WICKED: PART I - Mark Reviews Movies

Wicked: Part I, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 21, 2024

Wicked: Part I builds toward an impressive climax, as we discover the origin of the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum's children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and, perhaps more famously, its 1939 film adaptation The Wizard of Oz. Then again, those who are most likely to watch director Jon M. Chu's movie adaptation of the 2003 stage musical won't be discovering a thing. That musical is among the most popular ever produced on Broadway and beyond, and the filmmakers—and almost certainly a good number of studio executives—know that this movie's built-in audience will forgive the fact that it's not, as the on-screen title makes clear, the complete story.

Somehow, though, the movie version of half the musical is longer than a stage production of the show, if one doesn't count the intermission. The tickets are probably cheaper, at least, although one will have to pay now and expect to pay again later for the second act. Meanwhile, your average theater intermission lasts about 15 minutes, but the one between this movie and its follow-up will be an entire year. The final sequence here is good enough to want to see what happens next immediately—maybe after a 15-minute break, of course.

That's to this movie's benefit, because it does exit on a high note—namely Cynthia Erivo's final vibrato cry as Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, in the literal show-stopping number "Defying Gravity." It's also to the first part's detriment, because it does leave us hanging in midair and, if the stage show is any indication, what's to come in the second installment won't come close to the peak of this one. Obviously, the filmmakers could prove that assumption wrong, but here we are, talking about an incomplete piece of storytelling, instead of what easily could have been a complete one.

There's little creative justification for splitting the material into two separate movies, to be sure, which does make one wonder just how much the prospect of almost-guaranteed double-ticket sales over the span of a year figured into the plan. Chu, along with co-screenwriters Winnie Holzman (who wrote the musical's script) and Dana Fox, is lucky, perhaps, that the story before the musical's act break does mostly feel like its own narrative, explaining how the Wicked Witch of the West became known as a villainous figure throughout the land of Oz.

Erivo is very good as the misunderstood "witch," a young woman born of an extramarital affair and, more noticeably, with green skin. Through the years, she has gotten used to the stares, the jokes, and the cruelty by the time she finds herself an unexpected student at Shiz University, accompanying her wheelchair-bound sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) and catching the attention of Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) after unintentionally performing some magic. Morrible wants to train Elphaba in magic, much to the consternation of Galinda (Ariana Grande-Butera), a popular new student with dreams of learning magic herself.

Of course, Glinda, as that student comes to be known, is the good witch from the original Oz story, who sets that girl from Kansas on her way to see the Wizard. The clever bit of the stage musical, as well as the Gregory Maguire novel that inspired it, is how it flips what we know of Oz, the two witches, the Wizard, and other elements of the Baum tale on its head. At the top, Glinda announces the demise of the Wicked Witch to many celebratory Munchkins but with a tinge of regret. She knows Elphaba was far from wicked, despite all of the anti-witch propaganda still on full display in Munchkinland.

Without any of the payoffs, the story here turns out to be a lot of setup, as Elphaba and Glinda gradually become friends, after initially loathing each other enough to sing about it. They also fall for the same guy—a prince named Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who insists he doesn't think much about anything but secretly admires Elphaba's sympathy for and desire to do something about laws encroaching on the rights of Oz's talking animals.

The highlights here become Erivo's performance, a few of the songs, and the fact that the filmmakers do create a pretty detailed and convincing Oz to serve as the backdrop for the simple plot and the assorted musical numbers. The design of this world takes inspiration from the '39 film (The score possesses faint hints of a couple tunes from that film), imagining what it might look like with modern technology and a budget that would have been unthinkable during the Great Depression. It does look very expensive and occasionally neat, obviously, even if some of the more charming moments could have been—or were—pulled off on the stage, such as the massive puppet of the Wizard's terrible visage or Jeff Goldblum, as said Wizard, doing some shadow puppetry with a bouncing moon.

It's difficult to assess Wicked: Part I on its own, simply because it is so blatantly incomplete as a piece of storytelling. What we can tell from this half of the tale is that the filmmakers have turned a decent stage musical into what could be a halfway decent movie adaptation. Time will tell, but in the meantime, this movie doesn't quite make a convincing case for itself or the long wait to find out if the split is worth it.

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