I've got a bunch of reviews written, reviews for films and books, and I'm going to be running one a day for a while. I'll start off with this one, finally written up from the brief reaction
I posted the day I saw the film. Go go Charlie!
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a new film version of the classic children's story by Ronald Dahl. There was a previous film version, released in 1971 and starring Gene Wilder, but this film is based on the book, not that other film, and since I've never read the book or seen more than bits and pieces of the first film, my review is entirely based on this new film. I liked parts of it, I was sort of bored by the emotionless spectacle of other parts, and for me the performances and look of the film was what it was all about. The actual plot and events in it are absurd to the point that I felt no emotional connection to them at all.
To the scores:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 5
Humor: 5
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 4/8 (Adults/Children)
Overall: 6.5
I'll talk about what I liked first. Johnny Depp's performance has been
discussed a great deal, with some critics loving it, some hating it, and others saying they liked the film despite him. I thought his performance and the character were consistent and interesting, without being at all likeable or being anyone you could really identify with. He's weird, prickly, eccentric, childlike, and wacky, and he's consistent about it. It's not an act or an affectation; that's what Willy Wonka is like, in this film. I didn't particularly like him, and I certainly wouldn't want to get to know him, but he didn't make or ruin the film for me.
Charlie, the namesake young boy, was not at all realistic either; no child (or adult, I suspect) has ever been so selfless and kind and friendly and pure. He was consistently that way though, through the entire film, so you can't really criticize him for it either. I liked him and wanted good things for him and his interesting family, but I never believed in the reality of any of them for a minute. It's a fantasy though, and I don't think you're really supposed to believe in it. It was a bizarre Tim Burton world with anachronisms everywhere, impossible city and factory designs, and people who could never really exist, with the fantastic fun house madness of Willy Wonka's candy factory to cap it all off. I could nit pick about how Event X could never really happen or how Person Y wouldn't be that way, but what's the point? It did happen and they are that way, and that's just how things are in the film. You either go with it and get into the story or you sit there sniffing at everything and don't enjoy yourself at all.
And in the world of the film, I liked a lot of stuff. All of the Oompa Loompa songs were catchy and cute, the special effects and impossible theme rooms of Wonka's factory were creative and fun to look at, the child actors were good in their stereotype roles, their parents were likewise, and even the flashback scenes to Willy Wonka's childhood were useful, if no more believable in the real world than anything else in the film.
While I tried to suspend my disbelief, I wasn't entirely successful. I can go with a pure fantasy film, or one totally based in reality, but when the two combine oddly, as they did in this movie, it's a bit off putting. The movie was set in the modern day in the real world, and all of the children (other than Charlie) were very real people, if very cliche and stereotyped as well. Charlie, on the other hand, lived in some faux-medieval one-room home, on a rubble-strewn plot at the edge of a completely modern village.
Willy Wonka's factory was a complete fairy tale with no laws of physics or space or time, and that's okay, but the rest of the world was very modern and real, with modern electronics, media, television, video games, etc. Yet despite the fact that everyone on earth was dying to get inside and see what it was like, when the five winners and their parents went in none of them took along any sort of camera or recording device? And no billionaires offered millions of dollars to buy one of the golden tickets, and no one used modern technology (metal detectors, scales, etc) to try and find the golden tickets before actually opening up the bars of chocolate?
Charlie's dad worked in a toothpaste factory screwing the caps onto the bottles, at a very slow pace, until they modernized and bought a robot to screw caps onto the bottles. But it still did them just one at a time, with much excessive movement and wasted motion. So they bought a very expensive robot to do exactly what the human had done before, when they could have gotten one that screwed the lids onto 50 bottles at the same time?
The behavior of the winning kids was odd too. The basic theme of the story seems to be bad parenting, in the form of parents who either exercise no control over their kids by spoiling them rotten, or by not setting them any limits. That's fine, but with Willy Wonka announcing in advance that one of the five kids was set to win a super special prize beyond anything they could dream, and at least three of the other kid/parent teams being super competitive and scheming to win it, it was strange that they didn't actually make any effort to do so. All of the kids instead ran wild and did whatever stupid thing their character drove them to do, and thereby got themselves eliminated almost immediately.
True, it fits in with the basic theme of parental neglect that serves as the cautionary moral of the story, but it was strange that the parents watched their kids get (nearly) killed, and worse yet, get eliminated from the super grand prize competition, almost without objection. I'm okay with the parents not showing actual honest love, but they should have at least displayed some sort of twisted "How could you let me down like that!?" disappointment.
My last complaint isn't about the film, and I tried not to let it influence my score. All the same, we've got to remember to never again attend a children's movie during the day on opening weekend. The
Charlie audience had more young kids than a Snickers has nuts, and they did what children usually do in movies -- talked all through it. Not intentionally trying to be annoying; they were 8, not 13, but they were noisy all the same. I suppose it's a nice parallel to the film, seeing spoiled kids got ironic punishment for their bad behavior while the film was being spoiled for us by the noisy children of over-indulgent parents, but I wasn't there for the irony. And the constant loud voices asking, "What did he say then, Mommy?" and "I bet he's the bad guy!" and "Oooh, he's going to get in trouble now!" and so on were troubling. It was like being trapped in a crowd of really bad play-by-play announcers, with several kids pronouncing on every obvious plot twist several few seconds after it occurred.
Overall, I suppose my middling score is based on the lack of any sort of narrative pull or sense of building action or conflict, and the fact that none of the good stuff was so great that it overcame the overall "watching events occur and waiting for them to end" feeling I had during the film. The movie doesn't suck and it's not boring, but it's never emotionally-involving (other than in the opening when Charlie's parents are trying so hard to make him happy in their miserable lives), nor is the conclusion ever in any real doubt, and this was despite the fact that I'd never read the book or seen the end of the 1971 film version.
I suspect I'll see it again on DVD someday, and when that happens I'll add a comment on my reaction to it then. I doubt I'll like it anymore then, but maybe watching it without constant childish interruptions would improve the viewing experience? Or maybe I'll just appreciate it more for what it is rather than disliking it for what it isn't, on a second viewing?
