Elphaba, a young woman ridiculed for her green skin, and Galinda, a popular girl, become friends at Shiz University in the Land of Oz. After an encounter with the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, their friendship reaches a crossroads.
My family and I went and saw a double feature, Wicked Part 1 and Wicked for Good. So I thought I would do two reviews all at the same time, because I just recently watched both movies. So here we go.
So the first movie is amazing. They took this musical, made for the stage, and really made it into a spectacle of a movie. The problem you end up with other musicals that turn into movies is they don’t change enough to be movies. But I think they did a good job of bridging the two. So you’re going to do all of the songs that people want to hear, but you’re going to increase the spectacle. You’re going to use the camera in ways that you just can’t do in a stage production. So you’ve got way more intimate scenes. You can see people’s faces, so there’s a lot more opportunity for telling the emotional side of the story. You don’t have to rely exclusively on the music to tell how people are feeling, which is one of the benefits of it being a movie.
The play and of course this first movie benefit from having so much more discovery and so much more positivity. The musical is really two separate ideas kind of next to each other. The first one is an outcast, becoming friends with a popular person and it’s a bit like “She’s all that.” There’s even a she’s all that moment in the movie where Glenda takes Elphaba’s glasses off and then puts them back on. It’s played as a joke, but this is a trope in those sorts of movies where she has her hair in a ponytail and she wears glasses, but if you put her hair down and you take her glasses off, she’s already beautiful.
This is a movie about acceptance and someone coming out of the shadows while finding themselves. There are references to what’s happening with the animals. But largely this is about a movie about Elphaba gaining acceptance, at least with Glinda. And it’s also about Glinda being less superficial. It’s a completely different tone to where we’ll be going in the next film.
This movie is shot beautifully. I love the sets. There’s so many practical places that really make this movie stand out in ways that other musical films do not. Many rely so much on special effects they end up looking like a CGI nightmare. Since Oz already looks a bit uncanny it’s way more forgiving when youd do the CGI.
Cynthia and Ariana are fantastic, and you can really tell how close they are on screen. One thing I didn’t notice until this viewing is that during Defying Gravity Glenda is, just with her thumb, rubbing Elphaba’s hand while they’re both holding the broom. It’s a really subtle thing that I cannot imagine is in the script or the direction.
One of the things that this film really has going for it is it is clearly referencing The Wizard of Oz, but it is not during the time of The Wizard of Oz. It’s not following that timeline, so it makes it a lot easier to spend the time building the world and getting to know the characters. It also benefits, and we’ll get more into this again in the second movie, the songs in this film are just far superior. I know people love some of the things in the next one, but almost all of the songs in this movie are just fantastic.
