination will denounce the absurd usage of green backgrounds. Again, not a total problem as it creates a kind of atmosphere. But some simple errors in the editing make the chroma key scream at you and shows that this movie had no purpose but to make money.
It's a shame, because probably, with a cast full of stars and all this production, this movie had a lot of money to spent. But they chose only aesthetiques over content, and even in the focus they are totally unimpressive. At the end, The Greatest Showman is just like the main character: it bases itself in money ambition, a lot of lights and faking.