"Wicked" (2024)

I liked this movie once the plot picked up, which unfortunately was about two hours in. 

I also had to keep pausing it because I couldn't take more than a few minutes of these people at a time. (Once the love interest Fiyero showed up, that escalated to not being able to take more than a few lines of dialogue at a time.)

Some of the songs in this are good. Some of them are okay. Some of them are frankly irritating. I liked the main character Elphaba's first solo ("The Wizard and I") for how adorably happy she is at someone finally being nice to her. The dance scene at the Ozdust Ballroom wasn't my favorite, but I was amused by how it was basically Elphaba going like "You don't want to let me into your dance number? WELL HOW ABOUT I MAKE MY OWN DANCE NUMBER!"

I must confess that I watched this solely because I wanted to write a fanfiction where Dr. Dillamond (a talking goat teacher from the movie) is replaced by Asgore Dreemurr (the final boss of Toby Fox's 2015 game Undertale). Don't ask me why, my brain just does this sometimes. And because I can't really write a fanfic about something I haven't seen/read/watched (and also because I was bored), I decided to watch it before writing the fic.

Oh yeah, the clockwork train. They have a train in Oz, except it's made of clockwork and for some reason it runs on a rack-and-pinion system instead of on rails. There are such things as rack railways, but those don't quite work like that; they have normal wheels to support the car, and the rack-and-pinion is just to haul it up the mountain. Also they're pretty much only used on steep inclines, whereas this one is on seemingly completely level ground. It also doesn't seem to be able to pull any cars, which makes it... pretty much completely useless? I really don't understand why they don't just use a normal train, aside from that it's not as aesthetic.

(Plus how are you going to turn without screwing up the gear ratio? Are the giant gear wheels driven by a differential? What even powers the thing? Why the heck did they leave the giant gears on the front exposed where someone could screw up the whole train by just chucking a rock into them? I have so many questions.)

This isn't a videogame, it's a movie, and it's rated PG. I'd personally maybe bump that up to PG-13, but that's just me.

3 stars.

(Endnote: If anyone starts singing "Popular", I'm leaving.)