Every person is biased in some degree towards or against every single movie we ever watch, but sometimes that bias is severe enough that there's just no honesty at all in pretending it's not there. So let me lead with the blunt fact, and you can decide if you want to read beyond this sentence: there was never any chance that I was going to enjoy the film version of Wicked. Or Wicked: Part One, depending on if we're going with the copyright or the onscreen title, and you can certainly take it for granted that my knowledge that the 2003 smash hit musical had been split in half at the intermission to make two separate movies - the first one longer than the entire stage production, at 160 stultifying minutes - was part of why I walked into the theater already composing my negative review. But even if Wicked had been tasteful and restrained in limiting itself to one bloated running time rather than two, I was still never going to like it. For one thing, my opinion had been for many years before the movie ever went into production the songs composed by Steven Schwartz for the stage musical are almost all garbage, except for "Popular", which is at least extremely catchy garbage with a hell of a hook, and "Defying Gravity", which is actively good, though it has been made somewhat redundant by "Let It Go" from Disney's Frozen, which is basically the same song but written by people without Schwartz's career-defining habit of stretching really fucking far for cumbersome "clever" rhymes. For a second thing, I am thoroughly hostile to the animating concept of Wicked, which is to give the Wicked Witch of the West from the 1939 masterpiece The Wizard of Oz (and like most latter-day Oz riffs, Wicked is absolutely situating itself relative to the '39 movie more than to the 14 books in theOz series by L. Frank Baum or any other adaptation) a sympathetic backstory, and we just don't have enough top-notch iconic purely evil villains in the movies to take maybe the single best one in cinema history and destroy her beautiful wickedness by making her sympathetic. And following right on the heels of that, I'm also thoroughly hostile to the story conceived in Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, the basis for Winnie Holzman's 2003 stageplay and 2024 screenplay, which boils down to the most sneering '90s-style grimdark edgy nihilistic bullshit, "this nice and charming thing you liked as a child? What if it was fascist?" of which The Wizard of Oz was by absolutely no means the only target, though it is possibly the target where it annoys me the most personally. And combining that cynicism with treacly sentimentality, which I know the show does (though I have not, as of yet, seen it*), just sounded like Hell itself. So no, I was not going to enjoy Wicked. The best-case scenario was that if it was an extraordinary masterpiece of cinematic craft, simply undeniable in its construction of a magnificent visual spectacle of unmatched big-screen fantasy, I would grind my teeth to nubs while writing an extremely petulant and curt 3-star review.
Wicked is not an extraordinary masterpiece of craft. In fact, it's downright demoralizing that something with such unpleasantly shitty cinematography (and altogether catastrophic, none-of-the-people-responsible-should-ever-work-again levels of terrible color grading) could have been deemed ready for commercial release. I'm a little bit amazed at the achievement it represents: in those 160 minutes, I am not actually certain that there is a single interior shot that has been lit properly: every single one is either a murky soup with an embarrassed little key light that barely points at the actors and no apparent fills, or completely blown out by omnidirectional soft lighting that seems to have been designed to suggest that the movie takes place on the surface of Venus. Frequently, they're combined, so we get no fill lights and unspeakably hideous backlighting that pummels the actors' heads and gives them smeary halos that make it hard to even look at their faces, let alone discern what their faces look like. One of these is the triumphant climax to "Defying Gravity" practically all the way at the end of the movie, a huge comic book splash page of a composition obviously designed to be as iconic as director John M. Chu and cinematographer Alice Brooks could imagine, and between the shit lighting, the watery butter-yellow color grading that has managed to exaggerate the problems in the lighting even more, and the dreadfully smeary CGI sunset in the background, all I could think was to wonder if it was actually the single-ugliest image I had ever seen in a commercial movie theater, or if I only felt that way in the moment because I was in such a mean mood after two and a half hours of similarly dreadful-looking images.
