Every once in a while, I need to be reminded that Hollywood hasn't become an utterly festering pit of despair when it comes to great storytelling of classic and new tales - it has always been that way. And for all the beefs I have for the average movie full of terrible dialogue, mediocre acting and almost no character development, they do usually hit on the sights and sounds, costumes, music, explosions and special effects. If you need proof of this, watch any older movie, pretty much at all. There are always exceptions obviously, and you should remove probably 10% of all movies because they either have exceptional special effects for the time it was made, or some other attribute listed above that makes it exceptional for it's time. That being said, it still doesn't set me at ease sitting down to watch a new movie of any sort knowing I'm going to subject myself to more of the same for reasons I am still not sure of.
That being said, subjecting myself to the 2011 reprise of The Three Musketeers made me particularly irritated, not at the giant computer generated airships or dialogue which seemed to progressively demean every actor who uttered them, but because 20 minutes in I was completely convinced that what I was watching in no way resembled the original story, a bastardized string of action sequences and wonton killing that would make Conan the Barbarian start to question the sanctity of life and Indiana Jones wondering who would spend that much time setting up highly artistic elaborate traps. It seemed like a patchwork of all the most popular movies of the last 30 years - DaVinci Code style pseudo mystery treasure hunting, Matrix style rotational slow motion fight scenes, all the while taking the seriousness of the situation with the stride of the appropriate Loony Tunes character.
With all this in mind, I was determined to find out what the deal was with the original story, mostly so I could make fun of the movie and point out in all the ways it is WRONG. However, as it turns out, I jumped the musket and the reality of the situation is that the movie followed the original story in many ways:
-d'Artagnan is the "stranger coming to town" to become a musketeer
-he runs in to the head of the Cardinal's guard and is almost killed by him
-he then schedules duels with all 3 musketeers the first day in town, then they all get in a fight with the Cardinal's guards
-Milady de Winter is involved in a plot to start war between France and England - Milla Jonavich, shame on you, probably the silliest of all the characters, all of her scenes could have been in Resident Evil: Musketeer Zombies
-probably some other stuff but can't write about since the movie was mind numbing and I never read the original story
I know what you're thinking: QUITE AN IMPRESSIVE LIST!
Still, more than I had expected, and it is quite amazing they were able to put all this together while maintaining little or no integrity and a schlockfest of stupidity, cardboard cutout characters and absurd violence.
Now, my main gripe with the film was that it is or was supposed to be portraying a particular period in history, while simultaneously having no resemblance in terms of technology, manner of speaking, ideology, believability or even in any attempt to portray actual people from history as close to reality as possible, such as the Cardinal Richelieu for example. The Cardinal happens to be the embodiment of pure evil, as demonstrated by putting a skeleton pope with a crucifix and a reaper's sickle on the prow of his guard's airship.
As it turns out, it is probably just me getting older. The next nearest adaptation, the 1993 3 Musketeers made by Disney stars Tim Curry as a Wile E. Coyote style Cardinal, attempting throughout the movie to grope women and torture children if not bound by the producers and their PG 13 rating, and actually still comes across somehow as more evil than his 2011 counterpart.
The 2001 movie The Musketeer probably shows the least amount of effort, dispensing with all of the other characters but d'artagnan in a Japanese style shoot em up. In 1978 the Soviet's made a musical version, and in 1957 there was a Mexican comedy based on the original story. Anways, point being there has always been absurd revisions and changes to classic stories.
So why does it get my goat so much, why do they seem like such abominations to me? I can only guess that the contemporary "version" of a retelling of a classic story does (and will) speak volumes about the current state of the society it was conceived in, and made for. It represents all of us, preserved for all future generations, and like other stories and characters of popular culture like Dracula 2000 or the new Conan the Barbarian, speaks nothing but ill about the society we are in, where mindless fighting and gore planned around a loose character concept and a setting that is similar to present day in ways it seemingly should not be. Do I find it hard to care about the characters in more modern movies simply because they seem to lack personality, or because they remind me too much of the present. I don't really believe the latter, but it's just an idea.
