YMMV / Young Sherlock Holmes

• Awesome Moments: The deft way The Stinger gave you the new identity of Rathe, with a dark forboding orchestral sting, is chilling — even if you weren't into Sherlock Holmes.
• Awesome Music: The theme is an ear worm that combines a light adventure melody, mixed with a wistful nostalgia, and is just dark enough to hint that things aren't all sunshine and rainbows.
  • The Rame-Tep’s chant is a particularly nightmarish example of this. “E maltimel, e maltimel mobbit. On the other hand, while you might think it means something really evil in Egyptian, you’d be wrong, it’s just made up gibberish.
  • This film is the first Amblin Entertainment production to carry John Williams' Amblin Entertainment logo music.
• Fanon Discontinuity: It can be tempting to disregard the last act of the film due to how much more sad and creepy it is than the rest of the film, particularly with Elizabeth dying, and Rathe revealing to have survived as Moriarty, and thus will get away with her's and other's murders for a very long time.
• Genius Bonus: There are some obscure references to Holmes trivia. For example, when Holmes first meets John Watson, he guesses that his first name is James. In "The Man with the Twisted Lip", one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, Watson's wife addresses him as "James", causing rampant speculation from the fans about whether this was a significant slip or just a sign that Doyle had forgotten his own character's name. The in-universe explanation is that James is the most common male name beginning with J.
• Narm: The faces that Rathe's sister / The Dragon makes when she dies via accidentally ingesting a poisoned dart are so ridiculous that they turn her death scene into this.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Most of the hallucinations, especially Elizabeth's. Chased by Rame Tep cultists, Holmes, John and Elizabeth flee into a foggy, snowy cemetery. From beneath a flat gravestone, the hand of a corpse reaches to grab Elizabeth's ankle. The gravestone has vanished, to reveal an impossibly deep grave, into which she falls, screaming. At the bottom, from the earthen walls, skeletal hands reach to claw at her. High above, her recently deceased uncle shovels soil and dead leaves onto her. As a leering, top-hatted corpse chisels her name onto a gravestone, she can only sob with terror.
  • The priest's hallucination, especially the way it's built up. He's all alone in the church one winter evening, lighting candles for Mass... and then he hears a strange tinkling sound from above, coming from the stained glass window. Normally just portraying a knight and a bishop, the knight has suddenly drawn his sword... then the noise comes again, and when the priest looks back, the bishop is dead, and the knight's sword is bloodied. Now scared, he keeps staring at the window, which begins to shake — and finally shatters, the shards forming into the knight, which leaps out of the window and advances on him! Out of his mind in fear, the priest runs out of the church, screaming in terror, where he's promptly trampled to death by a carriage.
• Once Original, Now Common: With CGI being so ubiquitous now, it's hard to appreciate just how mindblowing that stained glass knight was at the time. To put it in perspective, the sequence is less than one minute long and yet it took them four months to create it!
• Presumed Flop: The film actually did make back its budget when it was first released. But it didn't make Spielberg money like it was expected to, so it's remembered as a bomb.
• Retroactive Recognition: John Lasseter of Pixar fame helped animate the Stained Glass Knight.
• Signature Scene:
  • The Stained Glass Knight is by far the most remembered part of the film.
  • A close second is The Stinger and The Reveal.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The cultists, performing a human sacrifice, chant a song which rips off "O Fortuna" from Carmen Burana. Still, it's a damn good ripoff.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The Stained Glass Knight. This was the first time CGI was combined with live-action film, and it's still pretty convincing. The film was nominated for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars, but was beaten by the more popular Cocoon. Bonus points for it being made by Pixar!
• Tear Jerker: Elizabeth’s death.

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