Photo: Universal Pictures

Jon M. Chu has created one of the greatest musicals of our time, a phantasmagoric coming-of-age journey to a land of wide-eyed enchantment, wild dance moves, and colorful, magical bubbles. That movie was called Enter 3Dand it was released in 2010. Although it was dismissed by critics at the time, this dance-off sequel feels more like a masterpiece every year, an early demonstration of the director’s ability to create new worlds through movement and mood . These talents also served Chu well in his pandemic-hindered 2021 adjustment In the Heights. There, the gritty musical numbers, which mixed realism with reverie, gave that ode to Washington Heights’ immigrant community a cascading poignancy.

Chu’s latest, Badis also quite good, although you miss the sheer attack of his previous work. A massive (some might say bloated) spectacle, it splits the long-running hit Broadway musical in two, with the film’s finale taking place during the play’s only intermission. Act Two on stage is a lot shorter than Act One, one suspects Bad: Part Two requires new figures and plot threads to match the weight of the first half. It would be quite an achievement: this Bad is huge in every way. Fans of the show will probably love it, but it only sporadically achieves the frenzied energy that characterizes Chu’s best work and makes the great modern movie musicals sing.

Despite being a lot longer, the film remains ruthlessly faithful to the piece. It opens with all of Oz celebrating the liquidation of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who will eventually be played by Cynthia Erivo. That’s pretty much true of the original Wizard of Oz left things, but soon Ariana Grande’s Glinda the Good, Elphaba’s supposed mortal enemy, floats down into her pink bubble to tell the story of how she and the Witch knew each other when they were young students at Shiz University. Glinda hesitates to say anything at first. The walls of the villages of Oz are decorated with anti-witch propaganda. (“She’s watching you,” blares a poster with a sinister photo of Elphaba.) And while Glinda’s story is meant to answer the question, “Why does evil happen?”, it ultimately reveals that Elphaba wasn’t evil at all . – that she was just a girl rejected by those around her because of her green skin, and that there was more to her war against the powers in Oz than met the eye.

Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, on which the show is loosely based, was written in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, and the author has said that it was partly inspired by Western press reports that repeatedly compared Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler as justification for the invasion of Iraq. . At the same time, the book goes to great lengths to show Oz’s gradual decline into fascism at the hands of our old friend the Wizard. The stage version, which premiered in 2003, in turn seemed to reflect the racism in the air amid the aftermath of September 11 and the escalation of the war in Iraq. (“The best way to bring people together is to give them a really good enemy,” is a line from both the film and the play.) I suspect this new film itself will resonate in new ways. The allegory of Bad is both blunt enough and vague enough to adapt it to whatever sociopolitical environment we want. That’s not a knock; several of George Orwell’s masterpieces – a clear influence on Maguire’s book – have suffered the same fate over the years. And both L. Frank Baum’s original novel, The Wizard of Oz, and the classic 1939 film have fueled many interpretations since time immemorial, including a charmingly persistent theory that Baum’s real goal was to shape U.S. monetary policy from around the attack the turn of the century. (No, really.)

In other words, the tension between the dark metaphor and the sickly sweet fantasy land of Oz has always been there. It’s easy to see why. The world above the rainbow is just too surreal and strange to ever be taken at face value – it has to mean something something. Perhaps that’s why Chu didn’t try to give his film Oz any real reality or weight. Even as his camera floats through the air, skims over rivers or races through villages, it all feels like pleasant, insignificant background noise. Anyone expecting Chu to breathe life into Oz like Peter Jackson did with Middle-earth into his Lord of the rings epics are sure to disappoint.

For all its ambition and cinematic pyrotechnics, Bad it doesn’t feel like it’s been opened up that much from the source, perhaps because the piece is already huge and dazzling. Much of the show consists of speeches, tours, large exhibits – people speaking and singing to and from large crowds. That makes sense in a stage production, but can be tiring when translated to film. What heightens the sense of an overarching allegory is that the population of Oz is essentially an empty mass of imbeciles, easily manipulated and to some extent capricious. They’re all in unison, all the time. Meanwhile, we keep waiting for the main characters to show some delicate emotion, something subtle and human, something that makes us care for them beyond their status as icons or symbols.

When things calm down every now and then, the actors shine. With her eyelashes on the pagoda roof and her quicksilver physicality, Grande gives a comic form to Glinda’s frivolity as a popular girl. She also pokes fun at her own amazing vocal range, throwing wandering high notes into simple statements like “I already have a private account.” su-iiite.” Erivo probably has the more difficult task. Elphaba is the one who goes from rejection and sadness to love and shrillness and finally to anger. Her performance isn’t particularly nuanced, but this isn’t a particularly nuanced character either; Elphaba’s melancholy is just as part of it Bad‘s spectacle, just like the armies of flying monkeys or the swirling shots of the Emerald City. And one of the film’s biggest moments is also its quietest. When she is ostracized at a school party because of the soon-to-be-famous black hat Glinda has made her wear, Elphaba creates her own rhythmic dance moves, without any accompanying music. On stage it is a relatively fast piece, played as a prelude to the two protagonists coming closer to each other. Here it is the emotional climax of the film, as Chu and Erivo change Elphaba’s expression from one of defeat to one of defiance, laying the groundwork for her eventual transformation.

I admit: I would have enjoyed it Bad much more if I was a bigger fan of the songs. But aside from a few highlights, like the immortal anthem “Defying Gravity,” that ubiquitous, tinny fake-pop Broadway beat immediately turns me on. Fortunately, the songs don’t need my blessing. They’ve lasted so long that the studio has scheduled sing-along screenings across the country for later in December. And when Chu sinks his teeth into the numbers, something miraculous can emerge. The film’s version of “What Is This Feeling?”, a showstopper in which our two heroes express their initial distaste for each other, seems to transition effortlessly from late-night bickering to a riveting, school-wide spectacle where everything changes. rhythm: clicking silverware, spinning fingers, stamping feet, rolling chairs and screeching tables. This is clearly the work of the great madman who made two of them Step up movies.

Erivo and Grande are obviously great singers and give everything they can to the songs, the vocals of which were reportedly recorded live on the set. They can’t afford not to: there’s so much more of it Bad here, with several musical numbers expanded on their journey from stage to screen.

The seams are not visible, but the film can still drag. The greatness of the theatrical spectacle rests on a sense of wonder that is very different from the awe evoked by the moving image. There’s a ritual passion to being in the same room as the smoke and the cherry pickers and the performers belting out the tunes that’s nothing like the experience of watching something unfold in two dimensions. Bad Although the film’s images are large, they are often superficial; they do not draw our attention further into the image, nor do they arouse curiosity about this world. They impress in scale, but not in depth. And the film continues to hammer home established themes, sometimes to its own detriment. Elphaba’s feelings of inadequacy and undesirability become less convincing after some notable character turns, especially as we sense where everything is going. That’s maybe Bad‘s biggest problem. Despite its status as a revisionist reimagining of a classic text, much of it feels preordained, even programmed. We are not waiting for revelations or surprises, but for confirmation and escalation. Bad is as enchanting as it is exhausting.