You do remember the tunes as you leave the theater, but you don't walk out humming them, you wonder if you'll be able to get them out of your mind. When the chandelier comes crashing down, it's not a shock, it's a historical reenactment. The story is thin beer for the time it takes to tell it, and the music is maddeningly repetitious. I do not think Lloyd Webber wrote a very good musical. In this version, any red-blooded woman would choose the Phantom over Raoul, even knowing what she knows now.īut what I am essentially disliking is not the film, but the underlying material. The character of Raoul, Christine's nominal lover, has always been a fatuous twerp, but at least in the 1925 version, Christine is attracted to the Phantom only until she removes his mask. The modern Phantom is more like a perverse Batman with a really neat cave. There was something unwholesome and pathetic about the 1925 Phantom, who scuttled like a rat in the undercellars of the Paris Opera and nourished a hopeless love for Christine.

The phantom of the opera background