To start out with, I should say that I am not the biggest Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fan, so that may play a role in this review, but I am a big Timothee Chalamet fan, so I feel like that helps to even it out. When you think of Willy Wonka, you think about a massive factory that is filled with wonder. Massive machines making candy that one could never dream of, but there it is being produced in a massive and magical way. This movie does not even get to that point, Wonka barely even gets a magical workshop, and when he does, it goes away quickly, so this is not the typical Wonka story.
Instead, this is an origin story of how the factory came to be. It starts with Wonka arriving to the mainland after a long voyage on the open sea, where he had been learning how to create chocolate, but he was also collecting unique ingredients to add to his creations, so that the candy not only tasted good, but it also created an emotion among or taster, or in some instances made them fly. Sadly, he ran out of money, and he did not read the fine print of a contract. This led to him being trapped in a motel because the owners price gouged him. So now Wonka was trapped in the basement of the motel, and he was left to do the laundry for the building with others that had also been bamboozled, but Wonka has a scheme to get them out of their indentured servitude.
They never explicitly say where exactly the story is taking place, or when the story is taking is taking place, but it is definitely some place in Europe, and it is some point after the industrial revolution. What would a movie review be without some economics? So this is a capitalistic country, but clearly it is not as free as the government leads its people to believe, which is probably true of all capitalistic countries, because the businesses that are the most successful, are the ones that really have all the power. They can take some of the money that they are making from their business, and they can dedicate it toward lobbying for rules that favor their business.
This is clearly evident in Wonka, there are three main chocolate companies, and they are all located in the same place. This makes it easy for them to have their monopoly and stay in control. If anyone wants to start a chocolate business, they must go through the triumvirate, and not only do they have the above ground monopoly, but they also have an underground secret society that helps them keep the power. This underground society has the aid of the police and the church, which had a ton of power back in the day. So not as free market as they would want you to believe.
Also this movie presents itself in a light hearted manner, but there is so much going on that it darker than it presents. Starting with Wonka being basically legally enslaved to the motel. They have a whole system, where they trick poor patrons into their motel, and the next day, when the patrons are not able pay, they are then locked into their rooms, and then each day, they have to go into the basement and wash the linens all day long, and although they are technically earning towards their freedom, the odds of it actually getting granted were slim to none. Also known as indentured servitude.
There was also a girl that was in this movie, and her origin story was that she was thrown down the laundry chute as a baby, and she had been locked into the motel since then, and they have been making her work and do the laundry everyday as well, and she was truly given no chance to buy her freedom. Also Wonka gets depicted as a white imperialist, who was traveling the world and stealing resources from other countries. He literally stole the last coco beans from the Oompa Loompa Island, and who knows how many resources that he stole from others.
The thing about this movie that bothered me the most was the CGI, so much of it looked horrible. With recent movies like Godzilla Minus One, that makes a massive fictional monster look so real, it does not make sense that Wonka could not even make a giraffe look real. There was also the scene when he finally opened his own shop, and that whole sequence also just seemed so fake. There was no sense of wonder being inspired within me. It was just some subpar visuals being thrown out there to try and tell a story. A story that was very segmented. There was the business plot, there was the girl plot, there was the Wonka plot, and there was the Ooompa Loompa plot. There is a large amount going on in less than two hours, and none of the story lines truly drew me into their world. I heard some people had emotional reactions to the story, but it did not hit home for me.
My favorite way to view this movie is through the lens of food. Everyone has one formative food that can change everything for them. For Wonka, it is candy, and the others in the world around him also seem to be inspired by candy, especially Keegan Michael Key’s character, who teaches the lesson of greed and excess by consuming thousands of pieces of chocolate. Food can change a person’s mood, and it can be very powerful. If this movie were about me, it would be all about pizza, and it would occur in Italy. Honestly, I would rather see that movie, not necessarily about me, but about a Willy Wonka of pizza.
Overall, the movie was fine. It was nothing special, but it was not bad. It had enough going for it to make it watchable, and it had a few laughs. Most of their emotional story telling fell flat for me, but it worked for others, but one thing is for sure, when my nine-year-old brother can point out how bad the CGI is, that is not a good sign, but he also said this movie was the best he has ever seen. So the only way to really know how good the movie is, is to go and see it for yourself. I give it 3 Stars.
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