(This review may contain spoilers).
I’ve just watched The Greatest Showman for the second time now. And I enjoyed it just as much this time as I did the first time.
The very start of the movie was enough to draw me in straight away. I loved the first song…and my favourite song in the movie is a toss-up between The Greatest Show and This Is Me. I like and have listened to both of those multiple times.
I’ve seen Hugh Jackman in innumerable movies to date, but the last musical I saw him in was Les Miserables; and his performance was good, but I still remember seeing the theatre version of the play…and the singing in the movie wasn’t nearly as good. Here, though? I was not disappointed.
I really liked the opportunity to see Barnum and Charity grow up writing letters to each other. The montage of them doing so might have been cliched, but I still felt it worked and by the time I saw Barnum as a full adult, I felt like I’d got to know the two main characters almost as well as watching an entire movie focused on them growing up. I did, however, feel that Charity’s parents were one-dimensional characters. At the beginning, I wasn’t even sure it was her mother teaching her to be a lady.
I really liked Barnum’s relationship with his children and his wife, but it was very clear as the movie went on that he was losing sight of what should have been more important. By the time Jenny Lind came into the picture, I was very disappointed in the way Barnum was treating the people he’d persuaded to come and work for him.
Speaking of Jenny…I really disliked her. By the end of the movie, she seemed like a petty person who decided to try and tear a marriage apart simply because she’d been rejected. At least that was how the movie portrayed her; I can’t really say if the movie provided any kind of accurate representation of the real people from history.
I really didn’t like the whole scene when they visited the Queen, as I felt, even for a movie that wasn’t really historically accurate, that required a huge amount of suspension of disbelief.
Watching the movie for the second time, I found it just as intense as watching it the first time through. I liked the relationship between Philip and Anne and felt people’s attitudes were quite realistically portrayed.
This is a movie I definitely wouldn’t mind watching a third time and I fully intend to buy it on DVD when it’s released.
Ink of Blood 