I believe that Tim Burton represents everything that’s wrong with 21st century cinema.
Since the release of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins in 2005, Tim Burton seems to have assumed that reinvention is remarkably simple. He takes a widely enjoyed film or play that has some kind of colourful or fantastic element, and then remakes it, billing his version as a “dark re-imagining”. However, unlike Nolan, Tim Burton isn’t interested in storytelling, breaking ground, developing technology or changing the way we think about cinema; his only goal is to squeeze as much money as possible out of pre-pubescent emo girls.
You see, what Burton actually means by “dark re-imagining” is manipulating the source material into a badly lit film in which Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter wear garish costumes and pasty make-up, and prance about acting Dickensian for 90 minutes in a world of saturated three-dimensional CGI. This method will of course always be successful because teenage emos hate staying in with their parents as much as they hate sunlight, and thus are guaranteed to spend money at the cinema.
The result is lazy, underwhelming and memory-destroying blockbusters such as Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd assaulting our screens for years to come. Perhaps most sickening of all, the 3-D fad meant that Alice In Wonderland actually made more money at the box office than Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi combined, despite disappointing everyone who managed to stomach it.
Please Tim, stick to stop-motion, and leave my childhood alone.
