Although this Georges Melies special effects extravaganza shows that after ten years the French wizard had lost none of his energy and enthusiasm, there's something a little 'same-y' about this three minute short in which an Alchemist has weird dreams in his laboratory which ultimately result in his death.While Melies' visual imagination was insuperable he often seemed to have difficulty creating scenarios in which his special effects could be put to good use outside of the tired 'dream' idea. Given his prodigious output, and the confines of the medium back in 1906, this isn't entirely surprising.The special effects in this one are up to Melies' usual high standards (apart from that pantomime snake), with the spiders web in the retort being particularly striking.

I love the films of Méliès, as for their day, they were the most clever, creative and had the best trick cinematography of the day. His movies such as Le Voyage Dans le Lune are classics and I try to see every one I can--they are just so amazing and watchable even today (unlike the films of Edison and Lumiere which seem pretty pointless today).Unfortunately, while this IS a wonderful film, it is NOT among Méliès' best--in fact, oddly, it is almost plot less and is just an excuse to create special effect after special effect. The effects (apart from the cheesy snake) are great and the film is well worth seeing, but it has little lasting value unlike most of his other films I have seen.If you want to see this film online, go to Google and type in "Méliès" and then click the video button for a long list of his films that are viewable without special software.

This short movie shows the visual effects wizard Georges Méliès at his weirdest, in a feature with a steady succession of bizarre and unexpected visual effects. He had quite an imagination, not only for devising camera tricks, but also for the images themselves.There isn't really very much of a story to this movie, just a sleepy alchemist whose laboratory takes on a life of its own. Most of the visual effects are seamless or nearly so, and even those that aren't seamless are more than interesting enough to make up for it.Some of the images are dazzling, some a little startling - it's a weird and very interesting collection of pictures and ideas that you have to see for yourself. You probably couldn't really call it one of the best Méliès features, but it's interesting and distinctive.

Even when we look at one of Melies' films and don't know what he is going on about, still, we are carried along by his speed, his good humor and his inventiveness -- after all, his films at this stage rarely last more than a minute. Here, we have a piece that might be called "The Alchemist's Dream." The old alchemist falls asleep and dreams of finding the philosopher's stone: he dreams of snakes shedding their skins, of young women tossing gold, all the hermetical symbols of the Philosopher's Stone which not only granted the ability to transmute any item into gold, but gave one eternal youth.So this is a sad movie, in a way: an old man dreams of being young. Yet Melies hides behind these symbols, which we don't know about nowadays, and produces a fun little piece.