This is especially irritating because the one thing thatWicked actually does have going for it - maybe two things, if we count the two leads, and I'm tentatively willing to do so - is that the visual design is pretty strong, in a very particular register. That register is "tasteless grandeur", and I promise that I don't even mean that as a backhanded compliment, let alone an insult. The main impulse that seems to have animated Nathan Crowley's production design (aided by a full-on squadron of credited art directors) is pretty obviously "I bet people are missing the Harry Potter series by now", which was also the impulse animating Crowley's work on 2023's edition of the terrible holiday musical that makes an annoying large sum of money, Wonka, though I think it's unquestionably better in Wicked. Either way, there's a shared conception of what "fantasy filmmaking" should look between all of these properties that's not attempting to build a plausible reality that could never exist and then invite us to walk around inside of it, as with e.g. The Lord of the Rings. These are much more about a conception of a fantasy world as a giant candy box or dollhouse, not really a place that lives and breathes but as a place that is eye-poppingly spectacular in its excessive of scale and detail. It's more like a theme park; or, more to the point, it's like a huge Broadway/West End theatrical megaproduction that only ever shows you the back three-fifths of any location and wants you to reveal in the artifice and impressive technical wizardry that went into making it. That's a perfectly legitimate approach, and Wicked mostly does right by that approach; the main courtyard and outside grounds of Shiz University, the school in the land of Oz where most of the story takes place, are enjoyably sprawling and detailed, devoid of any organic touches but still fun to look at all the filigree in the corners, and the low-ceiling attic bedroom that is where the "emotional" storytelling takes place offers a nice contrast, both in its cramped scale and also the way that its clutter speaks to the difference between private and public spaces. I don't think it's an across-the-board slam dunk; the scenario's conception of the Emerald City, capital of Oz, is so fundamentally broken at a dramatic level that I'm not sure what conception could have worked for it, and "Oz-themed mall atrium" is probably no more aggravating and small-feeling than anything else would have been.
Plus, while I like the production design with an asterisk, I like the costume design full stop, no notes: Paul Tazewell, who has till now primarily worked in theater rather than film, has very smoothly transitioned into a medium that subjects the costumes to a much higher level of scrutiny, while still having the theatrical focus on the actors' needs. I think it would not be even a slight exaggeration to suggest that the costumes are one of the central components of the stage business: Ariana Grande, who places the second-largest role in the film (Galinda, a plasticky rich girl with an increasingly gold-ish heart), particularly benefits from the costumes so clearly telling us who the character is and giving her such ready-to-hand things to do with her arms and the slope of her back, so the non-actor always has at least that resource to fall back on when she's otherwise not sure what to do (or when the horrific lighting has conspired with the ill-judged blonde wig Grande wears to render her entire body, head to do, as a uniform shade of necrotic greige). Which I think happens fairly often, pace the extremely loud Best Supporting Actress campaign for Grande and the generally consensus that she's the best in show here. I will say that she is the most consistent, though both her and lead Cynthia Erivo (as the green-skinned stick-in-the-mud Elphaba, a natural-born magic user whose smearing as "the Wicked Witch of the West" is not actually the subject of this film's narrative, though the opening scene acts like it still is) are mostly just stuck with what Holzman's baggy script has given them. Grande just has a much more obvious path to chart as the big comic relief character who is defined by having surface-level behavior and a very brittle, presentational way of standing and moving, so Grande's habit of simply playing the surface of the script is a perfectly suitable and even preferable approach to the role. Erivo is trying harder with much iffier material, and she suffers more from the stubbornly awful blocking that director Jon M. Chu has condemned us all to watch for two and a half chunky, cloddish hours of walking this way, then walking that way. I'll get back to Chu in a second, but I do want to stick with Erivo, since she does have individual moments of being actually great, trying very hard to find a character in the collection of half-baked impulses in the script; the huge, time-consuming subplot about the Oz government imprisoning talking animals, the main "Oz is actually fascist!" component of the story, is bizarrely disconnected from anything else in the movie despite taking up so much footage than in a sense it is the movie, but Erivo has at least managed to find a way to suggest that Elphaba's pro-animal activism is related to her own feelings of being an outsider (which is built into the script) but also born from a certain innate tendency towards "fuck you Dad" -ish resentment of authority (which is, at any rate, built much less into the script).
