The Post is the latest film in a long line of movies meant, more than anything else, to win their lead actors Oscars. With Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks as leading roles, it follows the exact footprints and motions of every Oscar bait movie that has come before it. Like all movies made for this purpose,The Post chooses to tell a slightly stylized and fictionalized version of a real event in history. It does this extremely well and with a competency rarely seen in films. The story this movie aimed to tell is about the struggle of the Washington Post to publish a series of secret documents that provide key information about the Vietnam conflict. These documents show the US government's true inadequacy in dealing with Vietnam and its failures in achieving any of the goals it set for itself.
Streep puts in great efforts to create the mannerisms and small details that make her role as convincing as possible as the owner and head of the Washington Post. More than anything, however, she comes off as an actress making an attempt, with overly exaggerated facial movements and not much else. She set out for this film to portray her character as realistically as possible, but instead comes off more as a overacting actress who wants her Oscar. Tom Hanks sadly does not fair much better. He puts on the same level of a performance anyone who has watched any of his movies lately would know. He put the effort in to gain weight for his role but hardly did anything else, which was disappointing. Hanks looks like himself, sounds like himself and for all intents and purposes is just Tom Hanks. Throughout the movie I can not say any other performance stood out at all. Every other character slides into the dull grey and brown backgrounds of The Post and sits there in quiet obscurity.
The cinematography sadly suffers from the same base issues as everything else in The Post, with one or two noteworthy shots that stand out from the rest, purely for their abruptness and distinction. Dull greys and dark browns make up the colour scheme of pretty much the entire movie, making it feel small and like nothing is happening as every scene looks somewhat alike to any other. Camera movement is common but average, following characters through rooms and showing what needs to be shown, but that is about all it does. The cinematography is as dull as the backgrounds it films and the characters it shows. The soundtrack does not stand out at all and could be interchanged with the tracks from any movie Hanks or Streep has been in at any point in the last 10 years. Sadly, in the end The Post is a perfectly competent movie and not much else. It does not take advantage of the excellent talent it controls, and lacks any and all characteristics that qualify a truly great movie.