Wicked: For Good Spoiler-Review
Greetings, my fellow Ozians. If you’re reading this, then that means that you’ve seen Wicked: For Good, and are still obsessulating over it. Or you haven’t seen it yet but don’t care about spoilers. Either way, you’re like me and haven’t gotten it out of your system.
I already wrote a spoiler-free review of the film, but as I said there, this movie is just too good for me not to gush about it. And for good reason. After all, a major complaint about the second half of Wicked is that it’s too short, clocking in at about an hour. That’s far too little time for it to juggle the drama, plot threads, and tie into the story of The Wizard of Oz, resulting in a bit of a letdown. Wicked: For Good had the job of not only adapting this second act, but to fix it. And while I do have some minor issues with it that still confusify me, I’m pleased to say that Wicked: For Good managed to do good for a story that has captivated fans for twenty years. In this spoiler review, I intend to fully discuss how it did this, as well as what I would have changed.
A One-Woman Rebellion
The film starts off several years since Elphaba made her decision to defy the Wizard of Oz, and she has been busy since then. She’s gained far greater control over her powers, and now has the confidence to openly face the Wizard’s army in combat. The very first scene of the movie is an action sequence showing her disrupting the construction of the Yellow Brick Road, sending the guards running for the hills and liberating the Animals being used as slave labor. She’s a liberator who’s doing everything she can to wake up Oz to the truth of what’s happening. But as we already know, her efforts are doomed to failure, something that the film works to reinforce.
After Elphaba’s latest raid, we see just how thorough the Wizard and Madame Morrible have been when it comes to demonizing her. There are piles of posters and pamphlets strewn throughout the movie that paint her as pure evil. They’ve made new storybooks about the Wizard featuring her. They’ve effectively brainwashed the majority of Oz into believing this young woman, who wants to help them, is their enemy. And it breaks my heart every time that I watch it.
The sad thing about this smear campaign is that this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it happen in a work of fiction. Order 66 in the Star Wars franchise is my go-to example of how someone in power can demonize people who want to help, leaving them to be hunted down. People like Sidious or Madame Morrible take advantage of others’ ignorance to get them to hurt the people they should be helping. What’s even more frustrating is that even if someone tries to tell everyone the truth, the lies can become so ingrained that there will still be people who will buy them. That is something that Elphaba experiences firsthand in Wicked: For Good, and she doesn’t deserve it.
Elphaba the Freedom Fighter
One of the biggest issues with the original musical is that, despite the oppression of Animals in Oz being what sets Elphaba on her path, it’s barely touched on in the second act. There were the moments when she freed the Flying Monkeys and discovers her former professor, Dr. Dillamond, in a cage and unable to speak. However, it never shows her actually liberating the Animals. Thankfully, Wicked: For Good uses it’s extended runtime to fix that.
The biggest change is a scene where Elphaba comes across a group of Animals escaping Oz, including her old nanny, Dulcibear. All of them are willing to leave behind their homes, and I think that, for a moment, Elphaba was tempted to join them. Given how her home kept rejecting her, she would be within her rights to turn her back on it. This leads us into the first of the film’s two original songs, “No Place Like Home,” a very sweet song where Elphaba thinks about the meaning of home and how it’s the people we love. And for a minute, it looks like she might persuade the Animals to stay and join her fight. That would have been so cool, seeing Elphaba become a rebel leader liberating Animals. And I hope that there’s a fanfic out there that does just that. But then the Cowardly Lion ruins it.
The Most Cowardly Version of the Cowardly Lion
Scooby-Doo, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and the Cowardly Lion. I consider them the trifecta of scaredy animals in fiction. But despite being scared of their own shadows, they all demonstrate great bravery when they have to step up. The film version of the Cowardly Lion, though, might be the yellow-bellied, lily-livered, gutless incarnation of the character that I have ever seen. Elphaba recognizes him right away as the Lion cub she and Fiyero saved from captivity in the first film, now all grown up. Instead of being grateful for that, or at least acknowledging that it gave him the chance to learn how to speak, though, the Lion calls Elphaba a menace for taking him from the only home he knew and leaving him alone in the woods.
