No matter how you slice it, the songs and choreography are the heart of this movie. He is in love with the girl, but his is a misunderstood and jealous love. She believes him to be an angel sent by her father from heaven to guard her. His only true joys in life are haunting the members of the Opera Populaire and giving secret voice lessons to a young orphaned chorus girl named Christine. Despite being an artistic and architectural genius, an obscene physical deformity received at birth has kept him at arms length from the world. The story of the Phantom of the Opera (whose name is Eric, though that fact never surfaces in either the musical or the film) is about a man who wants nothing more than to know and understand love. Then, for reasons defying logic, someone handed it to Joel Schumacher and said “Make a movie”. Somewhere along the way Andrew Lloyd Webber set it to some of the most beautiful music composed this century and created a theatrical masterpiece. It then became a novel by Gaston Leroux, a treacherous journey of love and intrigue through the underworld of the famed Paris Opera House.

It started as a true story, almost legend. Some magic element is needed to successfully bring a show designed for the opera house into the movie house.

Yet, for all its beauty there’s something lacking in this film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. Now they open one of the most elaborate and gloriously staged movies to grace the screen. For years those words have opened the story for one of Broadway’s most popular and successful shows.

Dvd phantom of the opera 2004