Review of Wicked

Like most people, when I watched Wizard of Oz, I was filled with questions. Where did the wicked witch get her hat? Where did she get those cool monkeys? And what drove her to be so wicked?

It turns out that the wicked witch, before she was known to be wicked, went to Rizz Academy and met Glinda the good witch there. The two witches started out as rivals, but eventually realized that they complement one another and became friends. Wait a second… I’ve seen this movie before!

Let me tell you the plot of Monsters University. The premise of the world is that there is a parallel reality of monsters that are able to produce energy from children’s screams, and have the technology to enter our reality through any door. They have combined these abilities and created an industry of entering childrens’ bedrooms through their closet door, scaring them to make them scream, using that to generate energy, and then getting out of there without being detected by the parents.

Mike is a small green monster student at “Monsters University”, where he wants to learn to become a scarer, where he meets a giant blue monster named Sully. Mike is an expert in Scare Theory, and knows what strategies you should use if a child is afraid of snakes vs if they’re afraid of spiders, but has no innate scaring talent because he’s just not scary. Sully has the talent, but believes that all you have to do is be big and roar at the kid and they’ll be scared enough. As a result, both of them become rivals until they both end up kicked out of the scare program due to their opposing weaknesses.

The only avenue they have to reenter the program is to succeed in the “scare games”, a series of scare-based competitions put on by the fraternity program. To do so, they need to join a fraternity, and there is only one with open spots available, so our two rivals are forced to work together. They find they work well together and do well in the games, but the final challenge will be to succeed in a scare simulation - you pretend to scare a dummy and a computer judges your scariness. Sully, fearing that Mike isn’t scary enough, secretly breaks into the facility and sets the scare simulator to its maximum sensitivity. The tampered-with simulator judges Mike as scary, and they win the competition. Mike doesn’t know the simulator was tampered with and gets a major ego boost from passing what he thought was an objective test of scariness, only to get his spirits crushed when he finds out what Sully has done, and what it implies about Sully’s lack of faith in him.

In shame, Mike returns his trophy and decides to prove his scariness once and for all: by sneaking through a door into a children’s summer camp and trying to scare them. Sully discovers this and sneaks through the door as well to help him, and after this the school decides to deactivate the door, trapping the two monsters on the human side. They realize that the only way to get back will be to scare the kids so bad that the amount of scream energy will reactivate the door from the human side, and they understand that they can only accomplish this by combining their talents – Mike’s knowledge of technical scare theory and Sully’s inherent scary physique and demeanor.

They realize that their skills perfectly complement one another and that together they can become incredible scarers. Tada, movie over.

I would suggest that Monsters University, while not amazing, is a much better-written movie than Wicked. You can see in the plot summary that I wrote, that there is a clear three-act structure. An act starts when a character makes a choice that they cannot or will not go back on. The first act ends and the second act begins when they get removed from the scare program and decide to try to get back in by entering the scare games. The second act ends and the third act begins when Sully thinks Mike isn’t scary enough and tampers with the scare simulator. That’s part of what makes a good story - it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Wicked doesn’t really have a 3 act structure. Depending on how you look at it it either has like a 50 act structure or a 1 act structure. I literally think it would be impossible to present a plot synopsis the way I did above, because nobody would be able to read it because it wouldn’t make any sense. There are two parallel plots going on for most of the movie – the good witch and the wicked witch developing a rivalry at Rizz Academy, as well as a trend of animals losing their ability to talk (animals can apparently usually talk in this universe) combined with rising discrimination against animals. The movie alternates schizophrenically between the wicked witch discovering that a global unknown force is taking away animal intelligence, to the very next scene going to a party and being humiliated for wearing an ugly hat. It’s an insane tone switcharoo and it keeps happening throughout the whole movie. The cause is that there is the actual plot of the movie – the good witch and the wicked witch starting off as rivals and becoming friends – has been interspersed with a bunch of random scenes that are either explaining some trivial detail in the original (where did the witch get her hat?) or setting things up for a sequel.

I didn’t watch the Han Solo prequel movie, but apparently his real name is Han Schwartz or something but when he’s at a restaurant he says “I have a reservation under Han?” and the host says “How many in your party?” and he says “Just Han, solo”. At which point the host says “wait a minute, say that again.” And Han says “Han… Solo” and then the credits roll. I made that up but it’s an example of the kind of dumb plot contrivance I’m talking about. Explaining things in the original doesn’t make a prequel bad, but a movie can become bad when a movie contorts itself into knots to give fanservice like that. And like half of this movie is plot contrivances to explain stuff from the original nobody cared about. Did you know that the wicked witch got her hat when the good witch gave it to her as a prank, and the good witch got it from her grandmother? Wait, you’re saying that doesn’t make that much sense, because it’s not a very good prank to give someone a hat, and even if it was somehow a good prank the prankee could just stop wearing it? You’re not intended to think about that, you’re intended to soyface and point at the screen and say “omg that’s the hat she wears in the original movie omg”.

A parallel problem is when various plot pieces have to be in a particular configuration for the sequels. I can’t think of any (non-wicked) movie examples of this off the top of my head, but in literature there is “middle book syndrome” where the middle book in a trilogy is bad. The first sets up the stakes, the third has the dramatic conclusion, and the middle book is just getting everyone into the necessary place for the dramatic conclusion to happen. Somehow, despite being the first of the trilogy, Wicked already exhibits middle book syndrome. The trend of animals losing their ability to talk is almost entirely told through boring exposition, and then there’s a random and incomprehensible scene where the school decides to teach them about the benefits of putting animals in cages, with a live demonstration using a lion cub. So the wicked witch and a future-scarecrow bust him free of his cage and dump him by a random creek in a nearby forest, and the entire incident is never spoken of again.

Yes, scarecrow is in this movie

Obviously the lion will end up being the cowardly lion, and the scarecrow will be the scarecrow. But why did this scene happen? Just because they need it to tease the lion for the next movies I guess. But if you cut it out of this movie, no one would notice. And this is not an isolated incident. When I said half of Wicked was contrived cameos for the original Wizard of Oz, the other half is contrived events happening to set things up for the next movies.

Anyway, there are some enjoyable parts to the movie, particularly the last 5 or 10 minutes where there’s some cool action setpieces. And the enemies-to-lovers arc between the wicked and good witches is actually very entertaining (when the movie will actually show it to you without interrupting it with random other stuff).

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