With Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton is back on the big screen after Wednesday’s Netflix detour. But not with the impact I had hoped for.
Tim Burton is one of the most influential directors of our time. For over four decades, his dark and dreamy (horror) tales have inspired the film world. With Batman, he even made one of the trailblazers of modern blockbuster cinema in 1989, while his macabre and lovingly told stories about outsiders like Edward Scissorhands have become indispensable to the film world.
Recently, the profile of the once-prominent filmmaker has faded. Although Burton started the 2010s with the biggest financial success of his career, the billion-dollar hit Alice in Wonderland, he faced his greatest blockbuster frustration at the end of the decade. Burton later described the shooting of Dumbo as a “big horrible circus” and took refuge in the arms of Netflix.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: Tim Burton celebrates his cinematic comeback with the Wednesday hype from Netflix behind him
The Netflix encounter is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, the fantasy series Wednesday, which Burton directed and produced, became the streamer’s most-watched English-language original and laid the foundation for the collaboration with Jenna Ortega. On the other hand, the impression that Burton is only moving in the shadow of himself was confirmed.
Watch the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice trailer here:
Without Wednesday, Burton’s new movie, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, probably wouldn’t have been possible. Not least because the studio Warner Bros. was ready to finally bury the project, which had been languishing in production hell for years, in April 2019, before the Wednesday hype brought a breath of fresh air into the matter. But does the long-awaited sequel really mark Burton’s return to his old strength?
At first glance, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a triumph. After its Venice premiere, the film got off to a strong start at the box office and has now grossed almost three times its budget. Critics and audiences are impressed: a legacy sequel that combines the charm of the original with new faces – above all Wednesday star Jenna Ortega – and frees Burton from autopilot mode.
Tim Burton is back… or is he? Beetlejuice Beetlejuice leaves me a bit conflicted.
I also had a lot of fun with Beetlejuice and was particularly impressed by the huge mess in the afterlife, where Burton can play to his strengths. Endlessly fascinating imagery is created here. Trapdoors in front of passport control that lead directly to hell, emergency exits that hurl you into desert worlds with sandworms, and of course the good-humored Soul Train on its way to eternal nirvana.
As soon as the film moves into daylight, however, it moves alarmingly close to the interchangeable aesthetics of Wednesday, which reduces Burton’s stylistic will to its superficial charms and hardly creates a moment that really draws me into the world. But that’s exactly what I want. I want to lose myself in spiral labyrinths that are so densely staged that there is no way out of the (nightmare) dream.
With Beetlejuice, I found myself staring into the void of Netflix images far too often, wondering if this is the price of Burton’s big-screen comeback. It’s great that he’s back, but why doesn’t it feel more full? 17 years have passed since Burton’s last masterpiece, Sweeney Todd, and I’m starting to fear that it will be his last forever.
I so badly want a new Tim Burton movie that completely captivates me again
Burton doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore. I don’t expect every one of his films to be a masterpiece. What is a masterpiece anyway? No director makes one masterpiece after another. And even if we stick with the term, Burton has made enough of them to secure his place in Hollywood’s pantheon forever. Still, I don’t leave the cinema feeling as fulfilled as I used to.
That’s what makes me so melancholy. That one of my favorite directors is no longer at the height of his art at the very time when I am experiencing the most of him in the cinema. Has Burton really said it all? Does he lack the resources? Is he not as good at telling stories with digital images as he used to be with analog ones? Or am I clinging to the nostalgic version of a Burton film that never existed?
Cinema is changing, the people who make movies are changing, and I’m changing too. It’s actually a miracle that there are so many overlaps in between that carry me from the canyons of Gotham to the depths of a chocolate factory. I haven’t disliked a single Burton film in recent years. I would even defend Dumbo at any time, although Burton himself would probably never do that.
