Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Tim Burton remaking Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with Johnny Depp playnig Willy Wonka - it was always going to be good. But let's not forget the particular brand of weirdness Gene Wilder brought to the same role in Mel Stuart's 1971 adaption. Too many people who saw that film as young children have forgotten just how fantastically odd it was at moments ("We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams" and so on). The first half of the film, before we see Wonka or the factory, was plainly rubbish, though.
Burton makes significant improvements on Stuart's film where he is able to (mostly, in the first part), but there are areas in which little that's new can be done.
The opening sequence is a stunning example of Burton's visual imagination. The exploration of Charlie's Dickensian poverty is very well done - although somewhat troubling, as it never quite gets resolved, but more on that later - and Charlie's parents are played very competently by Noah Taylor and Helena Bonham Carter (who STILL looks a good decade younger than her years). The search for the golden ticket is not mesmerising, but wisely, it's all over and done with reasonably quickly.
The factory itself looks largely as it ought to, but in many respects, it has simply been lifted from the 1971 film. The entirely-edible room with the chocolate river looks almost exactly the same. On the other hand, there are remarkably strange and imaginative moments - a room full of squirrels silently shelling walnuts; a cow being lashed with whips by oompa loompas (to make whipped cream, of course).
The most striking change is Wonka, who bears a very close and odd resemblance to Michael Jackson. We get a lengthy exploration of Wonka's relationship with his father - a stern dentist, who never allowed him to eat sweets. The family plays a dominant role in the whole film - with Charlie refusing to leave his own family to live in the factory. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but Steven Spielberg has made exploration of the family (and especially the family in crisis) a very difficult subject to explore in film without descending in to sentimentality.
The character of Charlie is stripped of all its complexity by the decision not to have he and his grandfather disobeying instructions in the factory and going to the top of the room with the bubbles (in the 1971 film, they have to burp their way down - brilliant). Instead, Charile loves his family, never misbehaves - in short, is perfect. Fine, but not very interesting.
It's been far too long since I read the book to remember how it deals with such issues, but I found the film's treatment of poverty and capitalism extremely unsatisfying. Charlie's father (seen reading books whenever he is at home) is made redundant when his factory buys a machine that can do his work, but eventually re-employed to maintain that very machine. What are we to make of Wonka, a reclusive millionaire, who has captured an army of coca-slaves to make his chocolate for him? It all seems rather unsatisfactory - especially given the attention given to Charlie's crushing poverty at the start of the film. But perhaps I'm expecting rather too much from a childrens' film. Or perhaps I've simply missed the real point which is that in the real world, there are no neat and simple answers to these kinds of questions.
The film is extremely enjoyable - of perhaps a little too long for very young kids - but for me, Charlie ought to be flawed (and thus a lot easier to engage with), Wonka ought to be weird in a Gene Wilder sort of way, not a Michael Jackson sort of way, which in the end is just disturbing, and it would be better if we did not get too caught up in all this stuff about families, as it does not really go anywhere in the end (Wonka re-finds his father at the end, gives him an awkward hug, and that's all we see of it). Neither film is perfect, but it seems that both are able to make up for the weaknesses of the other. I wonder if some clever editing could merge them in to one perfect film.