I won't be going to see Wicked: For Good in the theaters. From everything I've read about it, it takes the political messaging of the first film and turns them up to 11. In particular, this one turns into a story about immigration.
In the first part of the cinematic adaptation by director Jon M. Chu, which was nominated for best picture at last year’s Oscars, themes of racial tension were the backdrop to the story – which imagines an origin for the Wicked Witch of the West made famous in the 1939 classic film “The Wizard of Oz,” and explores her relationship with Glinda the Good...
The concluding chapter raises the stakes and leans hard into another scorchingly hot political topic: immigration.
In one scene, Boq (Ethan Slater) from Munchkinland goes to the train station to fulfill his desire to travel to the Emerald City and profess his love to Glinda. However, when he gets to the station, he is horrified to see that animals and Munchkins have been restricted from traveling and need a permit to do so...
The scene depicts dramatic, harrowing moments in which the enchanted animals are blocked from being able to move about freely. Later in the film, some animals are seen hidden in a basement within the Wizard’s palace in Emerald City, locked away in cages.
The scenes bear eerie resemblance to familiar images seen and stories heard from those affected by the Trump administration’s unprecedented crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Somewhat surprisingly, the film is not getting high marks from critics. Top critics have rated the movie at a measly 56% with many of them finding it tiresome. From Salon, a review which seems to fault the film for not being quite radical enough:
The sequel, which expands the second act of the hit musical the films are based on, is, to put it kindly, one of the most astonishingly muddled, poorly paced, wrecks of a blockbuster in recent memory...
If there’s one thing “Wicked: For Good” is lacking, it’s depth — of color, of emotion, of writing and of those beloved characters. The film has so little to say about its story’s themes of power and othering that it retroactively dulls the admirable shine of the first movie, reducing last year’s “Wicked” to a spectacle of glittery pulleys and levers distracting audiences from the doom that is “For Good.” If Chu’s first film was a fantastical yet mainstream meditation on control and who has it, “Wicked: For Good” is its shadow, the nadir symbol of franchise filmmaking greed and an ironic tale of how quickly avaricious capitalism corrupts a good thing.
The New Yorker's review is titled "'Wicked: For Good' Is Very, Very Bad."
This, as far as I can tell, is why “Wicked: For Good” exists: so that the events of Baum’s novel and the 1939 film, forever conjoined in the public imagination, can be maneuvered into position. But must they be maneuvered so clumsily, and with such a glaring absence of brains or heart? In time, we will be introduced to Dorothy Gale—cue a few flashes of gingham—and force-fed origin stories for her travelling companions, which range from the nonsensically contrived to the gratuitously traumatizing. (Even if your children can stomach the Tin Man’s arrival, the Scarecrow’s cornfield crucifixion might be the last straw.) Onstage, all this narrative retconning has a breezy behind-the-scenes cleverness, as if the story were being slyly fleshed out in the margins. Onscreen, and on full display, it’s close to an abomination—a travesty of fairy-tale logic and pop-cultural memory. By the time Dorothy and her friends march on Elphaba’s lair, there seems to be something more pernicious than mere mediocrity at work. It’s as if the picture were so cowed by its iconic predecessor that it could only respond with a petulant urge to destroy the classic it could never be.
Time's review found the film so full of left-wing messages that it wasn't clear what the point was ultimately.
The ostensibly deep messages and themes come at you like baseballs gone wild in a batting cage. Respect animals! Be wary of doing good deeds just for attention! The pretty blond white girl may always seem to get ahead in the world, but not really! Or, actually, maybe yes! By the end of Wicked: For Good, I couldn’t be sure what, exactly, it was trying to say.
It sounds pretty awful to me and I definitely won't be paying to see this in a theater. Most of the positive reviews have good things to say about the performances of the two leads even if the songs themselves aren't especially good.
Politics aside, there are a lot of musical fans out there who will love this because they like the genre even if this particular film isn't great. The film made nearly $150 million on its opening weekend and after Thanksgiving it's approaching $300 million at the domestic box office. Add on another $120 million for international sales and this is looking like a hit, though it still has a ways to go (another $150 million) to break into the top 10 for 2025.
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