Erivo is mostly at a loss to do anything with the musical elements in the film, but then, Grande is thesole cast member who mostly survives the musical numbers, which is probably another reason she's getting the best notices. For one thing, Grande sings "Popular", which has the singular benefit of being the only one out of eleven musical numbers where Chu seems to have been even peripherally aware of the possibilities that motion pictures offer to musical storytelling. Certainly, "Popular" is the solitary place in those 160 beastly minutes, musical or spoken dialogue, where Wicked offers any awareness of the utility of editing to shape the rhythm of a story and offer narrative information in a way that doesn't require the characters saying it out loud. It has cuts that break the song into musical phrases and elide time and space and all! It's actual filmmaking, darn near, if you can overlook that the attic bedroom where it takes place is also consistently subject to the most absurdly bad color grading in the whole movie, bathing everything in a hot rosy glow that feels like the movie is literally feverish.
Outside of "Popular", the musical numbers are a complete write-off. Chu has regressed in every way as a director of musical films since 2021's In the Heights, and that was by no means an achievement which offered a lot of room to comfortably regress from. Some of the problems are shared with that film: Chu and cinematographer Alice Brooks have latched onto medium shots with ferocious commitment, assuming that if you just chop mindlessly from one generically close framing to the next, and music is playing, there will be some kind of momentum produced simply by default. Not that I want more wide shots: the number that includes the most of them, "One Short Day", is also possibly my least-favorite in the movie, since those wide shots are not showcasing body movement or the sets (it's the number set in that somewhat unpleasant Emerald City). but simply a lot of visual filler, crowds and props and set pieces shoved into the frame to create constant movement more than to create compositions. It's during the same number that the film crams in its inevitable cameos for Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth, who created Elphaba and Galinda onstage, and that probably explains the wide shots more than any other artistic impulse; certainly, the whole sequence radiates a distinctly morbid fan-service energy that is charmless and pragmatic and mercenary, and extremely unpleasant to watch.
Anyway, shot scale is a huge problem throughout; it butchers "Dancing Through Life", the only proper group dance in the movie, which starts off by shooting itself in the face with a gaudily-staged rotating CGI hallway and never comes close to figuring out a decent rhythm for what to look at, or when, or why, at any point after that; we see crowds here and featured dancers there, but there's never an apparent motivation in the music or the choreography for making that choice. But sometimes the rot goes deeper than poor editing of shoddy coverage. "The Wizard and I", the show's "I Want" song, has sent Elphaba on a pointless stroll across that big Shiz University outdoor set, and it works neither at letting us see into the character's mood beyond what the lyrics already provide, nor at clarifying the layout of the location (most of the places we see in this sequence, we will not see again), and ending on a completely confounding gesture that seems to imagine that "running through fields" is a thing that happens in movie musicals because you can't do it properly on stage. "A Sentimental Man" seems to have been constructed primarily around Jeff Goldblum's laziness and disinterest, not even managing to sincerely play insincerity; he's mostly standing on this large model in ways that make sense and give the actor no way to move that isn't contrived and awkward, and in a cast where most of the non-Erivo/Grande players seem to have no actual idea what the hell they're doing, Goldblum's is by far the most detached from anything that might plausibly work as an interpretation of the role he has been given (contrast Michelle Yeoh, who very obviously doesn't know what the fuck is happening even more than Goldblum doesn't, but she's at least parading through the lines of fantasy gobbledygook with great gusto and melodramatic hamminess). "Defying Gravity" has been stretched out by the script to lose all of its building momentum, but even worse, it has been treated to the very worst of the film's warped lighting scheme, dropping Erivo into a blue murk that makes it almost impossible to see her facial expressions in some of the key emotional beats not just in the song, but in the entire story.
Which lets me circle back around: the way this film looks is criminal. I was never going to like Wicked, but I hope I am charitable enough that I wasn't always going to detest it. I mean, the sets are nice! The costumes are great! But the editing is so sloppy and the cinematography, lighting, and grading are so utterly incomprehensible just at a basic conceptual level that even the physical production ends up looking smudgy and overly-processed: this is a film with a great deal of practical sets and effects that has gone so overboard with goosing the lighting and color in post that even the actually-built sets that the actors are standing on end up reading like poorly-done green screen effects. Since the day it premiered onstage, the main sell for Wicked has always been "check out our amazing spectacle!" and given how forcefully Wicked the movie shuts down any prospect for that spectacle being pleasurable to look at, there is just nothing positive left to grapple with here.
*In fact, I had concrete and deeply unenthusiastic plans to finally see the show the last time the North American tour swung through the same town I was in, but in a great stroke of luck the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the run was cancelled.
