While I do think this remake has some benefits over the original with expanded backstories and the characters being more realistic everything else is a letdown. It's dark and not pretty, all the charm is completely gone and now it's quite a dark film instead.

A brilliant and imaginative reinvention of a classic tale- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (like the title) stays a lot more true to Roald Dahl's original source material and makes for a wonderfully wild and entertaining time. Growing up as a youngin- I felt deeply connected to Roald Dahl's imaginative and vibrant stories; having written such books a James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Witches, Matilda and so many more- but no book ever meant more to me than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When I saw the original film, wide-eyed and excited after reading the book a handful of times already, I felt an immense amount of disappointment and boredom. The original film's acting is dreadful, lacking of a consistent tone, broad and incredibly thin pacing, and all together just a very structurally unsound film. Thus I turned my child eyes to the work of Tim Burton with this film and immediately fell in love. It's such a beautiful adaptation from the source material, giving us the same songs used in the book, and staying incredibly accurate to the storytelling- with a few additions of course for the films runtime. All the films additions though, I really did enjoy, and provided a lot more heart to not only the film but also the character of Willy Wonka in general. The performances are all rather good, not a huge fan of the child actor playing Mike Teavee, but everyone else was perfectly cast and fun to watch- especially Johnny Depp's oddball character performance as the iconic character. The look and tone of the film exudes more of a dark energy, but I feel adds a lot to the wonder and whimsicalness of the story at hand. In the end, it may be an unpopular opinion, but I loved this film and would prefer it any day to the original adaptation.

My Rating: 9.7/10.

I was pleased to have this "Willy Wonka" re-make meet my expectations. Those expectations were high, at least in the visuals department. I expected a wild, colorful ride with brilliant hues and good special effects...and I was not disappointed.

It was inventively fun with those great visuals and another wonderful kid playing "Charlie." I doubted they could ever come up with another child as appealing and nice/wholesome as one in "Willy Wonka" but they found one in Freddie Highmore. He filled the bill magnificently, as did the "brat" kids.

A different feature of this version, as opposed to the 1970 original, was that here the Oompa-Loompas were all played by just one person, a very small Indian man named Deep Roy. One of the interesting "features" on the DVD details how difficult that was to do and how much time Roy had to put in to do all the things he did.

Johnny Depp, meanwhile, "did" what he always does - do a good job of playing a weird person. I get the feeling he relates easily to strange characters. He seems to play enough of them. This was the only part of the movie, frankly, where I preferred the 1970 version: the role of Willy Wonka. Yes, Depp was interesting as always but a little too weird, too Michael Jackson-like, for my tastes. I'll take Gene Wilder's take on the character.

Otherwise, this re-make has it all over the original, simply because it has 35 years of technology and computer work that the original wasn't able to have. It made this re-make a real "hoot" to watch. Since entertainment is what the business is called, and this movie is extremely entertaining, then I have no complaints. A fun two hours!