Great Improvement

Rating: 7/10 (1 November 2008)

I'm a bit of a book purist (Fight Club, for instance, is how a book should be made into a movie). I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when I was very young, and fell in love with the zany darkness and hilarity of it. So when we were shown Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory in class one day, the only saving graces were the few somewhat accurate visual adaptations. As a little kid I was even more demanding, so the scene where they sign the wall, the floating Charlie, the "oompaloompas" (where were the leaves and skins?) and especially the ending just disappointed me. I wanted to grow up and make my own version, taken verbatim from the book but mainly with accurate "oompaloompas", basically anything more true to the book. Even now, it sickens me to think that they had a script written by the amazing Roald Dahl himself, and they changed it. How can you in good conscience make a film that the living author vehemently refuses to see because you changed his script? But that's not really what this is about. I'm just saying all of that to set the scene.
When I heard that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was coming out, I outright refused to see it. I didn't care that it was Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, no one alive (Roald Dahl died quite a while ago) has the capacity to represent the book accurately, in my mind. And they still didn't. But even the things I was preparing to be upset about, like the "oompaloompas" (which, aside from their dress and lack of women and children were made short enough and interactive enough for me not to kill myself) and the back-story about his father (which I found tolerable because it was not done in that 'we're just searching for a moral here' way that I saw in the first movie). The kids were a little too modern for my liking (although in the future I'm sure they'll be too old fashioned), and I wish they'd included both parents for the comedy there. Johnny's Wonka though, was amazing.
I've had people complain that "it's too dark" or "but Gene Wilder's is a classic!". In the immortal words of Mark Twain, "A classic is something everyone wants to have read and no one wants to read". Simply not a good reason. And Roal Dahl is probably the darkest children's author. I think that Tim Burton's strange mix of comedy and darkness is very well suited to any Roald Dahl book.
Overall, I wish Johnny Depp and Tim Burton had waited until I had the chance to collaborate with them, but if I had to settle for an adaptation of Charlie without my input, this would be it. But I call dibs on remaking The Witches :P