BEFORE: Yes, it's a double feature today - one advantage of waiting SO long to watch "Wicked" is that I can follow up right away with the sequel. HA! And some suckers had to wait like a YEAR to find out how the story ended. I don't want to fall behind in the count, and I want to save my skip days for June, so I'm doubling up today - it's the weekend and I have a day off after working nearly ALL week, so yeah, I really wasted the better part of a day watching nearly five hours of "Wicked" movies. The first one was WAY too long, thanks to all that over-explaining.
Anyway, nearly everyone carries over from the first film - pick one, Ariana Grande, it doesn't matter, there are a ton of actors who are now one step closer to making my year-end countdown, but it takes THREE films, so just being in the "Wicked" films ain't gonna do it.
THE PLOT: The continuing story of Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, and her relationship with Glinda, the Good Witch of the North.
AFTER: I'll try to keep this one brief because I've got to move on - I'm treating these two movies as sort of a speed bump in the road, but once you're over the speed bump, you're really free to resume your cruising velocity. A bit of turbulence, maybe.
Basically, I can now never watch "The Wizard of Oz" again the same way, I watched that movie at least once a year when I was a kid, but then of course "Star Wars" came along and I got pulled in that direction. The funny thing is that the first "Star Wars" film and "The Wizard of Oz" are practically the same film, in that they are both fantasy quest films, a team has to be put together to defeat the evil power, they have to travel to a giant city or space station and the good magic/Force is needed to defeat the bad magic/Force. You can go even further with this by noting that Chewbacca is somewhat reminiscent of the Cowardly Lion, C-3P0 kind of looks like the Tin Man, and I don't know, Luke is naive Dorothy and R2D2 is Toto or something. The analogy kind of falls apart at some point, but I remember that Han and Luke dressing like stormtroopers to rescue Leia from the Death Star reminded me of the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion dressing like palace guards to rescue Dorothy from the Witch's castle. Or maybe it was the other way around.
I thought about that again near the end of "Wicked: For Good", where Glinda and Elphaba were battling with wand and broomstick, and it sure reminded me of a lightsaber battle between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, obviously Vader is the Elphaba analog because they both had prequel movies explain how they were not born evil, but got corrupted or betrayed along the way, so neither one is really "evil" except for the fact that they both did bad things and maybe killed a bunch of people along the way - but everyone can be redeemed, right? And now of course we're thinking the Wizard is the Palpatine analog, because they are the secret powerful (?) ones hiding in the shadows who just want to control everything and everybody. One just built an Emerald City and the other built a Death Star.
Of course, we can talk about the Trump symbolism of the "wonderful" Wizard, too, but that's a bit too easy. I'm going to stick with the Star Wars analogy for now. Glinda is Obi-Wan and Elphaba is Anakin and I guess that makes Fiyero Padme or something, but again, that analogy is going to fall apart at some point. This still makes "Wicked" sort of the "Attack of the Clones" and then "Wicked: For Good" is the "Rogue One" of the franchise, because it's going to lead us right up to the events we've already seen in the first movie, more or less. And as Obi-Wan once said, you're going to find that many of the truths that we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view". Well, there's a lot of that going around, because the original "Wizard of Oz" film led us to believe that the Good Witch is good and the Wicked Witch is Evil, and the Wizard himself is just an old foolish man with no power at all. And now thanks to "Wicked" we see all of that differently - Glinda is "good" but she's also stuck-up, spoiled, demanding and overly helpful, but in a way that is also condescending at times. The Wicked Witch was branded "evil" by the wizard, but was she? She was green and came to dress in black, however once she learned the truth about what was going on in Oz she tried her best to stop the Wizard's plans to dumbify animals and build yellow roads everywhere, and for that she was cast out, called evil and blamed for all of society's ills, to the point where crowds everywhere called for her outright execution. But she was just trying to make things better for everyone, including the animals.
