Wicked Gets Right What Star Wars Got Wrong

By Chris Snellgrove
| Revealed 5 seconds in the past

Not too long ago, Depraved had the third largest opening of the yr, coming in solely behind the huge Disney hits Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine. Blockbusters could be unpredictable, as Disney found when The Marvels bombed after the predecessor movie Captain Marvel earned over a billion {dollars}. It’s left followers and critics alike asking why this specific musical labored. I imagine the reason being easy: because of its literary origins, Depraved lastly delivers on Star Wars’ failed promise of utilizing a prequel to flesh out a beloved franchise’s well-known villain.

In fact, the Depraved film had one huge benefit that even Star Wars didn’t have: the chance to be taught from the errors of earlier diversifications. Gregory Maguire wrote Depraved: The Life and Instances of the Depraved Witch of the West in 1995 as a Wizard of Oz prequel, and it was tailored into a success Broadway musical in 2003. The current movie clearly focuses on adapting the musical for the large display however makes use of its outsize runtime (the primary movie solely adapts half the play however has an extended runtime than the complete Broadway adaptation) to incorporate extra particulars from the guide, creating the form of strong prequel that, frankly, all of us wished The Phantom Menace and its sequels may have been.

Maguire clearly wrote Depraved years earlier than The Phantom Menace got here out, however it’s nonetheless fascinating that they each had the identical goal, particularly, to supply a extra full origin story for certainly one of cinema’s best supervillains. Nonetheless, the chief failure of the Star Wars prequels is that they didn’t actually change our understanding of Darth Vader, merely offering the world’s stupidest motive, that he’s an simply duped spouse man, for his descent to the Darkish Aspect. 

In contrast, the Depraved novel, play, and now film dramatically change our understanding of the “Depraved” witch by presenting her as a sympathetic advocate of the underdogs (and overmonkeys, for that matter). We see her prepared to face as much as a corrupt Wizard whose solely actual energy comes from his fascist regime and his fuzzy Gestapo, a far cry from the scary inexperienced gal who menaced Dorothy manner again in 1939.

In different phrases, the Depraved story makes for an amazing prequel to The Wizard of Oz particularly as a result of it’s prepared to shock us with a model of this well-known villain we weren’t anticipating. That was comparatively straightforward as a result of the primary cinematic portrayal of this character offered her as nothing greater than a sneering villain, somebody who’d casually threaten to take out a younger woman and her little canine, too. Darth Vader equally began as a one-note villain, and whereas the remainder of the Unique Trilogy added a bit of depth to his backstory, he nonetheless spent virtually each certainly one of his scenes as a brute whose masks and heavy respiratory nonetheless couldn’t disguise how a lot surroundings he was all the time chewing.

As everyone knows, the Star Wars prequels didn’t do something stunning with Darth Vader. He went from being bizarre to being violent to bizarre and violent. Aside from discovering how eerily comparable he was to a faculty shooter, there wasn’t a lot new along with his character.

Depraved, against this, fleshes out the Depraved Witch’s relationship with different iconic characters whereas giving her sympathetic motivations. By the point she brings the home down with the hit tune “Defying Gravity,” the viewers is prepared to aspect with Hollywood’s oldest supervillain as she fights for many who have lost (fairly actually, in some circumstances) their voice.

All of that is to say that Depraved lastly does proper with the Depraved Witch what George Lucas didn’t do with Darth Vader: altering what we all know in regards to the villain with the intention to make the prequel contemporary and thrilling. Sadly, a whole technology of filmmakers has tried to chew Lucas’ model, giving us equally mediocre prequels like Hannibal Rising that equally did nothing fascinating or stunning with their charismatic villains. A profitable prequel requires artistic and modern writing, and if most Hollywood studios are incapable of offering that, they’ll be the one ones left mourning their field workplace failures.

In spite of everything, simply as nobody mourns the depraved, nobody mourns the lazy. And there’s nothing lazier than cookie-cutter prequels afraid to take a single danger with their most iconic characters. Hollywood is filled with laziness, although, and because the Depraved Witch herself would possibly say, what a world it’s.