Alexía Star Online

This review may contain spoilers.

Happy pride month?!

“We will be together always. You can see houses flying through the sky, but you can’t see that.”

Thought this would lose some of the luster I felt seeing it in the theater, now with more distance from it, being aware of the wider reception and assessing it without the glow and color of excitement that bubbled it and wonderfied it so ozzily.

Not even close. It has grown in personal estimation and far more in intimacy now that it lives away from an environ of broader audiences. I invite it into my home and it earns its way to my heart in turn.

To highlight some of the flaws I DO still have issues with; opening big and loud like the post-intermission part of the musical is a bad decision for a film. Maybe it works when you watch ’em back to back, but in a single film format where days, months or a year passes between the two for most (including myself), it simply can’t hype you back into gear the same way you’d need coming back from a quiet break in a stage show. Where you need to enchant people back into the same spirit, through the same tunes they were experiencing mere moments ago. For a film, what works better, is an ease back in, establishing its own identity from the start, as you are basically asking everyone to enter a new title, a new beginning, instead of a second half of an already ongoing show when you as a filmmaker and storyteller have essentially changed format and sense of time entirely.

It is also where the flaws in the editing and the effects-heavy shots really feels sloppy in comparison to the rest, as we dash from one loud weightless moment and (overly wide) visual to another as the stage has opened up from the academy and The Emerald City to the entirety of Oz. Thus it feels hard to have a center to focus on both geographically AND emotionally, as we are also jumping between so many characters. This is where a quieter, slower build up would have worked wonders to remind us of what really worked beneath the spectacle and the tunes we loved in the first; the heart and soul of these characters, their love for one another and how they relate to the world they inhabit. Instead we are plunged into a lot of oppression putting emotional and physical distance between everyone, we see endings of hope and hear loud, loud, loud spectacle (and the bass that overwhelms the singing is an odd failure of the sound mixing for a prodction like this tbh) long before we find that heartfelt guiding light anew. Intentional, yes, but also too chaotic to make it all come together with the grace required to pull off juggling so many chainsaws in the air from the word ‘go.’

And also not naming it Part 2 just feels odd to see with an identical title card.

However…

I do also feel that the first act in the FIRST film is the weakest as well, it just has an easier time easing us in.

Now that it has been spoken I can forever hold my peace and celebrate the love that is.

When both films get going, when both find their centers close to the runtime center of each, they truly start outshining all else. 

We find that heart that beats between Glinda and Elphaba, we find that gentle, intimate quiet they share, we find that spectacle that is harmonized to their emotions and the scope of the world they see!The two of them on screen when all else seems to fade away is always truly, truly truly magical and has not faded between films, that relationship and their interactions just become more layered in their love and wishes for one another. 

It is also when we have started to see the many subversions and darker mirrors of what came before in things like ‘we deserve each other’ and ‘I’m not that girl.’ It all builds up to two things: the hand-off of that central heartbeat from Glinda and Elphaba to Fiyero and Elphaba to set us up for the third act where-

well

Where all the yellow bricks lead. To where the story of two hearts becomes the culminating story of three. All equally full of love, vulnerability and bottomless wish for the best in one another. We oh so rarely see this kind of emotional vulnerability played so large and so soft at the same time on the big screen with full sincerity and investment by all involved. We oh so rarely in our real lives get to see people given the benefit of the doubt and second chances and they take it to become better selves and find their paths. That third act, I’m going to be honest,melts me into the same kind of crying mess that the final act of the third Lord of the Rings film does, just in much fewer words and much shorter runtime to get there. Seeing this at home just cemented HOW affecting this is when I can just let my guard down to be that mushy person I (and many others) can’t seem to project earnestly in public without filtering it out and movies oh so often are the perfect vehicle for that as we allow our senses to assimilate into what our eyes and ears perceive, leading a straight line to our heart in ways that few things in the world can as well as art can.

It is here that the quiet is the loudest it can be in its fullness and the larger scope can be its most affectingly intimate in its broad, bizarre visual imagination and sweeping emotions. It is where the story of these three hearts and their love gets to find their ever after, their purpose, their salvation in private and in each other’s wishes and it feels earned, earned, EARNED. Out of the two Wicked features this one hits much more intense emotional beats for me than the first one did, but both are this whole together. They are each other’s Elphaba and Glinda, the cheery and the sardonic in one another manifesting only in the presence of the other and bringing out the truest and most vulnerable feelings of affection and wishes for happiness for each other’s ends.

It’s not the same kind of easily accessible film as the first and asks a lot of buy-in from the audience with its ‘weirder’ aspects and less defined, fantastical concepts, but it is no less affecting and no less beautiful. It is simply a different side of the same musical sheet that together make something wonderfully harmonic. Something wickedly singular. Something so very beautifully unlimited and true in all its trappings of spectacle, simplifications and theatrics.

“You’re beautiful.”
“-You don’t have to lie to me.”
“It’s not lying. It’s looking at things another way.”