Wonka’s Golden Ticket Review: AI Gene Wilder Is Ghoulish

In reviewing “Wonka’s Golden Ticket,” a competition series from Netflix loosely (and I mean loosely) based on Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” it’s tempting to simply copy and paste my write-up of “Squid Game: The Challenge” from nearly three years ago. After all, the shows share similarly misguided concepts. In trying to kickstart in-house IP into a scalable franchise, the streamer fast-tracked an unscripted offshoot that misunderstands and perverts the original story. The point of both the South Korean drama and the beloved children’s book is that forcing human beings — particularly, in the latter case, children! — into lethal competition over scarce resources is, to be blunt, very bad. Any attempt to rerun these social experiments as straight entertainment rather than cautionary tales, even while removing the chance of bodily harm, is poisoned at the root.

But with “Wonka’s Golden Ticket,” there’s an extra, macabre twist to this already sinister endeavor. Rather than a human being or even an anonymous narrator, á la “Squid Game,” the competition is hosted by the voice of Gene Wilder, the actor who played the whimsical chocolatier in the 1971 film “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” still the character’s most enduring representation onscreen. (No offense to Timothée Chalamet!) Wilder, of course, died in 2016 at the ripe old age of 83 and was not available to record his lines in the flesh. This version of him has been reanimated using artificial intelligence.

“Wonka’s Golden Ticket” notes in a disclaimer that the production received the permission of Wilder’s estate for this aural resurrection, presumably in exchange for money. Even if the AI voice is legally sanctioned, however, it still invites a host of other questions. Such as: was this really necessary? Could there possibly be more gained from using Wilder’s nasal croon than lost in viewers put off by the manipulation of a dead man’s image (or rather, sound) for a game show? And if Willy Wonka, a textbook case of Peter Pan syndrome who subjects eager kids to sadistic trials, has always had a strong whiff of menace, where’s the line between deliberately evoking that quality and losing control of it entirely?

None of these queries are answered by the first seven episodes of “Wonka’s Golden Ticket,” but it’s still possible to puzzle out how we got here. Netflix acquired The Roald Dahl Story Company, which monetizes the late author’s work, in 2021. The company has since greenlit a drama series based on Dahl’s short stories, and while that works its way through the pipeline, “Wonka’s Golden Ticket” can keep Dahl’s work in the zeitgeist — if not exactly for the right reasons.

To its credit, the production design of “Wonka’s Golden Ticket” is objectively impressive, recreating iconic sets like the chocolate river, the Wonkavision studio and the “half office” while riffing on the theme for new creations. (There’s a shrinking hallway and a beehive-themed room with honey-slicked floors.) Yet the AI Wilder isn’t the only instance of the contemporary and the retro colliding in unpleasantly discordant ways. Challenges are introduced with “Fallout”-style, ‘50s-esque videos that are aesthetically out of place. It’s hard to make the group sleeping quarters associated with shows like “Love Island” feel natural in a fantastical candy facility. Hilariously, the Oompa Loompas are still around, and some are played by actors with dwarfism — but others are of average height, or even unusually large. I can’t say body diversity for orange homunculi was on my representational bucket list, but at least it’s here!

Contestants navigate this sensory overload in pairs, put through a series of challenges that combine physical duress (getting spun around in a circle) with social gameplay (choosing which competitors are up for “termination”). The cast have clearly been coached to attribute the design of the “tour” to “Wonka,” who’s referred to by a single name like HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” (Not the influence I’d want to evoke if I were using AI as a load-bearing part of my production, but that’s why I’m not in the television business!) Ticket holders — yes, there’s a staged montage where participants pretend to find golden slips in their chocolate bars — also play up the stakes, which leads to ridiculous statements like “Everything became different when my brother was trapped in the gumball machine.”

The prize for enduring all this is $3 million, oddly phrased as “a six-figure income for 30 years.” But for all the talk about life-changing money, nothing in “Wonka’s Golden Ticket” supplants the Wilder voice as the most attention-grabbing element. (The contestants seem perfectly nice, but there are no breakout stars among the ensemble.) The device grows especially chilling when tasked with delivering jokes, or rather, humor-scented snippets of dialogue that lack a human’s je ne sais quoi. A computer can ape Wilder’s tone of voice, but it can’t (yet) intuit comic timing. One imagines Dahl, whose sometimes monstrous characters captured childhood in all its messiness, would be relieved. I hope no one uses AI to try and ask him.

The first seven episodes of “Wonka’s Golden Ticket” are now streaming on Netflix, with a two-part finale airing Sept. 30.