Musical Watch: Wicked (2024)

Watched:  06/26/2025

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jon M. Chu

I am a huge fan of the OG Wizard of Oz.  My second biggest regret about ending the podcast was not covering the movie before we put away our mics.  In my opinion, it's not just an important film, it's a key to American film and culture.  

That said - I am fine with derivative works.  Of course people want to explore this amazing world in which Wizard of Oz takes place, to consider and deconstruct and shuffle around the cultural icons of the movie, look into the characters, themes, etc...  It's a bubbling well for interpretation, commentary and America.

Wicked (2024) came in riding decades of popularity as a stage show and soundtrack.  Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenowith were launched to super stardom with the show and became fixtures.  People who don't care about Broadway probably already knew two of the songs by osmosis before ever buying a movie ticket.  It's one of the few 21st Century Broadway shows to break into the pop consciousness like 20th Century shows like Oklahoma!, Phantom, Cats or Les Mis.  

The film adaptation did great at the box office and was at least an American phenomenon.  It did fine overseas, but likely suffered from being an English-language musical about a play that probably hasn't been getting seen in Beijing, etc...  quite yet.  And who knows if they care about The Wizard of Oz in Lichtenstein?

But in the states, it made almost half-a-billion dollars.  As the movie was released in late Fall, Christmas season 2024 was pink and green with the movie's merchandise and imagery everywhere.  It was kind of neat.

(deep sigh.  You can do this, Ryan.  Here we go.)

Maybe a decade ago, I saw Wicked as a travelling Broadway show and felt it was...  not my thing.  It happens.  It just didn't click with me, and I was in, like, row 17, dead center, so I wasn't missing anything. 

As it turns out, I also didn't really care for a much longer version of Wicked, on film, which is not even close to done after 150 minutes and will require a year's intermission between acts.

If me not liking your beloved this will anger you, bail now.

Look, I already knew I was not into the stage show.  But, more than that, aside from watching Galinda move around in her bubble and being a bit underwhelmed by the effect used for making Elphaba fly after hearing so much about it, I didn't remember much about the show.  Not in the "I don't remember specifics" manner, more in the "the story felt so whisper thin, nothing stuck" sort of way.  Which is fine!  A musical can be thin and be about the numbers and spectacle.  

But I didn't particularly care about the music.  It's fine.  Some people love Alan Jackson or the work of ICP.  I'm not that guy.  And so it was, I did not care for most of the music in the stage show, which is also the music in the movie. It has two songs that are earworms.  

If the story felt thin in the play...  when you're making a movie, adding twice as much water to the concentrate doesn't mean you get twice as much lemonade.  Flat out, this should have been one movie.

The story in this half of the film is that snooty Galinda wishes to be a magician as she enrolls in her new university, but lacks the capacity.  Meanwhile, the unfortunate emerald-tinged Elphaba is an X-Man with reality-warping powers.  Michelle Yeoh plays our Professor X, who spies Elphaba going Jean Grey on us, and not only recruits her into the school but makes her Galinda's roommate.

Elphaba has much back story, but it adds up to her being green, her father hating her, her sister is in a wheelchair and she's an awkward nerd with mutant magical powers.  Galinda is rich, blonde and pretty.  Elphaba is shunned at school for being magical?  Green?  Galinda is popular and mad she's sharing space with the sorcerer.  

I won't get into how none of this holds any internal logic as it seems like magic would be a big deal since everyone adores the Wizard and finds magic important.

MEANWHILE...  it seems a regime has come in that wishes to cage and remove talking animals, who had peacefully lived alongside "humans" for years.  And so the animals are fleeing Oz, getting captured, etc... and the regime shows up to lays down its own agenda in the school.  Which is something apparently a huge part of the US would be great with.

This is mostly subjective, but...  

The movie drags.  Which both makes sense since the stretched out the stage show, but is odd, because the movie insists it's in motion every single second.  

The camera feels like it's on gib with wheels and a motor that no one can turn off.  Music swells, background players romp about.  Edits edit at breakneck speed.  The film is almost never still.  And sometimes things even seem like they're telling us what we're supposed to be looking at now, but not always.  The lessons of George Miller and framing frenetic scenes did not make it to Jon M. Chu's desk.

Maybe a reaction to things being too dark in all-CGI environments, but for the first 2/3rds of the 2:40 runtime, the light feels constantly like it's 4:30 PM in high summer, something I assume is a feature not a bug.  A decision was made that it's fine if we tilt the camera in the direction of that light some of the time and let the screen go practically white with CGI flare.  Pumping in light, real and fake, means that when the image isn't bleeding into overexposure, they can flip the camera the other way and everything is in focus on hyper-detailed sets with herds of extras and colors and swirling motion just happening. Which is fine in small bits - this is a musical!  But it's... constant.  

I want to *see* something once in a while.  Let me see those sets, get a sense of geography.  And let me reach for my sunglasses, I guess.  Frame something once in a while, my man.

