Review: "The Magic Flute" mixes Mozart, magic, and teenage romance

SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — The Magic Flute
3 out of 5 Stars
Director: Florian Sigl
Writers: Andrew Lowery, Florian Sigl, Jason Young
Starring: Jack Wolfe, Niamh McCormack, F. Murray Abraham
Genre: Fantasy, Musical
Rated: Unrated (Family Friendly)

Studio Synopsis: Tim (Jack Wolfe) has been dreaming his whole life about attending Mozart All Boys Music School, but already his first days there confront him with a hostile headmaster (F. Murray Abraham), the stresses of a first love, and serious doubts about the authenticity of his singing voice. When he discovers a mystical gateway in the school’s library, he is pulled into the fantastic cosmos of Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute, where imagination has no limits and the Queen of the Night (Sabine Devieilhe) reign.

Review: The Harry Potter novels were not the first stories to be built around young people going away to boarding school and embarking on fantastic adventures. They are, however, such a cultural touchstone that when you put a young man on a train and ship him off to a faraway school, it’s hard to not find direct comparisons. Inject that film with fantasy tropes and British and Irish actors and it’s nigh impossible to make them.

In fact, should you be so inclined, you can easy pick out what characters in “The Magic Flute” are filling the same narrative space as Harry, Ron, Malfoy, and Hermione: They’re all archetypes and J.K. Rowling didn’t invent them. But if you fancy the idea of Harry Potter with musical interludes, here's what that might look like.

Those expecting a film based entirely on Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” will be a little bewildered. The opera is featured, but only in fantasy sequences that occur nightly at 3:00 AM when Tim (Jack Wolfe), our protagonist, is transported into the world of the story – and yes, that includes a lot of singing. The two worlds are entirely separate with Tim being the only character that travels between them. This isn’t “The Wizard of Oz.”

In the real world, Tim is a teenager who, following the death of his father, is enrolled in the prestigious music academy where his pops once attended. There, Tim is forced to confront the fact that he doesn’t know what to do with his hands when he is singing (there’s more to it than just that), while navigating the expected social and scholastic issues that come with these stories. Being 17 years old is never as easy as it looks.

I know that I sound a bit flippant, but I largely enjoyed the film. I’m somewhat surprised by the fact that I prefer the “real world” story to the fantasy segments. It’s not the singing, the special effects (Roland Emmerich is a producer), or the performances as much as it is that I’m far more interested in what becomes of Tim’s relationship with classmate Sophie (Niamh McCormack) than I am in the poetic conflict between night and day.

But you can't make "The Magic Flute" without actually including "The Magic Flute," can you? If your predetermined marketing is built on the casting of popular singers in strategic roles, the film has to have singing, right? Otherwsie the investors would riot!

If there was more of a connection between Tim’s real and fantasy worlds, I might be more invested in the musical segments. As it is, the lives of Tim’s classmates mean more to me than anything Mozart’s characters have to say. The real magic in the film is Tim meeting Sophie on a train and falling asleep next to her listening to the Jackson 5. It’s simple and beautiful. I want more of that. That chemistry is real and it is bigger and better than watching Tim run away from a massive snake.