The Wizard himself, along with Madame Morrible, had these vast plans that I can't even quite understand, yellow roads and trains going everywhere, what exactly was the endgame there? And how did it benefit them to take the power of speech away from animals? I'm still confused about that. And now they added a bunch of love triangles into the mix, I personally wouldn't have shipped the Scarecrow with the Wicked Witch or the Tin Man with Glinda, but I guess that's where we find ourselves, huh? It's kind of funny then when these characters meet up later after Dorothy comes to town, and everyone has to interact with their exes or unrequited love partners, isn't that all so very awkward? And Elphaba is really the only character who can use magic and read the spells in the spellbook, why is that? She casts spells that turn Fiyero and Boq into the Scarecrow and Tin Man - oh, like we didn't see THAT coming - why couldn't they just always have been the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, there was nothing wrong with those characters that they had to be given human back-stories.
Really, I saw all the twists coming, everything was pretty easy to predict - I thought for a second, hey, wasn't there a Wicked Witch of the East, too? But then I remembered that the Wicked Witch said that Dorothy's house landed on her sister, and I guess she wasn't speaking metaphorically at all, because the sister character was RIGHT THERE and even if she wasn't a true witch, she did feel like one, and call herself one that one time, so I guess that's enough? Still, a bit too convenient perhaps. And the biggest twist of all (which I won't spoil here) - sure, I saw that one coming too, because there really was only one GIANT plothole created by the first "Wicked" film, and the final twist in the sequel takes care of it. But that also hearkens back to "Star Wars", too, in a way.
I'm also reminded of the film "Noises Off", which was about a theater play and the movie version shows us the whole play once on stage, we have the same view as the audience. But then during the next performance of the same play, we see it from backstage and we see the actors changing costumes, fighting with each other, making out with each other, and it's all for great comic effect, of course. But now if you think of the original "Wizard of Oz" film, that film still exists, we can still go back any time and watch it, but now we've also seen behind the curtain, somebody filled in all the gaps (or perhaps more correctly, created the gaps and then filled them in) and just kept adding to the story so now there are connections where there never were before, and we've seen not just the behind-the-scenes action of the play, but also the rehearsals leading up to the play and also the curtain calls after. There were maybe a few too many endings here, it felt like nobody wanted the story to really end so it just kept going and there was more and more and well, guys, you've got to wrap it up at SOME point.
I still think these films are largely flawed and mostly unnecessary, but I'm just one man - you can attempt to modernize a franchise through sequels, but it's not always the best idea. They tried this with the "Star Wars" prequels, and took a lot of heat for things like Jar-Jar Binks and Neimoidians, it's tricky tricky business. Updating Superman and Batman films for modern audiences is a rather tricky venture, too - sometimes maybe it's best to leave well enough alone, I think. They really had to tear down a lot of "The Wizard of Oz" when they built the addition, sure they created some more storytelling space but I wonder in the end if if was worth all the effort. Sorry, but I kind of miss the days when Good Fairies were good and Wicked Witches were wicked, it was a simpler time I guess.
Directed by Jon M. Chu (director of "Wicked" and "In the Heights")
Also starring Cynthia Erivo, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Marissa Bode, Bowen Yang, Bronwyn James, Aaron Teoh, Keala Settle, Adam James, Alice Fearn, Courtney Mae-Briggs, Kirsty Anne Shaw, Alice Bennett (all carrying over from "Wicked"),
Bethany Weaver, Scarlett Spears, Samuel Wright, Clare Brice, Lucy Frederick, Summer Strallen, Minal Patel, Michael Guarnera (last seen in "Ava"), Herbie Kinsey, Matthew Yang King, Erin Battle (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"),
with the voices of Sharon D. Clarke (also carrying over from "Wicked"), Colman Domingo (last seen in "Sing Sing"), Dee Bradley Baker (last heard in "Spellbound")
RATING: 4 out of 10 children at Glinda's birthday party
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