Good, but Visually Overwhelming.

Rating: 6/10 (27 August 2005)

We all know the story, the sweet little unfortunate boy Charlie (Freddie Highmore) wins a competition along with four other children to visit the mysterious chocolate factory owned by the eccentric and weirdly wonderful candy maker, Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp). What follows is a roller-coaster ride of excitement as the children are taken on a tour of the factory.
From the introduction to the credits the audience is continuously bombarded with nauseating visuals in the form of sets, costumes, designs, special effects and lighting. Each piece in itself is yes, wonderful, creative and fantastical, but we are missing the awe and amazement that the characters feel, which a really good fantasy movie portrays. Burton's overuse of the overpowering visuals after a while cancels out the awe we are meant to feel as we enter each new world in the factory. You feel relatively no connection with either Charlie or Wonka as you are plunged into this story which never gives a breath to develop the characters, and tells the story at a pace so fast that by the end you wonder if you really were sitting there for 2 hours when it felt like 30 minutes.
I really feel that Burton compromises the storytelling side of the film for the visual side of the film, as with his previous films namely Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow. While the sets and designs are amazing, both the stories and the characters lack depth.
Johnny Depp certainly delivers a weird and wonderful Wonka, and Freddie Highmore is perfectly cast as the quiet and thoughtful Charlie, although he never gets a moment long enough to shine in with the pace of the movie. The child actors all do their bit as the annoying and spoilt little brats, and the parents are suitably moronic. The cast does a very good job with the boundaries that they have in this movie.
The Oompa Loompas however, are another story. Yes, thankfully we no longer see the little people dressed in drag with orange face paint, as in the original movie, but at least those Oompa Loompas had a sense of realness to them, very much unlike the ridiculous clones in the new film. Since each Oompa Loompa is portrayed by the same actor, and is duplicated by a computer, there is no realness to them at all, because you can't see through the visual effects. The beauty of good special effects in movies is when you don't know that they are there, or at least you are temporarily fooled into thinking that what you see is the real thing. When you see these computer copies skipping along with flawless synchronism, you are not being fooled; you know straight away that they are out of a computer, which detaches the viewer emotionally from the story.
Aside from the negatives, this does prove to be an enjoyable popcorn movie for children, and if you take you kids to see this at the cinema, they will probably thoroughly enjoy it. There are plenty of laughs and nearly sickening amounts of colours and of course, chocolate. But for the older viewer, who would like to see a really good movie, and be able to commend the filmmakers for realising Road Dahl's amazing storytelling abilities onto modern film, I'm afraid this will disappoint.