“Wicked” and “Gladiator II” Offer Nostalgic, Half-Satisfying Showdowns

One of the movie industry’s many recent laments is that 2024 has given us no Barbenheimer—no box-office showdown between two thrillingly brainy blockbusters, cemented together in the cultural imagination and in the commercial stratosphere. And yet, just in time for Thanksgiving, here come two wishfully galumphing epics, “Wicked” and “Gladiator II.” One is a revisionist fantasy of Oz, the other a revisionist history of Rome, and both are chockablock with political conspiracies, authoritarian abuses, and foul-tempered monkeys, none of which adds up to a full-blown phenomenon. If “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” struck blows for risk and originality in Hollywood, the slickly refurbished wares of “Wadiator”—or, if you prefer, “Glicked”—suggest a safe retreat to known quantities. Choose your own adventure, but, whether it leads to the Colosseum or to the Emerald City, you’ve surely been there before. In “Wicked”—or, as it appears onscreen, “Wicked: Part I”—that familiarity is entirely the point. The movie, directed by Jon M. Chu with some of the whirligig showmanship he brought to “In the Heights” (2021) and “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), kicks off a two-part adaptation of a hit Broadway musical, which was itself loosely based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.” All yellow brick roads lead back to L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” though the classic 1939 film adaptation exerts the mightiest influence, having immortalized the Wicked Witch as a green-skinned, broomstick-riding cackler—played by Margaret Hamilton, in one of the most primally terrifying movie-villain performances. Evil this delectable can no longer be simply savored; it must be deconstructed, and lucratively prequelized, in the manner of sympathetic villain origin stories like “Maleficent,” “Joker,” and “Cruella.” It makes sense that “Wicked,” a forerunner of this trend on the page and the stage, has now found its place on the screen, where the story can shoulder its full weight in cinematic Baumbast. And so the real Wicked Witch steps out from behind the curtain—and, lo, she is Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), an intellectually gifted, morally courageous, and grievously misunderstood outcast, whose only crime is […]

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