More so to the point that when I heard about a preview screening, I didn't even want to go. But I'm glad I did. Over this film's production I have slowly but surely realized that this IS NOT a remake of the 1971 film. (Though I will still compare them), It is a new representation of the book that, that film was based on and it shows.

As predictable, Tim Burton's visual style is here in full force, the sets are bizarre and sometimes surreal, and they're just as beautiful as either of those.

The acting performances surprised me as well, Johnny Depp came off at the beginning as a Michael Jackson spin-off in a pimp coat, and that was all, but as this film progresses, you truly feel connected to Wonka, nothing you really achieve with Gene Wilder's version of the character.

Also, in the original 1971 version you don't really get the feeling that Charlie and Wonka are connected in any way. In the 1971 film Charlie and Wonka are indifferent up to the very end. In this film Wonka and Charlie slowly build a kind of non-direct friendship in which Wonka knows Charlie is the best of the bunch even before the crap hits the fan with the other kids. Depp and Highmore's performances make this believable.

In regards to the other kids, they were above average at best. There was a kind of 'Vilet and Veruca' friendship to rivalry thing going on that I don't recall being in the book, but I really didn't mind it too much. Augustus Gloop was very humorous though Mike Teevee was far more annoying then in the original.

Now, on to the Oompa Loompas.. I am very sad to say this is what I liked least about the film. Though they are played magnificently by Deep Roy, (yes they're all the same actor edited into multiple Loompas digitally), it is the musical numbers I didn't like. From everything from a Bollywood number to a Rock and Roll piece, the songs by the Oompa Lommpas are almost a downer in this film compared to being one of the best things about the 1971 version.

As far as being faithful to the book, it is enough to not make fans riot, but it does differ at times.

Overall, while it was still not necessary to make a new Willy Wonka, Tim Burton does a much better job then he did with that abomination that was Planet of the Apes.

It is a greatly enjoyable movie and I hope you don't let the haters bring you down, 9/10

Wonka, the legendary candy maker, may be a stone freak, but he is also one of Burton's classic crackpot conjurers, like Beetlejuice or Ed Wood. Depp gives a performance that's an acrid, mocking put-on, delivering meta-sarcasms as if they were vicious tidbits meant only for his private amusement. At first, I thought he was doing his version of a manic Jim Carrey clown, surfing the channels of his own brain, but Depp, in his stylized way, never breaks character, never goes for the easy self-referential multimedia gag. He maintains the paradox, the mystery, of Willy Wonka: a misanthrope who has little patience for children, who can't even utter the word ''parents'' without gagging, yet who invents for those same kids the purest and most luscious candies out of the sugar dream of his imagination.

It's become an uncomfortable experience in movies to watch Burton, the prankish mod-goth fantasist, working to twist himself into ''mainstream'' shapes. His last two films, Big Fish and Planet of the Apes, lurched in and out of formula, but Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which has been faithfully adapted from Roald Dahl's great 1964 children's novel, is a delectably sustained flight of fancy. It's filled with puckish, deranged Burton touches, like the all-singing, all-melting puppets that herald Wonka's arrival, but it's also a grand and transporting celebration of the primal pleasures of childhood — namely, family and candy. As Wonka gives five children, who have all found his Golden Tickets, a tour of his famous factory, with its edible garden and chocolate waterfall, its kooky sci-fi chambers for testing out revolutionary new delights, he makes no secret of the fact that with the possible exception of Charlie (Freddie Highmore), a modest English lad as gracious as he is poor, he despises them all. He has good reason: The other children are brats, pigs, rich little bullies of entitlement. Burton gives us acidly funny new versions of the spoiled-rotten monsters you may remember from the 1971 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory — big babies like the German porker Augustus Gloop (Philip Wiegratz), the spiteful princess Veruca Salt (Julia Winter), and the television (now videogame) sociopath Mike Teavee (Jordan Fry). If anything, they seem timelier now, in an era when so many kids do get everything they want. As Wonka vents his disdain, though, it's still a comic shock to see an adult interact with children as if they were something he'd prefer to be roasting on a spit.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory revives, in a sassier but more artful way, the pixilated whimsy of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. The earlier film was driven, of course, by the creepy cuddliness of Gene Wilder — the smile of cozy dimpled warmth giving way to hysteria, then snapping back. Burton and Depp push Wonka further, making him into a sinister enigma, and in flashbacks to his childhood we see how he got that way: His father (Christopher Lee), a dentist, treated candy like poison and forced the boy to wear a torture chamber of a head brace. If that all sounds a bit Freudian, what it does is turn the entire film into a fairy-tale meditation on our relationship to candy: why it's wrong to love it too little, or too much.

