{"id":193830,"date":"2025-11-22T05:17:17","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T05:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/193830\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T05:17:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T05:17:17","slug":"the-wicked-bubble-has-burst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/193830\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wicked Bubble Has Burst"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Last year\u2019s Wicked<\/a> film was a big, brassy delight. Yes, the director Jon M. Chu\u2019s adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical\u2014itself drawn from a revisionist riff on L. Frank Baum\u2019s The Wizard of Oz\u2014had its flaws (why was every outdoor scene so scorchingly overlit?). Yet the smash-hit film\u2019s charms were hard to resist, the kind of sumptuous family fare that Hollywood should be serving up more often. I did detect one glaring issue. Presented in the opening title card was a footnote: the words Part One. Uh-oh. Postponing all the necessary wrap-up to a sequel seemed like leaving a pile of dirty dishes in the sink for tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Okay, maybe that second part, Wicked: For Good, isn\u2019t quite that drastic a chore. But it does have a lot of narrative cleanup to do, in large part because of the tricky second half of its source material. Act I of the musical fizzily mixes coming-of-age school comedy with darker fantasy drama; the back half struggles to tie its many plot threads together, and is further hampered by a much weaker set of songs. Splitting the stage show into two parts thus worked wonders for the first movie. Now for Chu and his screenwriters, Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox, the bill has come due. The best I can say about For Good is that its two stars, Cynthia Erivo (as the green-skinned witch Elphaba) and Ariana Grande (her sickeningly sweet friend Glinda), are strong-enough performers to make the most bizarre turns feel functional. But even they can\u2019t keep the film from collapsing under the lightest scrutiny.<\/p>\n

Wicked is loosely based on Gregory Maguire\u2019s 1995 novel, which imagines an origin myth for the Wicked Witch of the West. In Maguire\u2019s telling, she\u2019s an unfairly maligned victim of prejudice. Wicked: For Good opens as the stage production\u2019s second act does: after Elphaba has fully earned her status as a villain, having defied the dictatorial Wizard (Jeff Goldblum). Elphaba has earned the Wizard\u2019s ire in part thanks to her activism\u2014she\u2019s trying to rally the cause for the land\u2019s talking animals, which are treated like second-class citizens.<\/p>\n

[Read: The big risk Wicked is taking<\/a>]<\/p>\n

The broad, political bent of Maguire\u2019s book is flattened out by the adaptation, as is most of the world-building. The film instead strives to hit the biggest character arcs: The Wizard is getting away with his bad deeds; Elphaba is unjustly pilloried; Glinda, Elphaba\u2019s try-hard, mega-popular former roommate, has joined with the Wizard while quietly chafing against the unfairness of Elphaba\u2019s exile. The dashing Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) is also playing both sides, leading the Wizard\u2019s royal guard and searching to liberate Elphaba. Nessa (Marissa Bode), Elphaba\u2019s sister, has chosen a darker path: She\u2019s the new ruler of Oz\u2019s Munchkins, whom she treats with growing cruelty.<\/p>\n

All of those storylines sound like a lot to reckon with\u2014yet For Good also manages to fit in the entire plot of The Wizard of Oz. The audience meets the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, and gets several glimpses of the back of Dorothy\u2019s head. (Thankfully, if for run-time consideration alone, the character is reduced to a nonspeaking role.) Setting For Good against the backdrop of the best-known Oz tale is purposeful; it\u2019s meant to prick the myth of the Wizard as a helpful benefactor, and of Elphaba, the so-called Wicked Witch, as an unquestionably blindly evil adversary. Yet the movie can\u2019t line up the parallel storylines well enough for that endeavor to work. Instead, Elphaba largely protests and rages on the fringes as the land descends into chaos around her. Meanwhile, Glinda repeatedly fails to coax her friend back to the side of the Wizard, whom Elphaba once idolized. Every so often, someone mentions that Dorothy\u2019s still trotting down the Yellow Brick Road.<\/p>\n

The characters ultimately seem cordoned off from one another, and the script spins its wheels until the big conclusion. Wicked begins at the story\u2019s end, but For Good seems unsure of how to get there. Efforts are made throughout to beef up the thin narrative, with varying results. The composer Stephen Schwartz wrote two new ballads, one each for Elphaba and Glinda. They\u2019re both filler tracks, unable to advance the already established plot. Some of the musical\u2019s second-act songs do work here, as they do on stage; the jaunty \u201cWonderful\u201d is a solid showcase for Goldblum\u2019s sinister comic timing, and Erivo delivers the late-stage belter \u201cNo Good Deed\u201d with expected aplomb. Even those high points, however, seem static\u2014there\u2019s no lively choreography, and a mountain of fiery CGI action overwhelms what should be showstoppers.<\/p>\n

For Good is at its most successful when it\u2019s able to tap into its predecessor\u2019s strengths. Glinda\u2019s dilemma of presenting a face of public propriety while inching toward more rebellious thought is the crux of both Wicked installments, and Grande does the best job of adding some dramatic heft. At the same time, the focus on a more melancholic Glinda emphasizes what is now sorely missing: the first movie\u2019s comic charm, much of which stemmed from Grande\u2019s performance. Without it, the events just come across as unrelentingly dreary.<\/p>\n

[Read: The fairy tale we\u2019ve been retelling for 125 years<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Following the beloved source material may have bolstered Part One, but it hamstrings what should be a grand finale. For Good, chained to the Wicked musical\u2019s own failings, cannot expand upon the strangeness of The Wizard of Oz in any novel way. The Wicked saga\u2019s move to the big screen started on a delicious note. Now that it\u2019s over, I\u2019m left waiting to be satisfied.<\/p>\n

Article originally published at The Atlantic<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":193831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[79,69400,179,18,105094,19,17,107781,4411,92865],"class_list":{"0":"post-193830","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-cynthia-erivo","10":"tag-economy","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-elphaba-and-glinda","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-the-wizard","16":"tag-the-wizard-of-oz","17":"tag-wicked-witch"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115591659661357704","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}