Oh, he didn’t have a budget-busting box-office bomb on
his hands. But, with a $19.7 million domestic
box-office take barely covering its $18 million production cost, this movie was
a disappointment.
That did not mean, however, that Spielberg hadn’t
advanced cinema as a medium even now. This story—a speculation about the
origins of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Victorian detective and his friend, Dr. John Watson—took innovation in the still relatively new
field of computer-generated imagery (CGI) to a new level: an entire
character (a knight jumping from a stained-glass window).
CGI, first encountered onscreen in Westworld
(1973) and revived later in Tron (1982), now steered special-effects
specialists and the audiences that delighted in them away from old-fashioned
matte painting and model building and towards a brave new digital world. This new form of razzle-dazzle
put John Lasseter on the path towards becoming a legend in the animation
field, and earned the film an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects
(which, unfortunately, it lost to Cocoon).
(Oh, did I mention the major minds behind this
Paramount movie? Lasseter’s boss was Spielberg’s old friend George Lucas, in his
role as head of Hollywood’s answer to Edison’s Menlo Park, Industrial Light and
Magic. Henry Winkler, having wound up his longtime gig as The Fonz on Happy
Days, served as a producer here. Screenwriter Barry Levinson, having directed
someone else’s script on The Natural the year before, was doing the same
now for young Goonies and Gremlins scribe Chris Columbus.
So much for the auteur theory of cinema!)
Critics greeted the movie in the same restrained
manner as audiences, with ratings more or less ranging from two stars (Leonard
Maltin) to three (Roger Ebert). Even as they noted the significance of the CGI
tricks, they questioned why Levinson inserted it into what was essentially a
Victorian mystery, or why, following Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg
had yet again paid politically incorrect homage to the famous scene in Gunga
Din (1939) showing a group of European characters watching in horror a human
sacrifice occurring in a secret temple.
For years, this represented the final judgment on Young
Sherlock Holmes: revolutionary in cinematic craft, but decidedly same-old,
same-old as far as storytelling was concerned.
That verdict needs to be revised, or at least put in a
different context. When I watched it 35 years ago, I found it a very pleasant
way to spend two hours at the theater—and given the pretentious tripe that has
come from film-school grads since then, that is nothing to sneer at.
Moreover, Columbus’ chief fear as he created the
screenplay—i.e., outrage from Holmes purists over a departure from sacred
scroll (Doyle envisioned them meeting instead as adults, in A Study in
Scarlet)—seems in retrospect rather overblown, given the violent liberties
taken by Robert Downey Jr. in converting the master of ratiocination into a
bare-chested martial-arts devotee in two films.
Furthermore, I’m surprised that, with the passage of
time, detractors continue to harp on how derivative Columbus was rather than
acknowledge that he was paving the way for a far bigger trend in one of his
later projects. So consider: What other Columbus film (this time with
him as writer-director) also featured:
*another young hero with special powers (so great, you
might even call him a wizard), along with another nerdy but loyal sidekick and
another cute girl?
*another English boarding school with more than the
usual trials of that setting?
*another battle against powerful forces of evil, in
which the young hero is launched on his life’s mission?
Yes, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
(2001)—not to mention its 2002 sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets—made studio execs forget in a hurry that Columbus was ever involved
in an underperforming variation on Sherlock Holmes.
(For a fun summary of this film, see this post from the blog "Classic Film and TV Cafe" by "Rick29."
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