For most of us, "The Wizard of Oz" entered our imagination long before we ever consciously watched it. We absorbed its vocabulary through cultural osmosis as we met the green witch, the glittering good witch, the yellow brick road, and a Kansas girl with unquestionable moral authority and magically convenient shoes. But beneath the Technicolor splendour was a familiar Hollywood blueprint that women exist in binaries where one is good, the other is wicked, and the real adventure happens around the men who help or hinder them. The Wicked Witch is the villain. Glinda is the bubbly good girl. Dorothy is the innocent outsider who gets caught in their cross-fire. And that is the template we inherited.
"Wicked" has spent two decades dismantling that framework. What began on Broadway as a renegade act of revisionism has now expanded on screen into Jon M Chu's two-part cinematic saga, which is unhurried, emotionally layered, and audaciously uninterested in letting romance or heroism overshadow the real heart of Oz: the evolving, often painful bond between Elphaba and Glinda. Chu's adaptation understands that audiences come pre-loaded with assumptions. We think we know these women. We think we know how the story ends. And yet the films invite us to put aside the simplicity of good vs. evil and to witness a relationship that unfolds through insecurity, admiration, betrayal, sacrifice, and, most subversively, faith.
In the first movie, the camera lingers on their youth as two girls forced together in a hostile environment, immediately misreading one another. Elphaba's solitude is the daily reality of someone whose existence challenges the comfort of others. Glinda's effervescence is the performance of a girl terrified that without her popularity, she will disappear. Their initial rivalry is believable because it springs from a world that has pre-assigned their roles before they can even form opinions of one another. Chu resists the easy comedic caricature. "Popular," for instance, becomes less a makeover gag and more a moment of mutual vulnerability as an awkward attempt by Glinda to show she cares, using the only emotional language she has ever learned. Elphaba's longing in "I'm Not That Girl" avoids petty resentment as she refuses to turn her disappointment into hostility. The film positions their connection, not their competition, as the primary character arc. More importantly, they choose each other before the world chooses sides for them. For a while, they are co-authors of their own story. Glinda envies Elphaba's conviction; Elphaba envies Glinda's ease and in the cracks of those envies, something deeply tender grows.
Oz has always been a place where magic dazzles, but Chu brings its power structures into stark view. Who controls the narrative? Who defines a woman's goodness? Who benefits when two brilliant young women are convinced that their ambition cannot coexist? In light of these, the turning point of the first film is Elphaba's refusal to silence herself anymore and this fractures the friendship because the system weaponises their differences. Glinda becomes the state-approved symbol of female virtue and the glittering mascot of obedience, while Elphaba becomes everything society fears when a woman stops apologising.
The true brilliance of Chu's adaptation emerges only when the second film arrives. It treats their estrangement with mournful clarity. Each woman continues to love the other while being pushed farther and farther from her. There is no catty sabotage, no cheap antagonism, just two women making impossible decisions under pressure they did not create. The rarest achievement here is how the franchise portrays female loyalty in the long run. Even when Glinda stands atop grand staircases and Elphaba hides in shadows, their emotional tether never snaps. Instead, it stretches across ideology, across time, across the roles they are forced to play. They are mirrors each cannot bear to look into, because each reveals what the other could have been in a kinder world. The romantic threads are present, and beautifully staged, but they never consume. The films refuse to make a man the prize that justifies betrayal. Desire complicates things, yes. But it is never more important than dignity. In this version of Oz, love is chosen, not chased.
By the time the story reaches its iconic finale, what once was myth becomes a kind of truth told slant. We understand now how legends lie. We understand how a woman becomes wicked when power fears her. And we understand how another woman becomes good when power rewards her compliance. The friendship does not resolve into fairy-tale simplicity as there is pain and acceptance, but it remains the most enduring force in the narrative. That is exactly what makes this one of the most radical portrayals of female friendship in modern franchise cinema. It insists that two women can be ambitious without being enemies, they can be hurt without losing respect, and finally, they can be separated without erasing love. For generations, Oz conditioned us to cheer the downfall of a woman who resisted her assigned role and now, "Wicked" makes us mourn it. Chu's parting gift is a subtle but profound reframe of Oz as history written by those threatened by extraordinary women, and friendship as the one truth that survives the distortion. We walk away knowing that the supposed villain and the celebrated icon were once just girls trying to hold onto each other in a world determined to pull them apart.
It is not a happily-ever-after, but something way more rare, as we get to witness a bond that defies the story that tried to define it. And maybe that is the spell the franchise finally casts, through the audacity to believe that the most powerful force in Oz was never the Wizard or a pair of shoes, but two women who loved each other in spite of the narrative.
