// Personal website of Chris Smith

Watched on 2025-12-28. Rating:

I think I slightly preferred this to part one, but not by much.

My biggest issue with this (and its predecessor) is that not enough happens given the length of the film. It feels like most events happen, then we take a break to sing about them. The songs don’t move the story on, and they don’t really reveal anything we didn’t already know. If you cut a bunch of songs, or a bunch of non-songs, you could have a reasonably-sized film that told the full thing instead of splitting it across two two-hour-plus showings.

Anyway, the back half of the story shown here is more interesting than all the setup we got in Wicked. The way it winds around the original Wizard of Oz story is clever. There’s character development, although it’s rather abrupt in places.

I wasn’t a fan of the songs from the original Wicked, but I literally can’t remember any of the songs from For Good a few hours after leaving the cinema, whereas Defying Gravity is still living rent free in my head.