Wicked looks like every other film now. That’s its problem. It may be the screen adaptation of the stage musical – itself based on a 1995 novel – but, within moments, it also tethers itself directly to the classic 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz. And while that film’s Emerald City and Land of Oz have been cemented in the public imagination as brilliant-hued dream worlds, and the most famous demonstration of the Technicolor process, Wicked is shot and lit like we’re being sold an Airbnb in Mykonos.
Characters are aggressively backlit, so that the audience can feel what it’s like to watch events unfold while also staring directly into the sun. There are ferocious performances here, and it’s clear that hours upon hours of intricate craftwork have taken place on the film’s sets, but director Jon M Chu (of In the Heights and Crazy Rich Asians fame) treats his Oz as if it were as mundane as a city block. And if there were ever a film that demanded Hollywood finally put to rest its obsession with flat, stark realism and return to colourful expressionism, it would surely be Wicked. In theory, it’s pure spectacle – its emotional resonance powered almost entirely by the lungs of lead Cynthia Erivo, as she nails those notorious high notes on “Defying Gravity”.
