I think everyone felt the idea of basing a series of movies on a theme park ride was a really bad idea. Yet the Pirates of the Caribbean movies turned out pretty good. Then, forgetting that, we all thought basing a series of movies on a short clip from a largely in-cohesive dialog-free musical movie was a bad idea... Well, here's The Sorcerer's Apprentice to prove us wrong again.To put The Sorcerer's Apprentice into context, I would say it's similar to something like Harry Potter in that you've got a dorky nerd-child who is introduced to a world he can barely understand and is, coincidentally, the savior of the world. We're introduced to magic and get some explanation on how it works and the basic "rules" of magic. This is something I really appreciated. Compared to the very limited and almost non-existent explanations we get from the HP movies, we at least get a workable framework in The Sorcerer's Apprentice that I am reasonably comfortable with. There's some solid humor in the movie and a few somewhat touching scenes.
If I had to complain about anything it's that there was clearly a lot of contributing content cut from the final film. In fact, there are at least two scenes in the trailers that don't appear in the final cut. I understand the final cut is, I think, 1 hour and 51 minutes, so I can see they probably had a lot more content that was dropped to keep the movie under two hours. That's okay, but I feel like there may have been some useful scenes left out. For example, one of the scenes you see in the trailer involves Dave blowing up a baseball in lecture he's teaching. Some of the machinery you see in that scene (that is not in the final cut) is used in the climactic final battle... but in the final cut, we don't see that equipment before the final battle. It only made sense seeing the trailer again after having seen the movie. So, it's kind of a shame that we lost some potentially good scenes to the cutting room floor... Or not. I guess we won't know till the DVD release.
In the end, I really enjoyed the movie and look forward to the sequels.
