from Chris Snelgrove
| Published
recently Evil had the third-biggest opening of the year, coming in only behind Disney’s massive hits From the inside out 2 and Deadpool and Wolverine. Blockbusters can be unpredictable, as Disney discovered when The Marvels bombed after its predecessor Captain Marvel earned over one billion dollars. This led fans and critics alike to question why this particular musical worked. I believe the reason is simple: thanks to its literary background, Evil finally delivers on Star Wars’ failed promise of using backstory to flesh out the beloved franchise’s famous villain.
Of course, on Evil the film had one major advantage that even Star Wars didn’t have: the ability to learn from the mistakes of previous adaptations. Gregory Maguire wrote Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch in the West in 1995. as a The Wizard of Oz backstory and was adapted into a hit Broadway musical in 2003. The recent film obviously focuses on adapting the musical for the big screen, but uses its extra long running time (the first film adapted only half the play, but has a longer running time than the entire Broadway adaptation) to include more details from the book, creating the appearance of a solid backstory that, frankly, we all wanted The Phantom Menace and its sequels could be.
Maguire apparently wrote Evil years ago The Phantom Menace came out, but it’s still fascinating that they both had the same goal of providing a more complete origin story for one of cinema’s greatest supervillains. The main failure of the Star Wars prequels, however, is that they didn’t really change our understanding of Darth Vadersimply providing the dumbest reason in the world, that he is an easily cheated wife, for his descent to the Dark Side.
In contrast, the novel, the play, and now the film The Wicked have drastically changed our understanding of the “Wicked” witch by portraying her as a sympathetic protector of outsiders (and super-monkeys, for that matter). We see her ready to take on a corrupt wizard whose only real power comes from his fascist regime and his fuzzy Gestapo, a far cry from the scary green girl who menaced Dorothy way back in 1939.
In other words, Evil the story makes a great backstory of The Wizard of Oz specifically because he wants to surprise us with a version of this famous villain that we didn’t expect. This was relatively easy because the first cinematic portrayal of this character presented her as nothing more than a sneering villain who would casually threaten to kill a young girl and her small dog. Darth Vader similarly started out as a one-off villain, and while the rest of the Original Trilogy added some depth to his backstory, he still spent nearly every one of his scenes as a brute whose mask and heavy breathing still couldn’t disguise how much scenery , which he always chewed.
As we all know, the Star Wars prequels didn’t do anything surprising with Darth Vader. It went from weird to cruel to weird and cruel. Other than discovering how eerily similar a school shooter he was, there wasn’t much new with his character.
Evilon the contrary, it clarifies the Wicked Witch’s relationship to other iconic characters while giving her a sympathetic motivation. By the time she brings down the house with the hit song “Defying Gravity,” audiences are ready to root for Hollywood’s oldest supervillain as she fights for those who have lost (quite literally, in some cases) their voice.
All this is to say that Evil finally does right with The Wicked Witch what George Lucas failed to do with Darth Vader: change what we know about the villain to make the backstory fresh and exciting. Unfortunately whole generation of the directors tried to bite Lucas’s style, giving us such mediocre backstories as Hannibal Resurgence who likewise didn’t do anything interesting or surprising with their charismatic villains. A successful prequel requires creative and innovative writing, and if most Hollywood studios are unable to provide that, they will be the only ones left to mourn their box office failures.
After all, just as no one mourns the wicked, no one mourns the lazy. And there is nothing lazier than the prequels, afraid to take a risk with their most iconic characters. However, Hollywood is full of laziness and as the Wicked Witch herself might say, what a world it is.
