What's The Point?

Rating: 4/10 (22 September 2009)

I too was intrigued by the idea of a Tim Burton movie with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonam Carter, and Christopher Lee. In fact, the movie is technically excellent. But, the music is so-so, and at the end I could only wonder why they bothered.
Everything about the movie says that it is better to be dead than alive. The Land of The Dead is colorful, the dead are cheerful and sincere while the living are greedy, deceitful, and colorless (lifeless?). What on earth does this mean? Does Burton want to say that only good people die? Or that bad people become good when they die? Although that last does not seem to be the case when Barkiss joins them, at the end. Perhaps there is another level of dead, because it seems the dead were going to do something terrible to the shade of Barkiss.
Even a fantasy has to make some kind of sense. Not this one. Sadly. "Corpse Bride" is not an awful movie, but the music is not good enough and the jokes are not funny enough, so you could do better things with your time than watch this movie.