DJPaint’s review published on Letterboxd:
My patience has finally paid off!
That really was an amazing movie to watch. I hadn’t seen the stage musical in a long while so I was worried I wouldn’t be able to remember much of the story or the songs. Turns out I underestimated myself with the latter because every song came back to me as if I had just listened to them yesterday. That’s the sign of a good musical.
Something I’m glad this movie did is that it successfully managed to take the familiar beats from the stage version and tweak it just enough to make it work in a movie format (not many adaptations can pull that off). Director Jon M. Chu has plenty of experience with directing musicals so I think he was a great choice in leading this. I didn’t even feel the long runtime.
Big praise to Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande as Elphaba and Galinda. The story would not have worked as well as it did if either actress couldn’t have pulled off the performances of their own character as well as working off each other.
Could I see this getting a Best Picture nod? I actually could. That’s something I didn’t think I would say before watching this.
Now the world gets to experience what many theater kids know all too well: Intermission.
