The Greatest Showman Is Loud, Empty and Built on Illusion

The Greatest Showman makes its priorities clear early. Character comes second to spectacle.

Dialogue is rushed and flattened. When speech does arrive, it barely registers. The film moves quickly, but without weight.

Twenty minutes in, Barnum is already difficult to engage with. Arrogant, self-serving and convinced of his own vision, he risks his family and stability without a single honest conversation. Not even Hugh Jackman can make him genuinely likeable, and the film works hard to soften the reality behind the myth.

Then Keala Settle appears. The voice, the presence, the power.

The concern is immediate.

She will be underused.

The songs are catchy. The performances are committed. The problem is that spectacle quickly becomes a substitute for character. By the halfway point, people arrive, serve a function and disappear again. Zac Efron’s Phillip Carlyle exists largely as a narrative device. No one is given enough space to become fully realised.

Character is not built through behaviour or consequence.

It is replaced with volume.

The protestors are not the issue.

Barnum is.

His ego. His lack of foresight. His refusal to protect the people he brings into his world. Others carry the risk. He takes the reward.

It becomes difficult to care about him. The empathy belongs with the performers around him, people who believe they are finding stability and visibility while serving his ambition.

Rebecca Ferguson’s Jenny Lind only reinforces the problem. A world-renowned opera singer is reshaped into something more palatable, bent to fit the film’s version of events. Barnum does not change. The pattern continues.

When This Is Me arrives, it should be the emotional centre of the film. Instead, it feels unearned, attached to characters the narrative has never fully invested in.

Then comes the collapse. Fire, spectacle, consequence.

Or what should be consequence.

Barnum runs into the chaos. His image survives. His family leaves.

And then returns.

The resolution comes too easily. Redemption without accountability. Closure without reckoning. Circus is not stability. It is precarious, demanding work, and the film avoids that reality.

That avoidance defines the film.

The Greatest Showman presents itself as a celebration of outsiders, individuality and acceptance. Yet again and again, it removes the complexity that might challenge its central figure. The people around Barnum carry the emotional weight. He receives the redemption.

What remains is not inspiration, but erasure. A story that wants credit for embracing difference while smoothing away the consequences of the man at its centre.

I went into this wondering why I had never watched it again.

Now I remember.