As the children are vanquished, one by one, from the chocolate factory, each done in by greedy overindulgence, Burton makes the factory a place of blooming danger and wonder. The army of live squirrels shelling walnuts, the sight of Violet blowing up into a blueberry — these are indelible Burton images. The director also has a blast reinventing Wonka's army of pint-size assistants, the Oompa-Loompas. All of them are played, with digital replication, by Deep Roy, who looks like the deadpan maître d' of an Indian restaurant, and they appear in songs of various styles and eras (Esther Williams, psychedelic rock), scored with catchy deviltry by Danny Elfman. Those Oompa-Loompas are the beat, and soul, of Burton's finest movie since Ed Wood: a madhouse kiddie musical with a sweet-and-sour heart.

Candy and fantasy film share this in common: Each is tricky to get right. Success requires a perfect balance of flavor, richness, depth and a yummy yumminess that's hard to pinpoint but you know it when you taste it. So when it comes to candy -- and to film fantasy -- "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is the real deal. This morality tale disguised as a whimsical, magical mystery tour of the world's greatest chocolate factory has all the gorgeousness of hard dark chocolate that melts ever-so-slowly in your mouth. What a treat coming from Tim Burton, who has recovered his imaginative touch after a few missteps, and from his frequent collaborator Johnny Depp, an actor who resolutely embodies Burton's fanciful vision.

Here's a film about kids and for kids that has not lost touch with what it is like to actually be a kid. Children and adults alike will jam lines to movie houses in North America and overseas to acquire golden tickets for this audience-pleaser.

"Charlie," of course, derives from Roald Dahl's quirky fantasy first published in 1964, which inspired the fondly remembered 1971 movie, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." Dahl's tale, very faithfully adapted by John August, tells of a good-hearted though poor lad named Charlie (fresh-faced Freddie Highmore), who dwells in Dickensian squalor in a lean-to cottage -- how on earth does it remain upright, you wonder -- a few blocks from Willie Wonka's chocolate factory. He shares crowded quarters with a loving mom (Helena Bonham Carter) and a happy though unemployed dad (Noah Taylor) along with both pairs of grandparents who occupy a communal bed.

One day the reclusive Willy Wonka, seen by nobody in years, announces a worldwide contest in which five children will win a guided tour of his factory. Golden tickets have been hidden in five Wonka chocolate bars. Naturally, Charlie is one of the lucky five. Each child is accompanied by an adult guardian. Charlie selects his excited Grandpa Joe (ageless David Kelly), who once worked for Willy.

Upon being escorted into the candy kingdom, the five children find themselves in a contest of sorts, though neither the rules nor the prize are ever stated. Unlike Charlie, the other children are all vile: Gluttonous Augustus Gloop (Philip Wiegratz) is a German Junge whose only thought is to continually stuff his face with sweets. The seriously spoiled Veruca Salt (Julia Winter) pouts and throws fits whenever her rich daddy (sturdy James Fox) fails to satisfy her whims.

Martial-artist Violet Beauregarde (Annasophia Robb) is fiercely competitive in all things, even gum chewing. Finally, techno brat Mike Teavee (Jordan Fry) lords his supposedly superior knowledge over everyone.

So you pretty much know who the likely winner is and can probably even guess the surprise prize. Which means the delight of the film lies in the guided tour itself performed by troubled Willy.

Outfitted in black with top hat and formal long-tail coat, a pasty-white face and faux gullibility, Depp somewhat resembles Michael Jackson on a good day. He is a man deliberately disconnected from any reality so he can focus solely on childish delights. Through flashbacks, which cannot be found in Dahl's book, you learn that Willy's life is a complete reaction to an overly strict father (Christopher Lee), a candy-hating dentist.

Willy and Charlie, however, are on the same wavelength: They naturally gravitate toward those things in life that are cheerful, optimistic and good. Both banish the dark side with a breezy nonchalance. Charlie, for instance, sees no squalor or poverty in his home, only the love of a close-knit family.

