Jawdrop
he’s a genius…he somehow managed to get scantily clad women into a prison movie.
The movies - and probably the three musketeers - are usually shit though, yes.
Ah, as i was watching the trailer i was wondering why’d they cast Milla (married to the director) Jovovitch.
Are you thinking of the man in the iron mask, thats the only movie about musketeers that I remember with him in it.
Declan
So you’re the one!!!
Gah, d’Artagnon’s accent drives me up the wall.
As a firm fan of all things steampunk, this looks like a terrible, terrible movie. I’m really sick of the whole ‘no, our heroes aren’t super-powered, they can just dodge bullets’ thing. Swordsmen and machine guns don’t work well together. Guns and swords, yes - even in the original, the Musketeers used pistols as often as swords, and even muskets occasionally. But once you throw in corridors with hundreds of guns mounted in the walls, you pretty much have to find a better way to get past than ‘NOBODY will think of sliding along the floor! BRILLIANT!’.
Personally, I’m not troubled at all by it. It’s such a huge departure from the original, in such blatant ways, that it hardly even feels like an adaptation any more, and if it’s not an adaptation, then it no longer needs to bear any particular resemblance.
Titus Pullo’s in it. It’s worth a rental just for that.
Lester’s made-for-TV set is my favorite, as well. I’ve seen ratings/reviews that say his were the closest to the books out of all the versions. I have Three… and Four…, which I understand were drawn from Dumas’ book but split up (kind of like the last Harry Potter, but predating the approach by three decades).
I remember reading end of the book and being a bit irritated that it has D’Artagnan and Rocheforte on amicable terms; I much preferred the grueling duel and its ending. Made a nice book-end opposite the way they first met
I understand Lester also made a version of The Fifth Musketeer, *Count of Monte Cristo, *Man in the Iron Mask, and a couple others in an attempt to do Dumas’ whole musketeer-involving this was France-undergoing-change series. I think I saw Fifth… once and a snippet of …Monte Cristo with Chamberlain reprising Aramis once. I don’t remember if I was impressed 
Well, actually in The Four Musketeers (q.v.) he remembered strangling her [we see this in his flashback – is this a de-facto divorce?] and, thinking she was dead, left his position and name behind to become Athos, only to find out later that she didn’t actually die. Near the end of the referenced sequel, the four of heroes arrange to have her head cut off – but we don’t actually see it, so maybe… :smack:
In high school I was in a skit which the writers claimed was based on details in the book that weren’t in Lester’s TV movies. The writers had me do a monologue about how Milady corrupted a lot of lives with her (ahem) beauty, including the life of the executioner’s brother who had been a priest who was caught with Milady, then got defrocked and committed suicide. It was a fun monologue, but I don’t know if that’s part of Dumas’ tale. I’ll have to haul that thing out and really pore over it some time.
Captain de Treville explains to D’Artagnan that, only after they distinguish themselves as swordsmen, are militiamen allowed to also carry and train in the use of muskets. The three that the main protagonist initially meets, challenges, and is befriended by, are a clique of soldiers who have “distinguished themselves in the killings” but they are by no means the only ones who have done so. But if you haven’t shown a knack for fighting/surviving, and a tolerance of blood/killing, then I suspect you’re more likely to be relegated to less glamorous duties like latrine-digging, drum corps, hauling cannonballs, raking the coals, etc.
Okay, okay, quick answer: the three musketeers are the clique the protagonizt wants to join – kinda like the campus-dominating social group or the #1 Fraternity/sorority or – well, you get the picture.
At least the last people who attempted such a feat realized they had gone too far and went ahead and renamed the result as “The Musketeer” and called it a ‘re-imagining’ of the Dumas classics.
Yeah, basically it seems this thing is hauled out every few years. Douglas Fairbanks, Gene Kelley, Michael York, Chris O’Donnel … I dunno if it’s Hollywood recycling a superb story because they’re cheap, or Hollywood trying at yet another relevant time to get Dumas’ point* out to the masses – and wrapping it up in the latest special effects and popular stars to try and get people to watch.
*The point as I always saw it
The Church (personified by Cardinal Richelieu) is corrupt and power-hungry. We need heroes to stop them!
The Peter Hyams movie? The one with Tim Roth and Deneuve? It was shitty but the light was really good. They were fighting in Vermeer-lit rooms.
Which is funny, because in truth, Richelieu is actually doing his job, it’s the Musketeers that are continuously betraying their country for vainglorious reasons.
I think either towards the end of the book, or in one of the latter books, Richelieu and d’Artagnan (or is it Aramis?) have a conversation about duty, where the Musketeer comes to realize that Richelieu is more an adversary than an enemy.
BTW, are you sure that Lester’s movies were made for TV? They were released as feature films in Europe.
How about when all *three *of them fight?
I’m sorry, I’d duty-bound to watch any movie that has airships in it.
And c’mon - this is worth watching for Orlando Bloom’s hair alone.
It really looks like a movie that does not, in any way, take itself seriously, and i like that.
Don’t know about the whole monologue, but the bit about the executioner’s brother is accurate.
It was released in the theater in the U.S. also. I saw the Four Musketeers in a theater. The Lester version was rather infamous because the actors sued the production company since they were paid for one movie and it was released as two movies. I’m glad they released it as two movies, since I can’t figure out how they could have released it as single movie without leaving some wonderful footage on the cutting room floor.
snip.
I KNEW we had common ground!
This looks fun; you fuddy-duddys can go grouse somewhere else. This movie is cheese, eye candy, and possibly the first really good venture into steampunk territory.
It’s actally hilarious that these adaptations usually portray (as Dumas did) Richelieu as the secret evil mastermind undercutting the King, because the IRL Richelieu was basically a patriot who wanted a safe and secure France under a unified but generous monarchy. He actually pushed hard to get rid of many of the old feudal customs and problems, and had France continued under that path it might have avoided the Revolution or even become a Constitutional Monarchy.
I never thought there’d be a version that made the Disney abomination look good… until now.
Agreed - except for the last part. Didn’t this happen in the second part of the 1973 version? Remember - Lester made one very long movie that was released in two parts.
Weren’t the Musketeers all at least semi-noble? (Especially, impoverished nobility (exhibit A: D’Artagnan) and/or younger sons who couldn’t just live off of their father’s estate)
So even if they had no fighting talent at all they wouldn’t be ever digging latrines and the like; that’s for their commoner lackeys.
So, being a musketeer is a bit like being a fighter pilot or something: glamorous, high-tech (for the day) and even though they rely on their ground crew to keep everything running, they’re not expected to use the enlisted men’s crapper. And, if they’re running around a city causing trouble investigating plots, you’d expect them to use fists and/or pistols, not their battlefield weapons.
The Lester movies most assuredly were not Made-For-TV. Charlton Heston writes about them in loving detail in his autobiography. They were studio-made, theater-released films. As noted, the actors sued because they made one movie and the director/studio released two. Chuck wasn’t too upset about it because he was very well paid for what amounted to a lengthy cameo.
The Lester version had Milady and Athos married (estranged)(attempted murder will do that), her beheaded at the end, and lots of musketwork by all concerned. They are pretty good shots, too. Only Athos could fire a wheellock pistol off-hand without aiming and hit a man 40 yards away in the ass.
It reminds me of that Wild Wild West abortion with Will Smith.