Siding with the critics on this one

Rating: 5/10 (15 January 2018)

Amid the crowded December movie season, there were tons of movies I wanted to go see. It's easy to lose The Greatest Showman amongst Star Wars and Jumanji, but I was pretty excited to go see this Hugh Jackman-led musical. The very good trailers held loads of promise, and the award-winning lyricists of La La Land were making a return to compose the songs.
Walking out, I was extremely disappointed. There was so much potential here, and it did not live up to the expectations that I had walking in. However, when checking the buzz around this movie, I noticed the extremely high audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. Although I usually favor audience opinion over critic, I feel like the critics were right this time.
This movie does have lots of good things about it, amid the bad. The songs are spectacular, and the lyric team deserves to be praised. The sets and choreography of the dance sequences are very well done, with the songs being upbeat and catchy. The acting from mostly everybody is good, especially Hugh Jackman. He was the main catalyst behind the production of this film, and it really shows. Jackman gives 100% effort, and has had a pretty awesome year between this and Logan.
The blaring negative is the script. It is so poorly written and executed that I began thinking of ways to rewrite it as the movie was still going. The entire thing feels extremely rushed. It seemed like the writers wrote the movie in the first thirty minutes, then had no idea what to do after that. The film begins with cringy child actors in a pointless flashback sequence that could have been devoted to present character development. The movie gives hardly zero screen time to pretty important characters, then expects us to care for them later down the road. The main romance in the movie, between Zack Efron and Zendaya, is one of the most shallow love interests I've seen in a long time; they basically make eye contact once then are madly in love. The CGI is unforgivably awful, which makes no sense seeing that this movie had a whopping $84 million budget.
The script and the decisions that the film makes were very amateur and downright bad. If you take away the impressive songs and set pieces, then what you're left with is a poorly-written mess that can't stand on its own. One of the biggest praises I can give to La La Land, a similar film, is that amid the spectacular songs, the story is strong enough to stand on its own two legs. That is just not the case for The Greatest Showman.