A modern day classic!

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2005)

People need to understand that this movie is not the first one with Gene Wilder, I see all these reviews comparing it to the old movie, and that's just not fair, this is not a remake of that movie, it's another stab at making a movie out of the book, and people need to take that into consideration. I loved the grimness of the movie, because in reality, the original Wonka book was not as happy go lucky as people think and how the first movie was extremely sugarcoated, also, the situations like the puppets singing and then bursting into fire and melting is a pure spoof of Disney's " It's A Small World" and them melting is just a Burton kind of thing, and they even take it further and have a " puppet burn center" which I thought was very witty. You cannot compare Depp to Wilder, they both have two different portrayals, and although Depp did seem weird in a few spots, I thought many of his idiosyncrasies were extremely funny and he had the whole theater laughing, but it's true, the movie is grim and anybody under let's say 6, might not understand the irony and jokes and some part may scare them, like the puppets burning, so parents take notice, otherwise I recommend this to old and young alike, and I also like this movie far more than the original as it actually showed that all the children survived, disfigured, but survived, something that always bugged me about the first movie as it didn't reveal the children's fate, another not, most of the Oompa Loompa songs I believe are Dahl's original songs, or at least the lyrics are, anyways, a great acting, great cast, and surely this will become a pop culture icon movie like Burton's other film, A Nightmare Before Christmas.