A Review of Wicked, or, Can You Even Review Half of a Movie, Anyway?
"Learn to live the unexamined life!"
Watching the climactic sequence that ends and doesn’t end Wicked: Part One, the first half of Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the popular Broadway musical, it feels increasingly likely that the most objectively paradigm-shifting film of the 2020s may not be a complete film at all. More than the decade’s highest-grossing movie to-date (Avatar: The Way of Water), more than the comparable tentpole superhero sequels and the franchise legacy reboots (Deadpool & Wolverine; Top Gun: Maverick), and certainly more than any indie darling or awards season behemoth, 2021’s DUNE expanded the parameters of the deceptive, profit-maximization fuckery that filmmakers and Hollywood marketers can engage in—and what audiences will accept in order to express a fealty to their favorite directors, actors, canonized book series, and the fetishized ritual of the moviegoing experience. Whereas latter entries in the Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games franchises did split single sequels into multiple movies, DUNE took this executive-logic chicanery one step further with its lie-by-omission marketing strategy, the bait-and-switch promotional campaign that made it possible for countless innocent viewers1 not to realize they were about to watch DUNE: Part One instead of THE WHOLE DUNE until the opening credits rolled2.
Two years later, Spiderman: Across the Spider-verse pulled a similar stunt, with the middle entry in the trilogy cutting its narrative off at its most exciting, it’s-about-to-get-really-good moment. Now there is Wicked, another half-movie whose leave-no-survivors, shock-and-awe advertising blitzkrieg of teaser trailers, official trailers, extended trailers, smartphone ads, website banners, living bus stop posters, social media tie-ins, tweets, stories, snaps, innumerable corporate partnerships, Kohls-kore merchandise, talkshow appearances, astroturfed memes, and viral interviews has largely omitted the fact that what everybody is selling is a Part One, a partial product. Based on the box office returns and audience reception, these tactics haven’t been ineffective or seen as too duplicitous; as of this writing, Wicked: Part One has grossed more than $700 million globally, and word of mouth has prevented most people from buying tickets or VOD rentals under the auspices that they’re about to watch an entire movie. (There are, at this point, preverbal babies in this country whose first words will be “Wicked: Part Two—in theaters on November 25th, 2025!”) Tasked with selling half of a movie, the Wicked marketing team did do 110% of their job.
The normalization of the half-movie does make the critical enterprise a tad more complicated and a lot more futile-feeling, however. For what is the non-movie analogue for trying to review a half-movie like Wicked: Part One? Is it a food critic ordering a three-course meal at their assigned restaurant, and then having their plates snatched away by a cackling waiter midway through the entree? Or is it more like a pre-Conde Nast Pitchfork writer who is only allowed to listen to half of a song, EP, or album before having to compare the music to the perfection and artificiality of a wizard’s cap?
Furthermore, what are the appropriate preparations for a review of an adaptation of an intellectual property as old and googly-eyes-adored as WICKED? Like, should you read Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel that inspired the musical? Is it better to skip the book and see the musical, or does that doom the film adaptation to pale in comparison? Does seeing the musical only count if it was the original circa-2003 cast, with Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth? Should you forego the novel and the stage musical altogether, because successful adaptations can and should “stand on their own”? Is it possible that making substantial criticism impossible is the ultimate goal not just of this movie musical about witches going to college, but also the vast and powerful control apparatus that manufactures our conformity and sustains the imprisoning illusion of our freedom? Oh, and what about Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz?
Wicked: Part One, to its credit, is kind of about some of this stuff, particularly the impossibility of critiquing and improving cruel, unjust systems from within. Not to spoil The Wizard of Oz (1939), but the source code for this fantasyland and its characters is partly about learning how to perceive the brittleness, egoism, and stupidity that power and position often disguise in the real world. From this vantage, the most intriguing element of Wicked may be how the academic setting of Shiz University reveals how higher education, the vaunted institutions that supposedly nourish our greatest minds and fuel the progress towards self-actualization and socioeconomic equality, are no less complicit in stamping out transgression and teaching the most ambitious, critically minded students how to rise through the ranks of their chosen field by complying, giving up, acquiescing. When you think about it, Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba is basically like Obama when he transferred from Occidental to Columbia, when he got that first tantalizing glimpse of the levers of power. We will simply have to wait for Part Two to determine whether Elphaba will wield her formidable abilities to effect lasting material change, or if she will embark on an endless victory lap for accomplishing diddly squat, hand-select Hillary Clinton as her successor, and retire to a mansion on Martha’s Vineyard.
If any of this interpretative floundering sounds confused or scrambled3, it may be because Wicked: Part One is an innately unstable text. Like the talking animals that teach the courses at Shiz, Wicked: Part One is a hybrid that’s hard to classify, neither part nor entirety, neither faithful adaptation nor innovative reimagining, a nesting doll of copies within facsimiles within copies. This tough-to-read dimension is especially evident in the bloated, peculiar scenes that have been added to pad the film’s 2-hour-40-minute runtime. (See: Elphaba and Glinda’s interpretative dances. Disarming and defiant, these are the dances of the nonconformist.) Outside of “Popular” and “Defying Gravity,” it’s also tough to determine how the quality or staging of the songs in this musical cemented its status in the Broadway canon. Beyond existing as a pretext for its sequel, the not-that-dynamic, going-through-the-motions-ness of Wicked: Part One feels like a pretext-within-a-pretext, an overlong setup for the performance of a single, culminating song.
That song is “Defying Gravity,” and the ecstatic reaction engendered by Cynthia Erivo flying around on her broomstick, singing it, is awesome enough to sandblast every preexisting frustration with Wicked: Part One from your memory. Critical faculties disabled, you can listen without thinking about the obscure rules of magic in Oz; or how Michele Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum cannot sing, dance, or play characters that aren’t themselves; or how the casting of Erivo and her costar, Ariana Grande, as college students speaks to a generational cultural reset that will find Millennials clinging to capital and relevancy just as Baby Boomers did before them. Even if you were scammed into watching Wicked, you will wish, perhaps for the first time in the whole half-movie, that Erivo will keep singing and singing, keep flying higher and higher. You will hope that the marketing for Wicked: Part One was another trick, this time a welcome one, and the opening credits for Wicked: Part Two are about to start playing. This musical, your life; they aren’t about to get really good, they are already actively great. And just when you’re ready to believe these ridiculous things—it ends.
Numerical Score for Numbskulls
3 Goat Professors Out of 5 🐐
me included!
You might call it a “disinformation campaign.”
Not my fault.