As an angry mob rises against the Wicked Witch, Glinda and Elphaba will need to come together one final time. With their singular friendship now the fulcrum of their futures, they will need to trul...
With a few vital exceptions, Wicked was the biggest surprise of last year for me. One of my favorite movie-going experiences in recent memory, thanks to Gabby, it was nothing short of a love letter congratulating both its fanbase and the audience members even remotely interested in the source material, wrestling a complete arc out of the first half of the story and further deepening my love for The Wizard of Oz. It only made sense for me and Gabby to go back and see if “Wicked: For Good” could defy gravity all the same.
Somehow, for as high as our expectations were….they were actually met?
Even when tackling a darker, more muted subject matter than what Part 1 offered, Jon M. Chu’s keen eye for structural playfulness doesn’t waver and his rather enthusiastic direction is purposefully given a somber, reflective undertone with measured restraint—like watching a vibrant symphony played in a minor key, every flourish tinged with the bittersweet awareness of what's been lost.
Oh, how I graciously awaited the return of the art nouveau-style production design from Nathan Crowley. Keeping the phantasmagoric astute pastiche and tactical geometrical style ripped straight out of storybooks, the sets continue to expand beyond mere backdrops and into conduits steeped from early 20th century optimism and end-of-century malaise like a World Fair cone slightly eschew. Rather than merely transporting us, an almost funereal gravitas hangs over the muted cavernous set pieces, coloring them with a faintly metallic aftertaste to where even the admittedly tongue-twisted worldbuilding can be argued as less a matter of spectacle and more of psychic pressure where even the most personal gestures are inescapably public, witnessed, and ultimately, judged.
Such visual density might’ve choked the narrative but the presentation had been given enough of a lifeline to ensure every character a sense of tragic grandeur. Alice Brooks’s cinematography retains the sumptuous “elegance by simplicity” of Part 1 that Gabby called out though she can get crowbarred in with the musical numbers, some of which have repetitive framing, drab lighting and awkward blocking and it really shows whenever she prioritizes visual flair over emotional continuity. At least the somewhat muted lighting reflects the more drab situation this time around. Though, as for Myron Kerstein’s editing, he still gets by on match cuts that initially dazzle the eye but not all his seamless editing tricks and transitions can hide the smoke and mirrors this time.
I am glad to say the biggest issue with the Broadway musical, the pacing, has gone through the most salient sign of evolution yet; it's a leaner, tighter experience with just enough deftness to carry that connective tissue through while the tone is almost pleasantly, reservedly sour even when retaining brief spurts of the bubbly cheerfulness from Part 1. Visual effects are a wee-bit spotty exposing a brief but almost endearing rubberiness to the proceedings but not to a distracting degree, the practical/makeup prosthetics are exquisite and Paul Tazewell’s costume design remain impeccable, keeping the antique dreamy quality while ensuring the language of costume charts an arc of identity, power, and vulnerability through fabric.
Even with the addition of its two new songs, these musical numbers lack the immediate earworm quality from before but don’t think for a second that means they’re bad. Stephen Schwartz continues to demonstrate his veteran craftsmanship by ensuring each melody serves as an emotional anchor, where the orchestration swells beneath lyrics and pierce straight through theatrical spectacle into raw, unvarnished truth; three songs in particular will either give you goosebumps or make you cry and John Powell’s musical score compliments that beautifully. Sound design has stellar spatial awareness, meticulously crafted to envelope viewers in Oz's shifting emotional landscape and I firmly believe the two hour runtime was a healthy enough compromise for how stilted this would’ve been otherwise.
Now the PG rating….I’ll get to that in a bit.
Do you even need me to say it? These performances continue to dazzle in ways that defy description and since Part Two is more of ensemble piece, everyone gets a fair portion to bite off from. With the exception of Michelle Yeoh (cause what the hell happened here), the entire cast returns to their respective roles with added aplomb, spicy vigor or some tragic nuance with that same prissy powder pink precision.
While Cynthia Erivo continues to capture Elphaba’s symphony of contrasts with innate vulnerability and burgeoning resolve, I dare say Part 2 is Ariana Grande’s show this time, bringing a pitiful innocence out of a political prisoner and a lost soul trying to figure out what the truth is and grappling with Glinda’s sense of self. Their chemistry together, though strained by the narrative's events, still crackles with the same electricity that bubbled and boiled effortlessly in Part One.
