‘Wonka’ Avoids This Common Origin Story Mistake

The Big Picture

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• Wonka exceeds expectations as a prequel by avoiding the typical origin story tropes and focusing on an enjoyable stand-alone adventure.
• The film starts off with a clear goal for Wonka and doesn’t waste time on excessive backstory or unnecessary explanations.
• Wonka embraces the zany and unpredictable nature of the character, allowing viewers to go along for the fun ride without needing excessive explanations.

Wonka is one of the most conceptually flawed movies of 2023. Regardless of the quality of the final film, the notion of doing a movie focusing on young Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) and exploring his “origin story” sounds like the ultimate sign that late-stage capitalism has consumed the broader culture. A beloved children’s book character who thrived on eccentricities and mysteries…now getting every famous facet of his personality explained in intricate detail. Shockingly, though, director Paul King and company managed to pull a rabbit out of a hat with Wonka. Rather than being a reminder of superior pop culture properties of the past, Wonka functions nicely as an enjoyable musical family movie (save for some bad fatphobic jokes and predictable third-act “twists”).

A good chunk of that shocking level of quality comes from one simple detail: Wonka isn’t necessarily an origin story, or at least, not the exact kind of cookie-cutter origin yarn Hollywood keeps shoving down the throats of moviegoers. Compared to other recent projects like Solo: A Star Wars Story, Wonka seems tame in the way it “explains” things for the viewer or provides backstory for aspects of Wonka’s life. Going into Wonka, one recoils at the thought of having a tidy origin story explaining anything and everything about the film’s title character. Leaving Wonka, one is bound to be impressed by the film avoided key origin movie traps and left plenty about this character to one’s (pure) imagination.

‘Wonka’ Solidifies Itself as a Superior Prequel Right Off the Bat

Anyone who has read Roald Dahl’s original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book knows that candy extraordinaire Willy Wonka got many of his most scrumptious treats from traveling across the world. These offhand comments about the origins of various oddball confections suggest what a rich life Wonka has lived and allow the reader to have so much fun imagining what this man’s previous exploits looked like. Just considering Wonka as a movie, one’s eyes begin to roll to imagine these formative adventures finally being given a concrete form. Thankfully, Wonka kicks off its runtime not with a montage of Wonka pillaging chocolate from lavish locales nor with an adolescent version of the character discovering that chocolate exists.

Instead, Wonka begins with its titular protagonist aboard a boat, already preparing for a new adventure. These prequel movies often take so long to get going and especially to have famous characters act like themselves that it’s a nice treat that Wonka’s inaugural sequence makes it clear Willy Wonka is already his familiar self. Viewers don’t need to gird themselves for endless scenes of Wonka figuring out he likes candy or is good at making silly sweet treats. Instead, we’re just hitting the ground running, with Wonka having a clear goal in mind (to open his own chocolate store) and obvious hurdles (lack of money, restrictive laws) keeping him down. From its initial scene, Wonka wants to behave like a standalone feature, not a seminar explaining how every wacky detail of Willy Wonka has some backstory.

Compare that to the opening scenes of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which features lots of material intended to offer “revelations” about how and why Solo is the way he is. Most painfully, the movie grinds to a halt to explain why he’s even named Han Solo, a question nobody has ever asked about since the first Star Wars movie dropped in 1977! Wonka’s fast-paced in media res storytelling approach is also superior to a modern prequel like The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. That Peter Jackson film from 2012 drew out its opening sequences with lengthy cameos from actors from the original Lord of the Rings movies. It was a bit of fan service that spent too much time in the past when An Unexpected Journey should’ve been establishing a new identity audiences could latch onto. If your prequel or origin story begins with just backstory and references to the past, those elements are bound to define the rest of the feature.

But ‘Wonka’ Isn’t Flawless as a Prequel Movie

Granted, Wonka can’t outrun every hokey element that plagues these sorts of prequel origin story movies. Specifically, there’s a lengthy flashback scene in the first act depicting an adolescent Wonka and his unnamed mother (Sally Hawkins). Here, we see the eldest Wonka is adept at making sweets, a gift that provides a key reason for her offspring’s love for chocolate. It’s an overly tidy explanation for Wonka’s fascination that also leans on a generic concept to lend new “depth” to a famous fictional character. Having a dead lady motivate the origin story of a famous character is an arcane narrative choice. Heck, the 2020 Dolittle movie went down that route by making Doctor Dolittle a recluse because of his wife perishing. Wonka opting to give its lead a dead mom just reeks of derivative storytelling and an unwise impulse to explain the delightfully inexplicable.

Thankfully, from there, Willy Wonka carves out friends with a bunch of societal misfits and tries to evade authorities while getting enough money to establish a chocolate shop. It’s an adventure that doesn’t necessarily require Willy to become Wonka nor is it full of characters who will only become important in later stories. It all works well as a standalone exercise while Wonka’s love for the zany and unpredictable is firmly intact the entire time. The story doesn’t need to browbeat people about why Wonka is who he is, we just go along for the ride. At its best, Wonka leans on this concept to make a movie that feels like a fun one-off adventure that just happens to star a younger Wonka rather than a straightforward origin story.

Even the eventual introduction of Oompa-Loompas into the plot of Wonka reflects a welcome willingness to just go with the fantastical. These organisms are first brought up by Willy Wonka nonchalantly, who is concerned about a “little orange man with green hair” who keeps following him. He doesn’t know their name yet, but the idea of Oompa-Loompa’s existing isn’t shocking to Wonka nor are viewers later given in-forth explanations for how Oompa-Loompa society operates. The focus remains on this one unnamed Oompa-Loompa character (Hugh Grant) to the point that (thankfully) Wonka doesn’t even try to offer a belabored explanation justifying the armies of Oompa-Loompa’s working for this chocolate mogul in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Grant’s Oompa-Loompa is just offered a job at the end to work for Wonka, with no indications that he’ll bring more of his kind to Wonka’s workspace. Wonka could’ve capsized its ending with lots of gratuitous expository dialogue setting elements like the Oompa-Loompa army up. Instead, it just focuses on having a breezy time.

Make no mistake, Wonka is still cut from the same fan service heavy cloth of many modern tentpoles. Chalamet’s Wonka makes sure to serendipitously say many of the most famous quotes associated with Gene Wilder’s take on the character, while a rendition of “Pure Imagination” closes out the proceedings. Still, thanks to a focus on new characters and a willingness to just let the fantastical be unexplained, Wonka does soar heads and shoulders above many similar prequels. Heck, even a subtle closing moment suggesting where Wonka gets the idea for golden tickets being important (by way of a gift from his deceased mother) is played off so subtly that many viewers may miss it. Compare that to the ham-fisted name-drop of Katniss in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and Wonka is practically from another planet on its fan service! Other titles like X-Men Origins: Wolverine try too hard to provide explanations for every aspect of a character people love. Wonka, meanwhile, rightfully recognizes it can be great to just have fun with a familiar face rather than giving audiences a stomachache with too much lore.

Wonka is now in theaters in the U.S.

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