I went and saw Phantom of the Opera last night and I cant shake this feeling that I’ve just seen the Battlestar Galactica of movie musicals.

I got this sick feeling part way through it (inbetween naps) I have seen this all before. That George Lucas (with Speilberg) and Andrew Lloyd Weber both have elevated the medium they work in to such impossibly unobtainable levels of success that they effectively killed small budget undertakings and drove independent movies/theatre underground for twenty years. Yet they both created a library of work that millions have seen and loved in some way or another.

With that said, PotO was so reworked and reused that it reminded me of the wave of movies that tried to cash in on Star Wars, like Battlestar, Battle Beyond The Stars and the Star Trek franchise, but in this case, we got rehashing of Moulin Rouge, Chicago and Van Helsing.

Okay that last one wasnt a musical but you get my drift. PotO was a movie musical reworked from (going backwards) a stage performance, a slew of movies (Paradise, anyone?), and finally a novel. In this effort, the themes from the original story are worked and reworked to reflect our current cultural levels while giving us 20 year old pop music to hum along to. An example of is that the Phantom himself was no where near grotesque as suggested in the story. Why? Because we didnt have time to “warm up to” him like we did to John Merrick in The Elephant Man (stage or movie). True to formulaic Hollywood movies, we had to deposit our pity on him without being totally repulsed so close to the end, so his makeup had to be toned down from the original stories so that we could accept him fast before we killed him off.

With this movie cotowing to the Hollywood formula, it makes me think that alien archeologists will unearth this movie and get a completely skewed view of pre-photography medium history: “Gas light gives off enough energy to light an entire cavern? Everyone in 1800s Paris spoke with an Eglish accent? There were two-way mirrors and safety glass back then?” (Moulin Rouge is extremely guilty of this as well)

Joel Schumacher did create several beautiful shots of opulent Paris opera, while borrowing from several paintings of the period, but someone needs to tell him how to shoot and edit a good fight scene. Too jumpy, too fast and not enough satisfying long shots of the action, much like his work on Batman (barf!). Trap Raoul under water and Schumacher runs film backward to extend the tension! Watch the bubbles go down!

I saw this movie with 4 other die-hard PotO fans and they were shocked to hear my views. I guess I didnt succumb to the music of the night.