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Wicked - For Good
Was Wicked Part 2 for good or for worse?
Review: To immediately address the elephant in the room, I know most people were not fans of my Wicked: Part 1 review, as I thought the movie’s production (along with Part 2’s) was extremely well done and the story was disinteresting. As for Part 2, it was definitely the better movie of the two, but my thoughts for Part 1 also still stand for Part 2. Let me explain:
Of the two movies, this one is the better movie package. Part 1 was basically pure exposition until the last 30 minutes of the movie. For a 2 hour and 40 minute movie, spending 2 hours setting up a story that doesn’t even come close to reaching its climax within it was difficult to sit through, as I found a lot of the characters annoying and the story to be one that I don’t resonate with. Within Part 2, despite having the same feelings regarding characters and story, the movie as a whole actually felt complete. There was additional exposition at the beginning of the film, there was conflict in the middle, setting up the eventual climax of the story, along with an actual ending. This movie felt complete, making it already substantially more enjoyable to watch just due to the completeness of its storytelling.
Notwithstanding the significant performance increase of the storytelling, what also drops Part 2’s enjoyment is the lack of good songs. While the underlying score and soundtrack of Part 2 was also better than Part 1, I didn’t find any of the songs in Part 2 to be that interesting or enjoyable. Part 1 had the classics of Defy Gravity and Popular, but it also had incredible set and choreography design while everyone was singing Dancing Through Life. Even though I saw Part 2 last night, I can’t recall any of the lyrics, choruses, or melodies of any of the songs from Part 2, which was very disappointing. I also can’t recall a single song that had unique choreography, having most (or all) of the songs being sung while standing or walking around.
As for the story, even though I enjoyed the structure of the film significantly more than Part 1, this film also still has several issues with the way time was allocated to parts of the story, as they stretched out the 45-50 minute second act of a play into a 2 hour and 18 minute movie. First, the opening 40-50 minutes appeared to have no actual story impact, rather being a time filler. It starts off with everyone trying to find and capture Elphaba, to her going back and talking with The Wizard, then to going off to be captured again. Within this time no additional character work was done, no new or interesting characters were introduced, and none of the plot actually progressed during this time. Talking to my wife (who has seen the musical), she noted that this portion of the movie had a few songs from the musical within it. The only thing that got introduced was the Tin Man, who was in the movie for no more than 3 minutes total. From my perspective, even though they had songs from the musical and introduced the Tin Man, since there was nothing of story use within this time, it should have been whittled down and shortened significantly. Second, the time they spent “developing” Elphaba’s and Fiyero’s romance was nonexistent. They had one scene in the last movie where they saved the lion cub together, but the fact that nothing else was done besides to develop this relationship to have them end up in a relationship together was comical. Third, they brought back Dulcibear only to have no real impact on Elphaba. One of my major gripes from Part 1 was how one of Elphaba’s main reasons for caring so much about the animals is that the only being who cared for her and loved her at all was her caretaker, Dulcibear, never to bring it up in the film at all. In the first part of the movie they actually brought back Dulcibear for a scene to have her interact with Elphaba, but despite the few minutes they had together, the interaction they had left no impact on me (the audience) or Elphaba. I’m glad they actually brought her back, but their interacteion should have emotionally resonated with everyone instead of feeling like a scene to fill the run time of the movie. On a final note, the movie’s ending was just a little too long. Every major person from the films had to have their story have a resolution that felt a little too long.
Overall, I really do see why people love and revere the Wicked musical, but after seeing both Part 1 and Part 2, I can only say that it’s not for me. I respect the songs, but I don’t love them. I found the characters more annoying than interesting and entertaining. The two movies were too long and should have been a single 3 hour movie. I also don’t think the story of Wicked adds anything interesting to the world of Oz. Even if the story and the length of the movies aren’t to my taste, I’m still very glad that there are movie adaptations of the play that were extremely well made, allowing this story to be more accessible to everyone in the future
Rating: 3/5
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