I first saw Wicked on Broadway near the end of Idina Menzel’s run with the show. I thought then that the show was interesting technically, well-acted, had quality songs, and that I didn’t engage with the story in any way.

Recently I watched the film of Wicked, Part One, and got pretty much the same result.

People have been talking about the performances of Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Arianna Grande as Galinda. They are right to do so. Their performances are good and charismatic, which in a grandiose musical such as this, are necessary. Erivo is especially good, embodying a character in such a way as to make her believable and sympathetic.

The movie is big and colorful and full of set pieces and effects. As something like this should be. The songs are… well, they’re hummable and they’re used properly in the story. Wicked does not stop the story so the audience can hear the ingenue trill. Rather the songs move the story along, creating character changes through music. That’s as it should be.

But the story is just an inversion of The Wizard of Oz, and so despite all of its efforts and authenticities (only practical effects, they say), is ultimately unsatisfying on that account.

In the first place, the film is a Prequel, and so suffers from all the usual Prequel Problems. Ultimately this means that the story is bound by the story it leads into. It can be loose with lore but it can’t fully break continuity.

And this is dull enough if the prequel in question is trying to be a faithful prequel. But Wicked isn’t a faithful prequel, but an inversionary one. It is trying to make the bad guys the good guys and vice versa, but it can’t commit to this. It doesn’t take much to make the Wizard shady or the Munchkins sheep, turning Glinda the Good Which of the North into something monstrous is a harder sell. So Wicked doesn’t bother, instead using the origin-story narrative to make her a vapid Mean Girl until her relationship with Elphaba gives her character growth.

Which is fine, as a narrative arc. Two enemies becoming unlikely friends. Classic. Only, there’s nothing in The Wizard of Oz that ever suggests that they’re anything like friends, so the story has to end with them friendly but not on the same side, for some reason. Because it has to be that way. Even though the story of Wicked wants them on the same side, they can’t be. So it all gets left unspoken and swept under the rug.

The actual villain of the story isn’t even the Wizard so much as it is all of Oz, who bully Elphaba for being green, who harbor anti-animal prejudice, who are just generally bad for no particularly good reason. There’s no depth to the villainy, nothing interesting or even dramatic about it. It’s almost an afterthought.

Why is Elphaba bad? She’s not, but all of society denounces her becuase she’s green and she’s talented and just too smart and moral for everyone else to handle. It’s a story a middle-schooler could have written, and if you stripped away the songs and the spectacle everyone would see that.

But at the same time, that’s what makes it resonate. Simple character arcs are easy for many people to respond to. Everyone woman who’s ever been bullied in youth for anything can sympathize with Elphaba. Everyone woman who was ever a Queen Bee or close to one gets Galinda. The story is secondary to the character’s appeal. No Wicked fan cares about the Lore.

So this is where I admit that the problem is that I’m Not In The Demo. Wicked is going to fall flat with me for the same reason that Barbie irritated me (Barbie was, on balance, a better movie). It wasn’t made for me, and there’s no reason for it to have worked it’s charms on me. That’s okay. Go in Peace.