The real star here is the production design. Beautiful sets and eye catching costumes in every frame. Erivo does a good job as Elphaba, although it’s hard to say if she’d done better with a better story (I’ll get to that in a bit). I can’t decided if Ariana Grande is excellent or terrible casting. She’s very annoying as the prissy G(a)linda. I can’t decide if this is an overall good choice or not.
There’s a couple known bangers in the setlist (Popular, Defying Gravity) which are well done as individual scenes. There’s some other song-and-dance numbers which a good, I especially enjoyed the one at the library.
This movie suffers a lot from what I call “Solo Syndrome”: prequels explaining things that didn’t need explaining. We get an explanation for Elphaba’s broom and cape which distract from the actual plot and are effectively meaningless: she finds them in an random room in the Wizard of Oz’s palace. We also get an “explanation” of a sort of the flying monkeys: Oz tricks Elphaba into creating them so they can be spies. Sure, I guess.
The two things which work plot-wise are Elphaba’s skin color and her hat. Her skin color is explained to be some kind of fantasy birth defect. It’s a little unclear if it’s from her mother drinking some kind of drug before she was conceived, cheating on Elphaba’s father, or a combo of both. But it works as a way to make her ostracized for a factor outside of her control. And so we have fantasy racism be the main thrust of the plot. I didn’t love the hat at first because it felt kinda arbitrary–Galinda gives it to her to so people will make fun of her more–but it at least fits with the throughline.
However, where it really falls apart is the plot. This movie exists in a multi-racial Oz–Elphaba herself has a white father and Black mother and a mixed race (non-green) younger sister–so Elphaba isn’t possible to be fully targeted by race per se. The movie somewhat understands this, so instead uses her marginalization to make her have solidarity with other marginalized people. So how do you achieve that without systemic racism? Well you of course make humans racist against talking animals!
Yeah… talking animals are being put it cages we find out partway through the movie! I don’t hate this idea, but the execution just isn’t great. The only real talking animal character we get any idea of is one of the school’s professors. We get three scenes with him. The first explains the history of animal racism but also establishes his mispronunciation of Galinda’s name (a weird choice when setting up fake racism!). The second has Elphaba follow him to his home where she interrupts effectively a political meeting where talking animals are trying to stop the coming racism. And finally a scene where he’s taken away by the cops. It’s just too bare-bones to do a plot like this justice.
This is all used a motivation for Elphaba in the end as well. She gets invited to see the Wizard which she uses as opportunity to ask him to stop the animal racism. Of course he was the one who started it, with a confusing reason that he believes everyone needs an enemy. This ultimately leads her to her heel turn. It just feels ultimately so silly for her to make this choice in this way when we’ve seen so little emotional stakes to it.
Another funny consequence of the animal racism plotline is Galinda changing her name to Glinda, essentially off the cuff to impress her boyfriend by having solidarity. The Solo Syndrome aspect is the most egregious of all, because why the hell would someone do this. Within in the racism plotline, it also points out a detail which also feels underdeveloped: Fiyero. Fiyero is a hot prince who shows up and immediately starts dating Galinda. Elphaba also has the hots for him, which, fine. But then he helps save a caged cougar cub with Elphaba. This act isn’t really telegraphed, nor meaningfully followed up on. We could see it picked back up in Part II, but I find it hard to believe it would be resolved satisfactorily.
A few more things which don’t really come together in the synthesis. Firstly, the talking animal racism doesn’t really track with the original movie since we have at least one talking animal character that iirc no one is racist towards (I could be wrong it’s been a while). Secondly, Elphaba just feels like a different character from the Wicked Witch of the West. She has a ton of empathy and her “heel turn” comes from solidarity with marginalized people. Maybe this gets corrupted in Part II and fixes the problem. The Wizard of Oz is still a racist though, and if that changes then how does this whole prequel thing make any sense?