After a visit to the Phantom's lair, the love triangle between young singer, suave dude and freaky genius plays out in tandem with the drama of the operas being produced and the Phantom's increasingly violent acts of obsession. When the Phantom (Gerard Butler) orchestrates her big break by scaring off the house diva, Carlotta (Minnie Driver), Christine becomes a sensation and draws the attention of the hunky Raoul (Patrick Wilson), a wealthy patron of the opera whom Christine had known as a child. Her violinist father had told her he'd send an "Angel of Music" to guide and protect her after he died, she's taken this unseen tutor's training as a sign her father was watching over her. He's been secretly tutoring 16-year-old Christine (Emmy Rossum), an orphan who is living and working at the Opera as a chorister. For those 12 people in the world who haven't seen the stage show, The Phantom of the Opera is a musical based on Gaston Leroux's 1911 novel about a horribly disfigured genius/madman who lives beneath the Paris Opera House, here renamed the Opera Populaire. After watching this DVD and its featurettes a couple of times, my appraisal grew more charitable, though some criticisms remain. After seeing it in the theatre, I had a list of problems with the casting and limited vocal talents of some of the players and some of the story changes took away more than they added. While I'm not one of those "Phantom Phanatics", I have seen the show four times on tour and in Toronto and own the Original Cast Recording so I went into this film adaptation with a favorable attitude about the source material and hoped to enjoy it. Many of the reviews at the time seemed to focus on the critic's general distaste for the show itself - they hate Webber, they hated the music and the fact it was so popular - and as a result, the movie didn't stand a chance of getting a fair shake. After years of struggle and speculation, the film version, directed by the Batman franchise slayer Joel Schumacher, finally arrived in theaters at Christmas 2004, where it was soundly thumped by most critics and did poorly at the box office, though it did far better overseas.
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