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The Assessment is a high concept sci-fi thriller/drama with a truly fascinating and heady concept, that sort of falls short on the execution side of things, and kind of unravels towards the end, in my opinion.

In a resource-controlled dystopia, a wealthy couple, Aaryan (Himesh Patel) and Mia (Elizabeth Olsen), must pass a weeklong "assessment" by an agent, Virginia (Alicia Vikander), to have a lab-created child. As the week goes on, Virginia's methods grow invasive and suspect.

You sometimes hear people who say things like, "ugh, people should have to have a license to have a child," and I feel like this film makes the case as to how evil of a position that really is. There is something deeply inhuman about an institution "deciding" who should procreate or not. From the outset, the world of The Assessment is cold and sterile; there are no animals, there's a constant shade of grey, the characters eat nutrient rich gruel. The film does a great job of putting this world's inhumanity front and centre.

And yet, Aaryan and Mia seem like a couple deeply deserving of a child. Patel and Olsen have excellent chemistry and really sold me on their relationship. Alicia Vikander, as usual, delivers a stunning, yet menacing performance as Virginia. Her devolution into childlike behaviour, whilst absurd in the moment, makes total sense: of course the "assessment" would come to see how parents react to a challenging child. Naturally, Virginia begins to test their relationship generally, and a strange dynamic emerges that I found very compelling. The movie hints at cracking through the façade and outlining our characters' true motivations.

The film rolls towards what I'd hoped would be an emotionally devastating and thought provoking treatise on parenthood, desire, and identity, but then decides to start expositing about the world the film lives in. I cannot understate how much of a mistake this was; we go from compelling human drama, small scale in nature, but huge in implication, to really bad sci-fi. There are so many inconsistencies regarding the world these characters inhabit that I would've never thought about had the film kept its focus.

The final act is flat out bad. Vikander's psychologically complicated and fascinating character is given motivations that feel ripped out of a soap opera, tragic backstory and all. It really hurt the film for me, and i even found her performance to cap the film off quite terrible, complete with huge slips in her accent, likely due to poorly written dialog.

I was totally on board for most of this film, and but it just did not stick the landing. Flaws aside, this is a well-made, original film that's worth seeing. It's thought-provoking, but I only wish it stayed focused on the questions it's best equipped to ask.

I really enjoyed the original "Wicked," film and went into knowing very little about it aside from the premise and a couple of the more iconic songs. I knew even less about the second half of the story, but the curious lack of instantly recognizable hits like "Popular" or "Defying Gravity"...was an indicator that this half was probably going to be a little worse.

I learned after the fact the above hunch is basically what everyone thinks of the second half of this story, and I agree. Wicked: For Good lacks the expansive imagination of the original. I found myself compelled by the reimagining of the world, lore, and story of the Wizard of Oz, and impressed by how many little elements of that story were examined and expanded upon (i.e. Elphaba's green skin and reception from the Ozians being an indicator of how easy Oz can be led to hatred).

With Wicked: For Good, there's decidedly less of that; the story now intersects with the Wizard of Oz proper and has to integrate itself with it, to varying results. Did I need to know the origin of the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow? No. But was it fun anyway? Yes. It did however, veer a bit into the realm of "elevated fan fiction," and less into a "world expanding" narrative, though.

It's a god send that the characters are so likeable and I found myself genuinely invested in them. And, of course, that the performances are overall really good. I also felt that it was a really good decision to split the story up. For Good is distinct enough where it literally makes no sense to try and jam pack this narrative into one mega movie (naturally, it was a commercially sensible decision too).

I think Ariana Grande steals the show here; her performance as Glinda is phenomenal and she embodies the character with many little moments of personality that I genuinely felt was Oscar worthy. Erivo is good too, but I felt like she left less of an impression on me this time around. There's also the "turn" her character makes towards the dark side that I don't feel her performance communicated very well.

I was really surprised by Ethan Slater in this film; look, the man was about as intimidating as Spongebob in the first film (yes, I'm aware), but he really comes off as a deeply wounded and bitter person in this one. I found myself quite invested in his and Nessarose's story, to the very end.

However, given the structure of the story, it's reasonable to say that a lot of these characters sort of just...vanish from the story at a certain point. Let's just say there's this invisible wall that exists in this movie; on one side, there's Wicked, and the other, there's the Wizard of Oz. And once a character fully crosses over into the latter, they are unceremoniously dumped from the movie until they cross back over into Wicked. So, expect characters you've come to enjoy to just...disappear for long stretches of the story.

Aside from the inherent problems with the story, I felt that this film suffers in two big places: pacing and the music. It's apparently supposed to take place 6 years after the first Act, but the film does a tremendously bad job at communicating this. In fact, I left the theatre thinking this was all supposed to be a few weeks or months later.

That might not sound like an issue, but the film never really establishes what has changed since Part I, and consequentially, everything feels like it's happening over the course of a couple of days. Whereas the first film took its time to draw you in, this one seems like it's rushing through every story beat. It really needed to slow down and build up the conflicts it sets up.

The songs are...objectively worse thing time around, and to be honest, most of them passed through one ear and out the other. Outside of "For Good," which is truly beautiful, I genuinely do not remember any of them. It also didn't help that so many of these musical numbers are shot so flatly. I get that the tone is overall darker and you may not want big choreographed musical numbers, but stripped away from the choreography, it's VERY apparent that John M. Chu doesn't know how to shoot a musical number.

The actors are mostly standing or sitting or walking around and singing to each other; the worst case of this is the duet between Cynthia Erivo and Jonathan Bailey ("As Long As You're Mine"), which genuinely veered into bad Lifetime movie territory.

While the idea that a musical's worst aspect being its songs and musical numbers might seem like a death knell, Wicked: For Good is still a lot of fun. The VFX and visuals are quite excellent, the chemistry between Grande and Erivo is great, and the ending really sticks the landing, emotionally.

But given there was a pretty big narrative change, I wonder why Chu and company chose to stick SO closely to the source material, knowing its flaws? I felt like there was a missed opportunity to make some key changes that would've helped everything flow just a little bit better. I suspect that knowing the audience expects this instalment to be a little worse than the first one, the studio probably pushed the film makers not to be too ambitious and adapt it (mostly) faithfully. It certainly feels that way.