Trust me on this: the rave reviews you may have read about how wonderful the film version of “Wicked” is are the result of pure cognitive dissonance scale manipulation in action. It was cleverly engineered to be a love note to “Wizard of Oz” cultists, social justice warriors, Trump-Deranged fanatics and woke warriors, adding in the kind of people who listen to the Sirius-XM Broadway channel. It is not a great movie musical and arguably not even a good one. I wonder if its Hollywood architects and cast even realizes that the thing hoists itself on its own petard?

Allow me to get the artistic end out of the way before discussing the political and ethics mess in Part 2, Above all else, the movie is inexcusably bloated and long, and I say this as someone who has no problem with long movies if the time is necessary to tell a story, it is told well, and the director understands pacing. At two hours and 40 minutes, a film that covers the first act of the Broadway hit (“Wicked” is coming up on its 22nd year on Broadway) is just five minutes shorter than the entire stage musical. It is literally stuffed with gratuitous and pedestrian dialogue, extended scenes, CGI and show-off special effects.

I will state up front that the film would have been better if all the songs had been cut and the story presented in streamlined form…or, in the alternative, if two thirds of the dialogue had been left out. The musical genre traditionally dictated short scenes that set up songs as the show’s heart; Sondheim’s mutant branch on the musical tree challenged that formula, and he was also brilliant at communicating complex emotions and dramatic movement musically. It is an understatement to note that Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the songs, is no Stephen Sondheim, nor is he Cole Porter, Irving Berlin or even Jerry Herman. One persistent problem “Wicked” has is its reliance on memories of the original “Wizard of Oz” film. There isn’t a single song in “Wicked” that is as tuneful, clever or well-crafted as the worst number in Judy’s masterpiece. So Schwartz is no Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg either.

There are memorable presentations of a few songs, but none of the songs themselves are memorable: this is standard low-grade “Frozen”-level pop Broadway junk. Schwartz’s biggest Broadway success before “Wicked” was “Pippin,” which also had a weak book and homogenized songs. It was saved by furious gimmick-strewn direction and frenetic choreography by Bob Fosse, and a performance by Ben Vereen for the ages. The choreography in the filmof “Wicked” is uninteresting and often ugly (I have not seen the Broadway version, and after this, won’t). In one bloated eleven o’clock number particularly, it reminded me of the worst production numbers in the movie version of “Oliver!,” which had legions of dancers all over London doing things like throwing around huge fish. “Oliver!” won many Oscars; it is virtually unwatchable in its bloat and production excesses today—but it had great songs, a terrific star turn by Ron Moody as Fagin, and no woke posturing.

“Wicked” borrows from many other movies and sources. There is the original “Wizard of Oz,” of course, but you will also see “homages” (as in “lazy steals”) from the Harry Potter films, “Back to the Future 2” (Oz has a “Biff World”-style canned presentation about the Wizard), the Gene Wilder “Willy Wonka,” “The Sound of Music,” EPCOT, and more.

The cast is uniformly meh, with one exception. The critics are raving about Ariana Grande-Butera as Glinda, I suppose because she’s better than the typical pop star who turns to acting. Grande-Butera began her career as a child on Broadway and had played roles on TV and couple of movies: she knows what she’s doing. Still, I find her hard to look at, and her much praised voice is in the now-mandatory (on Broadway) head voice belt that I find painful to listen to.In “Wicked,” she’s also difficult to understand.

Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba Thropp, the soon-to-be Wicked Witch of the West, plays her protagonist role on a single note with a perpetually furrowed brow. Her singing is competent but not exciting, but then the material is so weak it seems unfair to judge her harshly. As Elphaba, Erivo lacks the screen presence and charisma to anchor the movie; in her scenes with Glinda, Grande-Butera’s energy (she’s annoying and repetitious, but energetic) swallows her.

In the huge, endless, almost camp number I compared to “Oliver” above, “One Short Day in Oz,” the original Glinda and Elphaba, Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, from the Broadway musical make a surprise appearance. They both sound better and radiate more “It Factor” than the movie’s leads, making one wish they hadn’t aged out of their roles.

When Jeff Goldblum shows up in the last half hour as the Wizard, you suddenly realize how starved the movie has been for genuine star power. Goldblum, as always, is funny, quirky, unpredictable (though the gimmick the director used to show him “dancing” is transparent and insulting to the audience’s intelligence) and he salvages the movie to the extent that a movie can be salvaged after two hours of sloth. I was standing at a urinal after running to the restroom when the movie ended. The guy next to me said, spontaneously, “Thank God for Jeff Goldblum!” Bingo.

The production design is, like the rest of the film, over-blown, but much of it is spectacular. Even as the story, scenes and songs bore you, the film is interesting to look at. I saw the 3-D version: I wouldn’t bother with that: there was only one second-long moment where the feature significantly enhanced the movie.

Some other artistic issues will come up in the next chapter covering the movie’s political and ethical content. Here is my faint praise: “Wicked” is better than any Hollywood musical adaptation since “Chicago,” and that was 22 years ago. The prime audience for “Wicked” is woke, female, gay, politically indoctrinated and under 30 or children: most of them have probably never seen a really good movie musical in a theater. Maybe that explains the film’s appeal.