Perhaps the most common complaint Wicked gets as a musical is strictly how congested the second act is; it’s quicker, looser, more fragmented and relies heavily on cohesion from Part I AND piggybacking off the shadows of The Wizard of Oz to where it barely feels like a complete work on its own. From first glance and on paper, it seemed like For Good was set up for failure at its conception……AND YET SOME-FUCKING-HOW, this movie managed to succeed above the bare minimum at condensing all of that baggage and making it flow more freely to give all the events more time to breathe and marinate. It doesn’t take away how most of this plot is entirely confrontational since most of the setup was done in its predecessor but thankfully, the delicate balance between traditional rise-and-fall story beats and the reviled “And then” method of storytelling still follow through here. While still not nearly as focused or taut (which in turn leads to some sacrifices), it delivers on the first film's promises, centering between Elphaba’s tireless journey to not be doomed by the narrative thrusted upon her and Glinda’s crisis of conscience and artifice existence constantly burying her head in the sand ON TOP of everyone else being chewed up and regurgitated to feed the machine.
Both the subtle and not-subtle jabs at fascism and otherism are at least wrapped up in as many metaphorical and dramaturgical layerings as possible for the trained eyes to pick apart but the very fact this movie HAS to cram its revisionist narrative into the Wizard of Oz story means it was doomed to repeat the other major flaw that hung over this play like a halestorm: it still feels disjointed. I’ve seen my fair share of narratives that had to bend over backwards to mold their story to fit a certain way and while this one doesn’t struggle nearly as much with the whiplash (some changes can be explained away in a manner that makes sense), the measured hydraulic pressure from before has cracked and the scars are visible to the point where the mere gesture at comparing all these stories daisy chained at the hip is too tempting.
It’s like you’re watching a video game play like it’s still stuck in the Beta phase and you never stop noticing it.
Yes, this new movie also sands down the provocations and perceptions behind the different types of Wicked a person can be, how they get there and whether or not they’ll stay that way to make certain characters more sympathetic than they are in Gregory Maguires revisionist novel and considering how messy this second act is on Broadway, this probably was the only logical remedy they could work in without giving it an R-rating or changing the second act entirely. Whether or not you consider the suggestion that Wicked is the true story and The Wizard of Oz is the propagandized version of what happened, you can’t not look at this as a true reflection of our times. We needed Part 1 as a palette cleaner from the crushing emotional heartache the election season gave us but now, its done holding our hands. We needed Part 2 to sober us up to the truth of our reality no matter how messy it is; take off the emerald-tinted glasses and face the world as it is. It’s a bittersweet pill, but as they say, the truth shall set you free.
And really, if you think about it, none of the characters get a happy ending here; both our protagonist’s either get a bittersweet conclusion or eventually do the right thing after having lost everything for the message to get through.
However, one other criticism I haven’t seen many people mention is the confines of the PG-13 rating itself; we’re now at the point of the story where the emotional stakes demand more visceral consequences. The film both dives into and also tiptoes around moments that should leave scars—both literal and figurative—the lines between right and wrong are blurred even further with characters aging, their innocence being stripped away from them, animals being muzzled, caged, and disappeared and the world growing more mature, thorny, and treacherous around them. While thankfully not all of the drama has been siphoned away, it doesn’t go dark enough to plunge us into the murky moral quicksand the story requires WITHOUT having to resort to an R-rating.
Not like “Return to Oz” dark or disturbing but….you know
While this tale end of the Yellow Brick Road felt pretty clunky to keep traveling down, I do believe the journey was worth every blister. “Wicked: For Good” remains an engrossing, emotional, bittersweet conclusion that soars on broomstick wings through the tornado-like challenge of balancing faithful adaptation and necessary streamlining even when it occasionally crashes into the poppy fields trying to contort its narrative into the familiar Wizard of Oz framework we all know. It outshines Broadway's rushed second act by several shades of green….though I suspect any cackling, blue-uniformed flying monkey with his tattered wings would've been able to.
