The first third of this movie, where you meet poor little Charlie Bucket and his family in their dilipidated home, where they are so poor that his grandparents sleep in one bed by the fire, head to toe, is so nearly perfect and straight from the novel by Roald Dahl that I actually got tense as Charlie would open each candy bar and still not find that golden ticket. The disgusting children around the world finding those tickets were spot-on as well, including the best update whatsover in the movie, where Mike Teavee, who in the book dresses as a cowboy and shoots his toy gun at the TV screen, is translated into an expert videogamer playing a Quake-like game while being interviewed.

Of course, perfection when it comes to translating a movie from book to screen is something rarely achieved, and I should be grateful for even that first third. Because as soon as Willy Wonka greets the children, the flaw in this movie becomes all-too-readily apparent: Tim Burton repeats the mistake he made in the first Batman film by putting a famous actor in the lead role who doesn't so much play the role as he plays himself playing the role. In Batman, it was Jack Nicholson who couldn't see the movie because of his own greasepaint; here, it's Johnny Depp, who looks the part, but plays it with more ticks than Big Ben. Sometimes, as in Nicholson's Joker, it's funny--but the problem is that it is distracting from the story, and the story should be king.

After his introduction, and we start the actual tour of the factory where the children show their true colors, we get back to the story, but every once and awhile Burton highlights Wonka again, with the addition of flashbacks to Wonka's own childhood that are not from the book and were totally unnecessary to the plot.

On the plus side, Burton uses Dahl's lyrics for the songs that the Oompa Loompas sing about the bad children. Unfortunately, the songs are so overproduced in both sound (a typically Danny Elfman-type error with movie music--it was fine when he was in a rock band, but in a movie, you only get once chance to hear the lyrics and having the music overwhelm them defeats the purpose of having lyrics) and visuals (the Oompa Loompas are one man, digitally reproduced, and in the dance numbers this becomes so apparant that instead of enjoying the visuals, you are distracted by noticing the filmmaking).

All in all, I liked the movie, for when Burton gets it right, such as when the squirrels decide the Veruca Salt is a very bad nut, it captures the book perfectly. I'm just saddened that Burton (or the studio?) felt that they had to insert differences from the book. Danny deVito's Matilda remains the best adaptation of Dahl from book to screen, and that's because he didn't waver from the book, in large part due to his children threatening him that doing so would make them very, very mad. I guess Burton didn't have that type of editor.