I must be about the last person on the planet to go and see this movie; I went last night with my six-year-old son. I have not yet read the book (although there’s a copy on the shelf we have owned for years - I plan to read it now that I’ve seen both movies - I deliberately didn’t read it in between).
First off, our enjoyment of the movie was marred by the excessive audio volume in the cinema; there were only about a dozen customers in the whole place and without all those humans to soak up the sound waves, it was just too loud - to the point of physical discomfort; more than anything, this caused my son to get more upset than he might otherwise during some of the slightly more scary scenes. We departed before the end of the film (we left just as the glass elevator touched down, I think).
I was actually rather surprised at how similar was the movie to the Gene Wilder version - aside from the obvious differences in the portrayal of Wonka’s character and the Slugworth subplot - I find it hard to believe that certain scenes weren’t influenced by the original movie - I’m thinking about (among others) the scenes in the Buckett’s house - the layout is very similar, right down to the placement of the actors, and the scene where Violet turns blue and inflates - unless the book is unusually descriptive in these parts, I’ll suspect there has been some osmosis of storyboarding.
I thought the CGI was inexcusably poor; the machinery in the opening titles was particularly unrealistic (in terms of texture and ‘presence’) - some of the ‘aerial shots’ of the factory and the crowds (and the aerial shots of the motorbikes going out in formation) were lifeless and ‘floaty’, like a capture of a video game or something. The insertion of the bendy Violet near the end was just excruciating to watch - she just looked cut-and-pasted into the scene. The Oompa Loompa CGI was tolerably well-executed, although there did seem to be some variances in the portrayal of scale of these characters.
I liked the Oompa Loompa songs/scenes (I’d have liked them more had my eardrums not been rattling from the excessive volume, but that’s hardly the fault of the filmmakers) and I liked some of the jokes and dialogue particularly things like the anticipation of questions the audience might be asking (“it all seemed rather rehearsed”) and I thought the casting was pretty good, with the exception of Depp, upon which I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve read the book. The glaring lack of realism in the chocolate river was one thing that always bothered me in the old movie, so I was more or less happy with that in this one.
But overall, my impression is “why bother”? I don’t really feel this movie brought anything strikingly new to the concept (not that strikingly new would even have been wonderful if it wasn’t true to the book) and it made poor use of the technologies that are now available.