... sometimes stories are best left alone, without the injection of random fantastic elements. I mean, theoretically, it might have worked, with a very skilled person approaching it - I've read awesome historical fantasy - but the 2011 rendition of The Three Musketeers just failed. On so many levels.
World-Building: *headdesk* (I'm going to make this an official rating now)
Characterization: nonexistent
Plot: What? We need plot in a movie? Ooops!
Alexander Dumas wrote some pretty awesome books. I've read most of them, but it's been a while, so all I remembered going into this movie were some random vague scenes and the names of the 4 main characters.
It started off with a very bizzare sequence and I was wondering what was happening, until they did the little freeze-frame-character-name thing for Athos and I thought "Oh! They're going a video-game style route, like Prince of Persia!) So then they proceeded to do the same thing for the other two Musketeers and it was ok by this point.
Then suddenly D'Artagnan showed up with an AMERICAN ACCENT! It made me want to *headdesk* every time I heard it. Also, the accents in general made no sense, except maybe Orlando Bloom's, because they were supposed to be French, not British and certainly not American. I'm not going to go on about this, but it was annoying.
I'd love to say something about the plot at this point, but I really can't because it doesn't make sense. Nothing in this movie made sense and the Musketeers did the most random things without the viewer having any sense of what they were about to do and then they had to explain it all later in really lame dialogue. It just didn't work.
The thing I want to talk about the most is the world building. From the moment they turned out to be after some mysterious plan for something invented by Da Vinci I began to roll my eyes. It gets worse when you realize that this invention is a flying ship. Yeah, a full blown ship fitted with a hot air balloon.
The fight scenes were so over the top they were lame and Milady suddenly became a Ninja out of thin air. I was just starting to laugh at her acrobatics with the huge dress (they weren't able to breathe properly in those things and you are trying to convince me that she was preforming physics-defying acrobatics in it!) when she took off the skirt part of it and started to fly around half naked.
At some point in the middle of the airship battle I began to fall asleep. And before you say I can't criticize the movie without having seen it all, don't worry, I forced myself to finish it the next day. It doesn't get any better.
The one thing that could have saved this mess from the lame idea of inserting pointless airships was the wide variety of awesome actors involved - they could have done an awesome job with the characterizations. Unfortunately all of them were completely ridiculous and there wasn't a single character that I cared about. Certinaly not D'Artagnan *shudder*.
This movie got the low ratings and negative reviews it deserved on sites like Rotten Tomatoes, and I had a good laugh reading some of the one-liner reviews about what other boring activities people preferred to do over watching it. However, there was an irritating tendency to compare it to Pirates of the Caribbean. There might be ships and Orlando Bloom, but the resemblance ends there. (Actually, this movie also attempted to rip off the PoTC soundtrack to little effect). While PoTC may not have been the highest form of literature or anything it still had awesome characters and great plotlines (and when I say PoTC I don't count the fourth movie, btw). Also, Pirates was just plain funny, and when some of the reviewers on rotten tomatoes said that the Three Musketeers was trying (and failing) to be funny I was taken by surprise. I had no idea, as I was watching, that any of it was supposed to be in any way funny or amusing.
*sigh*
I should really stop here and maybe go find a copy of the book to read to help erase this terrible experience from my memory.
Sorry about the rant. In good news, I'm currently reading a good book and I have some others (including a couple by Crichton) lined up and waiting to be read. As always, let me know your thoughts/comments.
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