Wicked: Salute to Opera Fans, Disaster to Movie Fans

Hello Peliplaters!

While Wicked has received widespread acclaim since its release, it was a 161-minute ordeal for me—though I should note that I genuinely enjoyed its beauty for about 30 minutes.

Though Wicked faithfully adapted its source material, it failed to consider the cinema audience's experience.

In theater, every performance is unique. Your seat location, your mood, the actors' energy, audience reactions, and unexpected incidents all shape your experience. Until the curtain falls, every audience member is an active participant in the performance.

A cinematic experience is fundamentally different. The projection screen is flat, not a curved, three-dimensional space. Cinema seating runs parallel to the screen rather than surrounding the stage like in a theater. This means two things: First, the actors' performances are fixed, deprived of any flexibility for modifications like words on a printed page. Second, while viewing angles might affect comfort, every viewer sees identical images and hears the same sounds.

These differences mean that films—even musicals—must prioritize storytelling. Without engaging plot developments, cinema audiences have little reason to stay seated.

Yet Universal Pictures' film adaptation of Wicked took an overly cautious approach. It emphasized operatic presentation so heavily that it resembled a recorded stage performance. While many current supporters of Wicked are fans of the leads and the original musical, the issue is that nobody watches a recorded performance straight through. Like watching soap operas while doing housework, we tend to glance at such recordings while doing other things.

While the film's opening had me struggling to stay awake, everything changed when Elphaba accepted Glinda's invitation to the ball.

The scene captivated me completely—from the fierce determination in Elphaba's eyes as she entered, her poignant solo dance, to the breathtaking moment when she danced with Glinda. The visual harmony of black, green, and pink made all the previous tedious setup worthwhile. Elphaba deserves acceptance not merely out of sympathy or recognition of her talents, but because she is essential to the world's harmony and completeness.

Unfortunately, the film lost its way after this powerful scene.

I longed to see more of Elphaba's character development, but instead watched others perform musical numbers that felt disconnected from both the plot and her journey. While I could appreciate the technical skill in their singing and dancing, these performances seemed to exist solely for their own sake, adding nothing to the story.

What makes a musical number truly serve the plot? I think La La Land offered a perfect example: