For me, the odds were stacked against John Chu’s 2024 adaptation of Wicked. Nearing three hours, only depicting the first half of the story Mockingjay style, and following the adaptation of In The Heights which I dislike, it was a hard sell. However, maybe because of the messy unavoidable press circuit, that one Target commercial featuring Cynthia Erivo that I can’t get out of my head, or the fact that I couldn’t find somewhere showing Heretic, I found myself sat for a two hour 50 minute trip to Oz.

There’s something very exciting about a movie that feels the need to justify its own existence like Wicked does. While I’m not especially familiar with the source material of the stage musical (or the novel it’s based on, or the 1939 movie, or any other Oz portrayal before that), I have watched the TV show Glee and therefore have an idea of how important and highly regarded it is by theater kids. A straightforward stage-to-screen adaptation would feel unnecessary and irreverent, a full reimagining blasphemous. I could feel the pressure on the film to be precise, strong, and somehow completely surprising. 

Wicked (2024) opens swinging, throwing movie magic at the audience at a break-neck speed. Within the first 20 minutes, enough events have passed to fill half the runtime of another, slower movie. CGI bears are delivering babies, the audience is jerked through the entire detail-filled land of Oz in a fly-through shot, and pop princess Ariana Grande is screaming operatic arias directly into the camera, mostly to prove she can. See? The opening seems to say. We are just as manic about this story as you the fans are. Don’t you feel reassured by this?  

Grande specifically seems manic in a way that works in the movie. After a decade-long campaign on social media to be involved with Wicked in some way, she was met with some pushback when cast in the role of Galinda, but I thought she did a great job. You could sense the energy radiating off her body in every scene. Her portrayal doesn’t necessarily feel realistic, but it doesn’t need to. She’s truly funny in a way that’s restrained and self-aware enough to not get on the viewers’ nerves. The song Popular was definitely the highlight of the film for me. Splashy, comedic, and vocally impressive, it hits all its marks and doesn’t demand a serious emotional suspension of disbelief in the way that other numbers seem to— i.e, expect tears in my eyes when a character on screen is saying the word “degreenify”. In the long, intense, sometimes overly earnest movie, it’s a place to rest.

Cynthia Erivo – playing the serious and sensitive Elphaba Tropp – has an obviously harder job and sometimes does it very well. It is objectively very impressive that her voice sounds that gorgeous while she’s flipping around in the air like she’s performing a PINK concert. I just found myself wondering if it was necessary. In the space where she’s been tasked with setting the emotional stakes for the film, she’s also having to run through CGI fields of wheat, perform choreography, or have entire conversations with side characters in between verses. Is this the norm for movie musicals that I hadn’t noticed before? Every number in Wicked felt like it lasted 15 minutes, with three minutes of actual singing rationed out in 30-second chunks. Boq (whose name I had to Google to write this) was always getting to talk during other people’s songs! Is Boq a character I was supposed to care about more than how much I care about how well Cynthia Erivo can sing?

This back-and-forth encapsulates the most interesting aspect of Wicked to me: the way the movie itself feels like a tug-of-war between intimacy and spectacle. The dizzying and constant switch between elaborate and larger-than-life visuals and the quiet attempt at emotional connection that lies in the heart of the story. At moments this tension works, but often it seems to work against itself, resulting in a tonality that left me laughing in moments when I definitely shouldn’t have been laughing in the theater. 

Despite its flaws, Wicked is an experience worth having if you’re trying to go to a movie theater over winter break, if only to be able to talk to relatives about the big blockbuster of the moment instead of how college is going. Its ambition, energy, and love for the source material make it hard to hate and hard to be bored throughout. You might leave a little dizzy or a little embarrassed for Jeff Goldblum, but can’t that be part of the charm? It’s that or Gladiator II.