This Movie Kinda Sucks

Rating: 3/10 (5 November 2019)

I really like the original Dark Shadows TV series; it's got a nice eerie feeling and it was satisfyingly complicated. I didn't, however, catch the early '90s version or the 2005 TV movie, so when I heard that Tim Burton was going to be remaking it for the big screen, I was quite excited. The material seemed right up his street. There was no way, I thought, that this could be anything other than excellent. Oh, how wrong I was!
While a lot of the blame for how bad the movie turned out to be must be laid at the feet of Seth Grahame-Smith - and I'll go into why in a minute - there are some creative decisions that were surely other people's, or that people didn't question at the script level that just don't make sense.
In fact, this movie's main problem, I think, is that logic packed its bags and went on holiday during production.
You can make the world you create as a movie-making team with whatever logic you like, but, if your world doesn't operate according to the real world or by logic set out by similar worlds and characters in past works, you must explain that, or the audience must, and will, use their frames of reference. I might be looking into all of this too deeply, and the leaps in logic, inaccuracies and nonsensical stuff here might just be oversights, but there are too many of them for that to be the case.
But, then again, they must just be oversights and examples of shoddy writing, or else they would be explained. If I could have just turned my brain off, not thought and not listened to dialogue or not paid attention to the many, many illogical and nonsensical things in this movie, I might have enjoyed it more than I did. I doubt it, though; it's got Johnny Depp in it, who has definitely lost that certain something that made him a great actor.