I was genuinely disappointed in how the film handled the Cowardly Lion here. He played almost no part in the musical, not even being shown onstage as an adult. Instead the most that we got was the Tin Man claiming he hated Elphaba for. Or letting him fight his own battles. I never bought that for a second and I thought that maybe, Wicked: For Good could clarify how he really felt. As it turns out, he really does blame Elphaba for his cowardice. Yes, Elphaba and Fiyero leaving him on his own in the woods as a cub wasn’t the smartest decision, but it’s not like they had many options on where to hide him. And does he really have the right to complain when his alternative was to be trapped in a cage that would’ve robbed him of his sentience? I don’t think he does, and it’s thanks to him that we don’t get to see Elphaba actually leading an Animal rebellion against the Wizard, which I was kind of hoping to actually see.
But at least For Good manages to do justice to another supporting character in Elphaba’s story, Nessarose. And by Justice, I mean showing how she becomes everything that the Emerald City claimed her sister to be.
Marissa Bode Sells Nessarose Being Wicked
Now, when compared to the last film, Marissa Bode has far less screen time as Nessa. However, when she is onscreen, she knocks it out of the park, really selling us on how Nessarose has turned into the worst version of herself. This wasn’t a change that took place during the timeskip, though. You could already see the seeds of the Wicked Witch of the East already growing in the first movie. Take, for example, when everyone’s seeing Elphaba off to the Emerald City and Glinda changed her name. That glare Nessa gives Boq as he’s looking at her was just amazing. Marissa did a great job of getting what Nessa’s thinking across without saying anything. But when she does say something in the short runtime she has in Wicked: For Good, it shows just how far she’s fallen.
Nessa is what anime fans would call a yandere, an archetype for a character that starts out sweet, but is revealed to be dangerously possessive of their love. While Nessa doesn’t physically harm Boq at first, she hurts him emotionally and psychologically by keeping Munckins from leaving. A lifetime of getting her way has left her unable to cope when someone refuses, and when Boq hits his breaking point, she crashes out, with tragic results.
But while the audience is supposed to be feel bad for Nessa for the bad hand she’s gotten in life, most of the pity I had evaporated when she reunited with Elphaba.
When Elphaba decides to reach out to her sister, she does so in the hope of finding someone actually willing to listen to her. Instead, Nessa blames her for their father dying from a heart attack and not coming to mourn with him. She blames her bad rep for affecting how people see herself. She just blames her for everything bad in her life. It’s a great way of showing just how self-centered her own choices and the choices of the people in her life have made her. And that’s not even getting into the moment when she physically harms Boq with her inept spellcasting, forcing Elphaba to transform him into the Tin Man. And then Nessa throws her sister under the bus by blaming it all on Elphaba.
Here’s Boqqy!
Speaking of Boq, or as he becomes, the Tin Man, I couldn’t help but feel a mixture of pity and disgust for him by the end of the film. On the one hand, he should have better handled his unrequited love for Glinda and tried to move on. Better still, being a recipient of unrequited love could have made him see how much it bothered Glinda. On the other hand, he was a genuinely nice guy who did not deserve what happened to him.
As for his transformation into the Tin Man, I have to give the film major props for the entire sequence. We barely see the process but we can tell that it is painful and horrifying as he becomes what is essentially a magical cyborg. And the way he uses the axe to chop through the door like The Shining was pure genius! Ethan Slater really sells the loss of humanity that Boq was experiencing. He did not deserve what happened to him! However, that trauma is no excuse for what happens when we next see him.
The next time we see Boq is during the film’s darkest moment, “March of the Witch Hunters.” Seeing the Ozians get duped into forming a lynch mob was already bad enough. But what makes it terrifying is how Boq is riling everyone up. We got a glimpse of it in a flashback in this film, but there are deleted scenes from Wicked that show that Elphaba, Nessa, Glinda, Fiyero, and Boq did manage to form a circle of friends for a time. Elphie and Boq even have a heart-to-heart about their feelings for their crushes! I don’t know why they cut those out of the movie, but they make the sight of the Tin Man out for Elphaba’s blood absolutely tragic.
And this Guy Played SpongeBob
You know what the scariest part of all of it was, though? It was the person playing Boq, Ethan Slater. Before Wicked, his biggest role was playing SpongeBob in the Broadway musical. This was like SpongeBob, one of the nicest characters in cartoon history (depending on the writer) become a hate-filled monster. That’s terrifying! Even more terrifying than the fateful twister that sets the final act in motion, but more on that in a moment. We need to talk about how Wicked: For Good handles the romance.
