Character names and some plot details aside, A Game of Shadows does not feel like a Sherlock Holmes movie, because it adopts a steampunk aesthetic and moves the characters out of London and into dirty forests and factories. But what an aesthetic! If you can forget you are supposed to be watching a Holmes film, the visuals are genuinely thrilling to behold in a primal sort of way. An action sequence following the main characters through a forest as they are beset by hordes of soldiers feels like something out of a video game conceptually, but Director of Photography Philippe Rousselot expertly employs a super slow motion camera to capture debris, bullets, and shrapnel with clarity and visual flair, but does not lose the intensity of the scene in the shuffle. Best Shot: As Holmes and company run through the forest in the aforementioned scene, the movement slows to a crawl as a flare goes off near the protagonists, illuminating them in white/orange light. This shot is great at displaying simultaneous beauty and danger within such a kinetic and overdone action scene.
Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
