‘Wicked’’’s first half is flawed, but often fantastic

If you can get past that it’s a 160-minute adaptation of just half of the Broadway hit, Jon M. Chu’s film is a large-scale, beautifully mounted musical.

Image: Universal Pictures

In the weeks and months leading up to the release of Wicked, there’s been a trend of people sharing clips of the film, or trailers, and pointing out that they “look bad.” That the colors are off, and that movies today just look generally awful, and not like how they used to look. 

I’ve always found this sort of analysis wildly unfair, mostly because movies aren’t meant to be viewed in out-of-context clips in an inch-high Twitter window. A movie that looks bad as part of a social media scroll might just look fantastic on a massive silver screen. Combined with a lot of extracurricular beef that certain people seem to have with both lead actresses that have nothing to do with the film, it’s led to some early buzz about the film that’s generally unfair. 

(On the other hand Emilia Perez, another new musical, pretty much sucks at any size.) 

Wicked, needless to say, benefits from the big screen treatment. Director Jon M. Chu knows his way around a spectacle, having directed Crazy Rich Asians and the underrated 2021 adaptation of In the Heights, and here he’s assembled another elaborate colorful world, in the adaptation (well, half of) the hit Broadway musical. 

There’s a lot I loved about Wicked, starting with the look and the spectacle, and that it’s an actual musical that cares about being a musical, unlike half-assed recent movie musical efforts like Emilia Perez and Joker: Folie a Deux. Cynthia Erivo is absolutely fantastic in the lead role. 

On the other hand, the plot stretching is obvious. And I’m still not entirely sold on Ariana Grande as a movie star. Grande was always strong as a performer on those now forever-tainted Dan Schneider Nickelodeon shows, and she certainly sings the songs well, but I don’t know if she has the presence to carry a movie. 

If you’re not familiar, Wicked is a Broadway musical, based on a revisionist novel by Gregory Maguire that’s set in the Wizard of Oz mythology, telling the backstory of the two main witches.

Built on music and lyrics by Broadway veteran Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman, and originally starring Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Manzel, Wicked overcame initial bad reviews to gain massive box office and remains on Broadway more than two decades after its debut. 

Its signature song is “Defying Gravity,” the first act finale that ends the new movie; the film very much nails this long and elaborate number. 

I have not ever seen the Wicked stage musical, although I know its music fairly well, and I do have a great reverence for The Wizard of Oz, which may be the movie that I’ve seen the most times in my life. 

The Wicked movie represents a revisionist take on The Wizard of Oz, depicting the Wicked Witch of the West as tragic and misunderstood and Glinda the Good Witch as what the kids might call a Problematic White Woman, convinced of her goodness when she’s actually kind of self-absorbed and selfish. It’s revisionist about old and familiar material in the way that recalls Sondheim’s Into the Woods, a much more highly regarded stage musical, although Wicked is the better movie adaptation. 

We meet Glinda (Grande) and the born-green Elphaba (Erivo) as roommates at Shiz University, a Land of Oz answer to Hogwarts, where talking animals (including a Peter Dinklage-voiced goat) are professors, and Michelle Yeoh is the headmaster (Yeoh even gets to sing a musical number, but singing is sadly not among her many talents.) 

About two-thirds of the action is set at Shiz, before the characters head to Emerald City at the end, to see the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum.) It’s long and uneven, but at least it ends well. 

A lot of recent movie musicals have, in their promotional campaigns, left out the part about it being a musical. Wicked has not done that, but it has significantly downplayed the part about the film only representing Part 1 of the two-part saga. 

It’s a two-hour and forty-minute movie based on the first half of the Broadway musical, which itself ran for 2 hours and 45 minutes. I’d love to know where all that extra running time came from. I’m told there are new musical numbers, and the existing ones have been made longer, but more than two hours worth? 

Wicked does have a lot of plot, and a large number of characters to service, while also lining itself up with the main plot beats of the 1939 Wizard of Oz. But it does feel, at times, like it’s stretching. 

The second half arrives a year from now, and I gather that it will touch on the plot of The Wizard of Oz, but Part I is entirely a prequel. It feels a lot like the Land of Oz version of the Star Wars prequels, with the Wicked Witch standing in for Darth Vader.

I’m rooting for the film to succeed, because I want more movie musicals. Neither of Stephen Schwartz’s two classic musicals he wrote as a young man in the ‘70s, Pippin and Godspell, ever got a proper movie adaptation, although Schwartz spent the ‘90s composing Disney movies and eventually The Prince of Egypt. 

Ultimately, Wicked is flawed, but it’s going to make musical theater fans happy. As long as they watch it in a theater and not on X.