Willy leads the party through rooms of wonder beginning with the Chocolate Room, a grassy landscape divided by a chocolate river and waterfall, dotted with candy trees and fudge hills. In another room, 100 trained squirrels sit on tiny stools and carefully remove nuts from their shells. And can you imagine a goofier image than a suspended cow struck repeated with tiny whips to produce, yes, Whipped Cream?

Throughout the factory, workers named Oompa Loompas perform such tasks as mining fudge and rowing a spun-sugar seahorse-shaped galley on the chocolate river. All Oompa Loompas are played by the same diminutive actor, Deep Roy, who has been further miniaturized and multiplied through motion-capture technology.

During the tour, each vile child is undone by his or her character flaw. At the moment a child is eliminated from competition, the Oompa Loompas break into marvelous song and dance numbers that utilize Dahl's lyrics from the book. (Danny Elfman wrote the spirited music.) In these numbers, Burton cannot resist kidding a range of Hollywood classics ranging from Busby Berkeley musicals and Esther Williams pool ballets to Beatles movies, "2001" and even "Psycho."

Generally, movies have viewed mechanization with suspicion, going back at least to Chaplin's "Modern Times." Not here though. From the opening credits, Burton & Co. glory in automated assembly lines that spin out sugary concoctions in all colors and flavors, in laboratories filled with boiling pots and strange pipes and in an elevator that impossibly moves up, down, sideways and through the roof.

Dahl was nothing if not a first-class production designer and Burton's team follow his suggestions to the max. To evoke this dream factory, Burton benefits from a third collaboration with the resourceful and dexterous cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, who turns Alex McDowell's edible-looking sets into a confectioner's wonderland. Nick Davis' visual effects, Gabriella Pescucci's not-quite-old, not-quite-new costumes and Chris Lebenzon's smooth editing makes the chocolate factory one of the best fantasy worlds this side of Oz.

Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka is sure to give audiences the willies. Though he's the master of all things sweet, his demeanor is anything but.

Viewers may find Depp's Willy Wonka loopy, bewildering and off-putting, but never boring.
Warner Bros.

Still, Depp deserves kudos for fashioning an original and outlandish if occasionally menacing character in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

It couldn't have been easy to take on a role so memorably etched by Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory three decades ago. Wilder's Wonka may have been eccentric and enigmatic, but those qualities are intensified when Depp dons the mantle of the bizarre chocolatier. Depp's androgynously idiosyncratic performance surely qualifies as the most disquieting in a career filled with quirky roles.

This adaptation of Roald Dahl's 1964 children's classic is a faithful one, filtered through the vivid imagination of director Tim Burton. But as wondrously whimsical as the movie is — it is a marvel of rich, colorful design and flair — Depp's discomfitingly creepy Wonka tends to overshadow the rest of the film's attributes. One can't help but wonder about the subtext of the film when Depp's peculiar, alabaster-skinned persona has flashes of Michael Jackson. But love it or hate it, Depp's sadistic and snippy Wonka is audacious.

The story concerns five children selected to visit a mysterious candy factory. No one had been seen entering or exiting the place for years, but after a much-publicized contest, Wonka leads the winners, each accompanied by a relative, on a guided tour of the factory's fabulous inner workings.

Four of the kids are obnoxious, disobedient and greedy brats. But the fifth, Charlie Bucket (Finding Neverland's Freddie Highmore), is loyal, brave and kind. He's also rather bland, but that's heightened by the contrast with Wonka's flamboyant weirdness. Dahl was making a statement about overindulgence with characters such as the gluttonous Augustus Gloop (Philip Wiegratz), spoiled Veruca Salt (Julia Winter), gum-chomping Violet Beauregarde (Annasophia Robb) and TV-obsessed know-it-all Mike Teavee (Jordon Fry).

An especially entertaining segment is the back story of how the tiny Oompa Loompas came to the chocolate factory, and the diminutive Deep Roy is a standout. Wonka has flashbacks about his childhood and his imposing father (Christopher Lee). Not part of Dahl's story, this was invented by screenwriter John August (Big Fish).

Viewers may find Wonka loopy, bewildering and off-putting, but never boring. With its dazzling sets and fabulous special effects, Charlie is a visual feast, from the dragon-headed boat made of pink spun sugar bolting across a chocolate river to the elaborately kaleidoscopic song-and-dance numbers. Charlie's dilapidated but delightfully cozy home is an architectural marvel.

Dahl's familiar tale feels extraordinary and dreamlike thanks to Burton's creative interpretation. It emerges as the summer's most visually arresting escapist adventure.