When the Fandom Spotlite writers chose which movies we were most excited for in 2024, my pick was Wicked – Part One. As I mention in the article, Wicked was the first musical I ever saw on Broadway, so it has a very special place in my heart. I had high hopes and even higher standards for the film adaptation… and both were surpassed beyond my wildest dreams.
Casting
This was the area that I had the most concerns about, yet ironically I feel like it ended up being the film’s greatest strength. There is not a single member of this cast who didn’t play their role to utter perfection.
I admit I had was skeptical about Ariana Grande playing Glinda; after all, I grew up knowing her as Cat Valentine in Nickelodeon’s Victorious and currently know her as a popstar with a dating history almost as infamous as Taylor Swift’s. With this role, however, she proved that she is so much more than that. I knew she was an extremely talented singer, but I didn’t realize just how incredibly versatile her voice is. She manages to match Kristen Chenoweth’s (the original Glinda on Broadway) style without sounding like a copycat or that she’s trying too hard to mimic her. I am ashamed of any doubts I ever had about Grande’s ability to pull off this iconic role!
This was the first time I’ve ever seen Cynthia Erivo perform in anything so I had no idea what to expect, but she was incredible. Both her singing and acting were spot-on. Elphaba is a complex character who is dearly beloved in the theatre community, and Erivo did her so much justice. In a cast filled with A-list performers like Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh (who were both fantastic as their respective characters, by the way), it was refreshing to see the leading role go to a lesser known actress. I will be looking into Erivo’s other films for sure after this.
I was especially pleased with the casting of Marissa Bode as Nessarose. Being confined to a wheelchair is a significant part of Nessarose’s character, yet to my knowledge this role has never been played by an actress who is disabled in real life. It should be a given to cast disabled people as disabled characters, as it feels ableist to do otherwise; unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Think of Patrick Stewart as Professor X in X-Men or Drake as Jimmy in Degrassi. So while it shouldn’t be a revolutionary concept to cast a wheelchair user as a wheelchair user, this is a massive win for the disabled community. But this casting decision wasn’t solely about diversity: Bode perfectly portrays the sweet but spoiled girl who has conflicted feelings about her protective older sister.
Storytelling
You would probably be hard pressed to find someone who has never seen, or at least heard of, The Wizard of Oz. The 1939 film is a household name all over the world. With Wicked being framed as a prequel to the events of the story everyone knows, it feels almost anti-climactic to know how it’s all going to end: Elphaba becomes the infamous Wicked Witch of the West and strikes fear into all the citizens of Oz until Dorothy kills her. Wicked doesn’t beat around the bush with the fact that everyone in the audience probably already knows how the story ends: the movie starts with the conclusion, showing the residents of Munchkinland celebrating the death of the Witch. The events of the film are immediately established as Glinda, now known as the Good Witch, reminiscing on her past. However, she only serves as a narrator for the first moments of the movie. I’m conflicted about this decision, because on the one hand it neatly connects this movie to what happens in The Wizard of Oz, but on the other hand it sets up the film as being told from Glinda’s point of view when in reality we see both her and Elphaba’s perspectives.
A lot of the lore about the world of Oz is given to us organically through lectures by staff at Shiz University rather than through artificial exposition. There is also a scene where Elphaba and Glinda learn about the history of the Wizard of Oz by watching a play. We learn about the world right alongside the characters living in it.
Music
A musical is nothing without its soundtrack. Fortunately, both the choreography and singing in this movie were phenomenal. In addition to three whole ending credit pages’ worth of dancers, the cast included some vocal powerhouses. I already sang Ariana Grande’s praises above, but Cynthia Erivo deserves plenty of credit too. Elphaba’s part in the song “Defying Gravity” is notoriously difficult to perform, yet Erivo nailed it. While it almost feels blasphemous for them to change the iconic vocal rift at the end of the song, Erivo sounded so amazing that I can’t even be mad about it. The entire scene gave me chills. I didn’t love that both “Popular” and “Defying Gravity” had extra verses added to them with the sole purpose of showing off Grande and Erivo’s vocal ranges (extra “la la”s in the former and repetitions of “Unlimited” in the latter), but I wouldn’t say these additions made the songs worse. For the most part, the cast added personal touches to the songs without drastically deviating from the original music.
Visuals
While the movie was near perfection, it did have its flaws, and in my opinion the biggest one had to do with the lighting. There were several scenes where the bright sunlight in the background washed out or obscured the characters that were meant to be the focus, such as in the image above. When a clip from the “Dancing Through Life” scene was released before the movie hit theaters, I saw someone online point out how a film student would flunk their assignment if they used such terrible backlighting, so the fact that a major studio would do so in a film with a $145 million budget is appalling. I never studied film, so perhaps there’s an artistic reason for using such bright backgrounds, but I felt that it considerably took away from the quality of the visuals.
In addition, after the “live action” Lion King movie I’ve been a little uncertain about my feelings towards CGI animals, and Wicked is full of them. To be fair, though, I can’t really think of a better alternative for this movie. Using real animals would be too inhumane, not to mention they wouldn’t be able to move their mouths in a way that convincingly looks like they’re talking. Maybe they could have used puppets, like the monster in the upcoming Grendel movie? At least the CGI flying monkeys were definitely more realistic (and less disturbing) than the men in costumes in the 1939 Wizard of Oz.
Overview
I couldn’t have asked for a better big screen adaptation of my favorite musical. This movie is borderline perfect, and I absolutely cannot wait until Part Two comes out next year. In the meantime, I’m going to have to get a tattoo of the lyrics to “Defying Gravity.”
