To put it bluntly, I'd say Tim Burton is just a hack. I'll agree with you on Sweeney Todd, but only up to a certain point. I think it's a solid film, but it's one I don't think I'll ever find reason to revisit. It just feels so mechanical, like Burton directed half of it on Xanax. I don't recall much camera movement, which made it feel like Burton literally just set up a few cameras at a stage performance. I actually decided after seeing that film that I'd much rather see an interesting failure than a boring success, which is what I would call Sweeney Todd.
As for a line connecting Burton's films... They all seem to deal with a radical outcast, often very bizarre-looking. But I agree with you. He doesn't ever really seem to say anything about these characters of his. Despite the make-up, they feel flat. Barnabas, Wonka, what I remember of Sweeney, whoever you'd say the main character of Alice is... They're all just kind of boring, if not while watching them, then certainly when the movie ends.
To be perfectly honest, I really wouldn't even call many of Burton's early films masterpieces, or even very good for that matter. Pee-Wee, Ed Wood, and Edward Scissorhands are great; Beetlejuice, Mars Attacks!, and Sleepy Hollow are fun, but his Batman films are brutally dull. I remember loving them as a kid, but revisiting them as an adult is almost impossible. I tried to watch Batman a few years ago, and dozed off four or five times before I just gave up on it, and Returns is no better. Whatever credit he built up in the first half of his career has long been exhausted by Planet of the Apes and the last decade of boring redundancy.
The real shame is that he is at a point in his career where he could probably do anything he wants. He thinks he's so weird? He could make the trippiest, most disturbing, off the wall film imaginable, and he'd get a $100 million budget. But instead he takes $150 million and makes Dark Shadows! Why? Why did it need to cost that much? What did he even spend that money on? It looks good, but Jesus. It's obnoxious that his least imaginative film probably has the highest production budget... And it's a fucking comedy! I think you're right when you say that he's so focused on visual style that everything else suffers. I actually made the Johnny-Depp-as-Barnabas face when I saw the budget. It's mind-blowing. I would be willing to bet that each scene in Dark Shadows could have financed a half dozen funnier, more heartfelt comedies than Burton's film. What an asshole.
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