“Everything in this room is edible!” giggles Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) from the chocolate heart of his enchanted candy factory. Five children, his guests, drool at the luscious landscape spread out before them: peppermint mushrooms, licorice lawns, sugar-wafer blossoms, milk chocolate rivers. “Even I am edible!” chirps the Wonkster with a wave of his purple rubber glove, “but that’s called cannibalism, and it’s frowned upon in most societies.”

And this is what you call a Tim Burton movie.

“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” – not to be confused with, uh, “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”- has everything we’ve come to expect from Hollywood’s reigning adolescent fantasist: neat visual storytelling, spectacle to the max, ersatz humanoids, an alienated man-child weirdo. It’s the movie Mr. Burton was born to (re)make.

Why remake “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” at all?” Are you kidding me? The real question is what took so long. To begin with, Roald Dahl’s children’s classic packs a global following of nearly Hobbit-ular proportions, and as everyone in Hollywood knows, reading must be pre-empted at all costs. A text? Who’s to stop the little whippersnappers from e-mailing the stuff?

As for the immensely popular 1971 movie – it was made in 1971! Ancient history, people; positively B.C. (Before CGI). And who is Gene Wilder again? Say that name to your 10-year-old, and watch his face go blank. Now Johnny Depp, there’s something the little ones can latch their celebrity-savvy little iMinds onto.

But what it really comes down to is this: “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is a children’s movie about a chocolate factory. Listen closely: ka-ching! That’s the sound of the box-office “slump” running up against every candy allowance in the world. I’m amazed we don’t see a chocolate-centric blockbuster every other week.

Everyone knows the setup of the story; what surprised me is how well Mr. Burton tells it. It’s a hard-knock life for Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore), the last decent boy. Together with Mom (Helena Bonham Carter), Dad (Noah Taylor), and Grandpa Joe (David Kelly), he subsists on cabbage soup and lives in a broke-down shack so diagonally deranged it makes Dr. Caligari’s pad look like a penthouse in Perry West.

One morning Charlie wakes up to a life defined by the Contest. Willy Wonka, the eccentric confectioner of metaphysical morsels, has hidden five golden tickets in his chocolate bars. Whoever finds them will be treated to a tour of his fabulous factory. The winners are front-page news.

Gluttonous Augustus Gloop (Philip Wiegratz) gobbled his way to a ticket. Spoiled Veruca Salt (Julia Winter) made daddy buy millions of bars, and set his nut-sorting factory to unwrap them around the clock. Trophy-grubbing super-brat Violet Beauregarde (Annasophia Robb) clobbered all competition to get her ticket. And violent videogame nerd Mike Teavee (Jordan Fry) ran some bar codes and probability equations through his computer to locate his prize.

As for Charlie, all hopes rest on his annual birthday chocolate bar. No such luck. But after he finds some money in the gutter, and buys another, the golden ticket is his. Townsfolk offer buckets of cash; the Bucket family could sure use it. Charlie’s crisis of conscience – is this boy for real? – is brushed aside by Grandpa, who assures him there’s more to life than money. Grandpa, it should be noted, is angling to be his plus-one.

Going into “Charlie” with the lowest of expectations, I was delighted – slightly stunned, even – by this first act. Frame by frame, Mr. Burton one-ups the original in every way, turning in some of his finest filmmaking to date and a good half-hour of mainstream entertainment as swift and skillful as anything in “War of the Worlds.” He’s thought through the material – design, characters, feelings, jokes – made it his own, taken nothing for granted.

Sweet! For a while there, I thought we might have a tasty new classic on our hands.

But then we meet Anna Wintour – I mean Michael Jackson – I mean Howard Hughes – I mean Edward Scissorhands – I mean Willy Wonka. Decked out an Edwardian goth ensemble, his flesh sealed up in blue-green makeup, Mr. Depp gives us Wonka as a pinched, phobic, psychologically tormented sourpuss who has to hold down vomit every time he tries to formulate the word “parent.” The characterization took nerve – but it grated on mine. The minute he steps on the scene, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” warps around his grotesque gravity, and Charlie is set adrift in the vacuum of Mr. Burton’s indifference.

Flashbacks tell us that Wonka got wonky because his uptight dentist daddy (Christopher Lee) strapped him into complicated headgear and denied him Halloween candy. “Willy Wonka and the Pop Psychological Backstory?” No thanks. I applaud, in general, any oddity that cuts across the grain of conventionality, but this doesn’t feel like the right place for it. The movie’s priorities are all wrong.

The first duty in adapting “Charlie” is to delight the imagination; the second is to use this delight as a medium to impress Dahl’s moral lessons onto a receptive audience. Mr. Burton does neither.

Mr. Burton is a cartoon surrealist (“Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” “Mars Attacks!”) whose true forte is synthetic gothic decadence (“The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Sleepy Hollow”). “Chocolate Factory” is a failure of the first mode, to which it properly belongs, and is tainted by the latter, which adds nothing to the texture except a misplaced auteurist impulse. His Wonka is more likely to pleasurably perplex Siouxsie and the Banshees fans than charm devotees of “James and the Giant Peach.”

Once inside the Wonka factory, we enter a universe where anything goes – but nothing goes anywhere particularly interesting. I liked the walnut-shelling department, where squirrels in the round feverishly pry out the goods, discarding the moldy bits into a blueberry-striped funnel in the middle of the floor. (This is where Veruca meets her doom.) The teleportation chamber where Mike gets zapped serves as pretext for a clever, white-on-white homage to “2001.” But then there’s the tiresome Oompa-Loompa (Deep Roy, digitally multiplied) numbers, with their unintelligible lyrics and dated pop styles. The famous glass elevator zips about, generating less excitement than similar, superior stuff in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

As a talented pop expressionist, Mr. Burton has a good eye for symmetry, and the effects one can create from skewering it. This visual acuity stays keen throughout; what’s missing in the CGI-crazed, brain-glazing body of the film is a sense of scale and proportion. Unmoored from any controlling spatial logic, the factory feels like it could go on forever, and is thus ephemeral, arbitrary. Entirely lost in this not-very-fun-house are Dahl’s cautions against the deadly sins. The only things children are likely to take home is the peculiar aftertaste of Wonka’s persona.

Worse yet, where’s the joy of snacks? The movie ought to get you salivating for the production design – or at least trigger stomach grumbles for a Kit Kat. But, no, I saw it on an untroubled empty stomach one early afternoon at a Times Square multiplex. Exiting into the everlasting gobstopper that is 42nd Street, I felt as if I’d walked right back into the movie.