Wizard of Oz is not just a movie, it is THE movie.  So if we're dropping into that world, we're drawing comparisons - and maybe that's unfair, but no one told you to make a movie based on Wizard of Oz.

And things are designed.  In minute detail.  In every corner of every frame.  Yet, for all the design, the school and this particular part of Oz looks weirdly like a very expensive resort that I would not want to pay to go to.  Like an Atlantis or that new thing at Universal Florida.  Where you kind of can see what they were doing, but it's also kind of soulless and intended to be as inoffensive as possible.  

The rich Technicolor hues of the MGM original is now sun-bleached tan stone, burnt out grass and fields of dully colored flowers.  The forest looks like someone typed "jungle with flowers" into an AI image generator.

And, despite all the motion and light, so little of consequence seems to happen for the first 90 minutes, I had time to think about things like "why does the University of Shiz look like a Universal Orlando resort?"  

This feels true in part because the characters feel so undercooked.  

Elphaba's sister goes to the dance?   Right.  I forgot she existed or mattered, but the camera frames her meaningfully again in the last hour.  There's a guy named Boq?  Neat.  He's suddenly not an extra at the 45 minute mark and given a Kleenex-thin storyline.  What is he like?  Musical character stammery, I guess. 

I don't expect even main characters in musicals to be deeply complex.  Main characters want something, so they sing about it, and we understand their drive.  And in this way, our two leads are fine.  But how they become friends feels oddly flimsy, like we're missing a scene or two - somehow Step Brothers more successfully conveys two people becoming pals.  And what is there feels more like two people following an enemies-to-lovers trope that would please manga readers.  

It is not hard to reconcile the film's analog of talking animals with our own current political situation of people getting kidnapped on the street (well done, America.  Way to miss every possible lesson shoved at you since WWII).  It is in fact shocking that this is the storyline released in a movie weeks after the 2024 election - and we'll have a whole lot of pondering and online screaming when the second half shows up.

What I guess feels odd to me in 2025 is watching the oppressed people of MunchkinLand portrayed as willing members of a fascist movement because they're just super against anything new - which... seems odd when "super weird shit is around every corner" was entirely the bag of Oz in the original film.  Here's a place full of Munchkins.  Down this same road are talking trees throwing apples at you.  Over there is a talking Tinman.  Here's a Horse of a Different Color.  Providing origins to the weirdness almost seems to diminish both films.  It's like there's a weird tension between wanting the whimsy and wonder of the first movie and someone saying "but how would all of this actually work and look?" we reserve for superhero and sci-fi films.

Now - to be fair - once they get to The Emerald City, the movie picks up substantially: ie - things finally happen that have emotional resonance.  We get some cooler CGI stuff in the Wizard's chamber.  

But it's still a CGI overload. Partway through the first scene in the the Emerald City, Jamie turned to me and said "this CGI explosion reminds me why I didn't like Quantumania".  YMMV, but I knew exactly what she meant- the direction, shot selection and editing make navigating what I assume was a beautifully constructed and rendered combo of real sets and CGI cityscape an emerald mess.  You can tell the choreography and singing and dancing are all done well, if they'd let you see it.  

As we roar to the conclusion and the movie finally has life to it - What's odd is that we're working through some genuinely emotional beats, our leads are singing and acting their brains out, the movie is cruising along at a good clip here, and just when they get to the big showstopper of a moment.   the movie... drags. out. the. final. scene. so. long.  

Jon M. Chu...  less is more.  Just do the bit, do it super well, and get out.  We do not need Wile E Coyote falls or zip-zapping around.  

Just do the thing.   

Credit where it's due:  Our leads really are that good.  I was impressed immediately, but when Menzel and Chenoweth made guest appearances for one scene, I thought out loud:  this could have gone real bad if Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande weren't such powerhouses, vocally, and as performers.  So.  No notes.  Well done.  They sell the notion of their relationship far more than what's on the page.

Goldblum the right guy in the right role at the right time - even if it's just Goldblum being Goldblum.  I confess... while I would never say anything negative about Michelle Yeoh, I feel like Jon M. Chu knew her from their prior work on Crazy, Rich Asians (which I liked) and it was just going to happen whether she was the ideal choice or not.

I did go back and look to see what Jon M. Chu had done, it is... interesting.  Lots of Justin Bieber music videos, Crazy, Rich Asians, the "meh"-received In The Heights, which suffers from many of the same visual sins as this movie, but is grounded in reality, mostly.  But he also did the Jem and the Holograms movie which somehow didn't make back its $5 million budget.  That's hard to do with a studio movie.  Anyway, I don't know what deals and blood oaths and blackmail happen in Hollywood, but must be nice.

Anyway, I know this is a whiny review.  And I know a lot of people love this movie.  I wish I were one of them.  I was really pulling for this one.  Maybe in the theater I would have loved this more.  But this is now my second exposure to Wicked, and it's maybe just not for me.