A Magical First Look At The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

This week I was so lucky as to score a chance to see the upcoming film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and to be able to attend the press junket the following day.
As a obsessed devoted Disney fan, I was curious to see how anyone could make a movie inspired by the famous animated segment that was featured in Fantasia. Even the original source material (a poem by Goethe that provided the inspiration for the animated short) was far from meaty enough to provide sufficient material for a feature film.
According to Jerry Bruckheimer, this was part of the reason that it turned out to be quite a challenge to bring The Sorcerer’s Apprentice to life. Yet, somehow they managed to build a well rounded story around a magical sequence of anthropomorphic cleaning supplies. To help do this, they brought in elements of another fantastical story; that of Merlin.
The movie is rooted in the familiar mythologies of magic that have been a part of our culture for centuries, but it brings some modern sensibilities and elements of science to the table to give us something a bit more fresh. Our unlikely hero, Dave Stutler (Jay Baruchel), has to use his mind as well as his new found magic. In Sorcerer’s Apprentice, magic is not simply a get out of jail free card.
After all of this, you’re probably asking the big question: was the movie any good? The answer is yes. While it’s nothing mind-blowing, the film manages to be highly entertaining.
The movie wastes no time, and launches you into a back story of good versus evil and how a sorcerer named Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage) came to be in our current era. The rest of the film plays out as one would expect; the sorcerer takes on his apprentice to help him defeat the powers of evil and darkness.
Nicolas Cage turns in a charming performance, but the real show stealer is Jay Baruchel, who provides a wonderfully comedic foil to Balthazar. The other highlight was Alfred Molina as the delightfully wicked Maxim Horvath. Maxim is one of those rare, sinister villains that really provides a sense of danger while still managing to elicit a laugh here and there.
Even though the performances and plot were fairly sturdy, the movie wouldn’t have been half as fun without such clever uses of magic. While there was a bit of conjuring things from thin air, the majority of the spells utilized whatever was available to the characters at the time. You were never quite sure what might come to life or even be a trap.
The use of magic in the film was called into question briefly during the junket the following day. One of the attendees asked if there was any concern about a backlash similar to the one the Harry Potter films have encountered. The consensus was that people are going to think what they want, but the bottom line is that everyone went into this with the hope of making an entertaining family film.
Overall, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a movie that rekindles those childhood dreams of being able to perform magic. That secret wish that maybe you’re capable of more than you thought. Who knows? Maybe we are. At least, we can keep hoping.