Interestingly, the grey vintage footage is used for the present day, while the events of yesteryear are filmed in glorious technicolor I'm reminded strongly of the 1995 Yu/Cheung film, which did the same thing, but unfortunately Schumacher's lack of variation and interaction between the two styles lacks Yu's deft and evocative touch. The prologue is, therefore, familiar, being set in 1919 the vintage-style film, sepia-toned black and white with artful distressing to suggest age, is effective in communicating this to us, though it wears a little thin over the course of the movie. well, it does survive, at least, but one of the greatest technical faults of this film, for me, is in relying much too heavily on its stage origins and refusing to explore most of the new freedoms that could be accomplished in film. As far as surviving the transition to a new medium, it.

This is, as you can probably guess from the cover's white half-mask and the inclusion of a certain composer's name all over all the credits, a film version of the 1986 Lloyd Webber musical it follows said musical's plot almost exactly, and makes few nods to its new format, retaining a lot of the same stage effects and recitative passages. This film was the most undeniably polarizing descendant of the original Phantom story until the advent of the second Lloyd Webber musical in early 2010, and it still inspires a great deal of heated opinion on both sides of the fence. Some people think this is the worst film ever made, and some thinnk it's better than Casablanca. Whether or not that's a good thing is a topic of hot and often frothy debate. This film is probably one of the most influential workings of the Phantom story to emerge in the last decade.

The phantom of the opera 2004 no mask