Brilliant and touching

Rating: Null/10 (29 October 2003)

This film still would place in my top 100 of all time. Burton's musical and visual aesthetic alone has been highly influential, and this is the film that made it salient. The direction, story, score, and aesthetic is typical gaudy, nostalgic, satirical, yet brilliant Burton - but it is also a very touching film that resists oversentimentalization.
Not unlike Shelley's Frankenstein - this is the story of an inwardly benevolent outcast who doesn't fit because of the way he looks. His hands are razor sharp - in a painfully delicious twist his creator dies just short of upgrading him to the real thing. Edward therefore has the potential to mangle anything he touches and bears the scars to prove it... Though there have been other wonderful treatments of good/outcast theme (Frankenstein, E.T., The Elephant Man), Burton's postmodern look at insipid modern American suburbia / teenhood rings truest for me. Somehow Burton has managed to tap an emotional nerve that is still raw in a staggeringly large group of us.