So, my apologies David.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory existed on screen. That's for sure. The fact that it was being projected onto the screen cannot be denied. Did it go beyond flickering images and Dolby Surround? Will I even remember it tomorrow? Do I even remember it from last night? No, not really. Is that anybody's fault? Not exactly.
In defense of John August, the writing was good. I loved that there was a stronger emphasis on family, that Willy Wonka actually HAD a past... but it seemed that everything other than that let me down. Everything.
I shouldn't compare it to the original, but Willy Wonka is a movie that I don't feel is out of date in any way. That should have only been remade with the intention of completely reenvisioning it. When I heard that Tim Burton and Depp were doing it, I knew I was in for something new. Yet, I found it LESS creative than the original. Back in the day, Michael Jackson was fighting to remake Wonka; so was Marilyn Manson. I want to see THOSE movies. Now, those would be something different. Both creepy in their own ways. How true they were to the book, I wouldn't care. Because the original is close enough.
Tim Burton was all but invisible in this movie. The rundown house that Charlie lived in--THAT--was Tim Burton. Whoever directed the rest of the movie, I don't know. Maybe the director of Cat in the Hat, but I don't know because I see on IMDB that he was the production designer for Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands... so maybe if Bo Welch, director of Cat in the Hat directed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory it would have been more of a Tim Burton film than what is playing in theatres.
Everywhere I expected a Tim Burton touch, there wasn't. The Oompa Loompas all being played by the same person was a great idea that fell flat on its face due to an absolute lack of anything interesting about that person. Where was Burton's character design there? Augustus Gloop is just a fat kid, yet he had plenty of character design.
How could Burton, the director of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and it's marvelous breakfast-making-contraption utterly fail to create a single interesting candy making machine? I mean, the Everlasting Gobstopper machine in the first film for heaven's sake! THAT was a wacky machine. The Everlasting Gobstopper itself had character in the first film! There is nothing as interesting to look at in this movie as that original Everlasting Gobstopper.
Then there's the CGI, that was supposed to make the factory large beyone our wildest dreams. Once again, the original's factory felt far more vast for me. I saw Jon Favreau talking about his new children's sci-fi movie Zathura the other day and how he had to fight the studios to use model spaceships instead of CG. He said exactly what I've been saying for years... that you can do anything with CG nowadays but who cares? You can make the biggest spaceship, but it's still just CG in our eyes. You can make the biggest fucking chocolate factory with humongous corridors that glass elevators float down for minutes as fireworks explode for no reason... but that doesn't mean I can touch that chocolate factory. It doesn't even look like I can touch that glass elevator. Film a model, film claymation even and I still get a sense that it's something that's THERE. Something that can be touched. Heck, the sandworms in Beetlejuice were just claymation, but they were far more dangerous to me than the aliens in War of the Worlds.
Alright, I'm getting lazy now. I've written far too much about this movie already. So...
The original is far darker. This is a kid's movie, through and through.
Johnny Depp is surprisingly boring, for once.
We know now and should've known before... don't mess with Gene Wilder.
The squirrel sequence was good. That and maybe four lines of surprising dialogue. The four lines that were hilarious and out of place. Out of place because they belonged in the real Tim Burton movie.
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