"So it's a lot of clock ticks, quite a few more than the stage musical, which had roughly half the runtime. But Wicked has always been a spectacle of scale: power ballads and sprawling sets, all in retina-testing technicolor. Muchness is part of the point of Wicked, a song-and-dance assault of allegory and anthems relayed with an earnestness that you might call endearing if you're good or tiresome if you're, well, you know."
"That may be an unavoidable aspect of a pop amalgamation like Wicked. This is a big-screen adaptation of a 2003 stage musical (Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz) based on a 1995 book (Gregory Maguire) inspired by a 1939 movie (Victor Fleming and company) and the original 1900 The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. More than a century of American entertainment is packed inside Wicked."
"All the momentum that Wicked: For Good does gather is owed significantly to its stars. To a large degree, these movies have been the Erivo-and-Grande show, a grand spectacle of female friendship that rises above all the petty biases and misjudgments to forge a vision of harmony in opposites. It's a compelling vision, and Chu, as he did in the triumphant "Defying Gravity" culmination of part one, knows how to stick the landing."
Wicked: For Good expands the stage musical into a two-part cinematic spectacle with substantially longer runtime and amplified scale. The film foregrounds political metaphors as Oz grows increasingly agitated while Elphaba, demonized as the Wicked Witch of the West, lives in exile. The adaptation draws on a lineage from L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz through Gregory Maguire's novel and the 2003 stage musical. The production relies heavily on Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, whose performances drive the movie's emotional momentum and portray a transformative female friendship. Director Jon M. Chu successfully lands key moments, including the part-one culmination.
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