Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer (2006)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Very Cool!!!

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

It's 1622. Spain is ruled by King Philip IV. Diego Alatriste (Viggo Mortensen) leads his feared Spanish soldiers on a raid in Flanders. He returns to Madrid and gets caught up in an assassination attempt with Gualtiero Malatesta. His young charge Íñigo Balboa is taken with Angélica de Alquézar. He and his men are sent back to Flanders.The plot is jam packed and disjointed. It's hard to follow. It skips time. The story simply doesn't flow. Apparently, this encompassed several books and it shows. The actors are game. There are compelling fighting scenes. It's just a pain to keep track of the characters and their story lines. Without the flow, it's hard to feel for these characters. It has to be much more compelling to do a smaller part of the story and let the sequels come if they're able. This is good for fans of the books but I doubt others would find this compelling.

Bear in mind that Alatriste is one of the few Spanish action/adventure movies out there. That's not the typical genre for Spanish filmmakers due mainly to budget reason as it's really hard to compete with Hollywood's blockbusters.If you have read the books or are familiar with Spanish history during 17th century you'll really enjoy and fully appreciate this gem. Atmosphere = real 17th century. Costumes = great. Music = great. Acting = great. Directing = great (for Spanish cinema). Script = good (if you read the books, otherwise may look incomplete). It would be better to do it in 2 or 3 movies.

This movie is a deeply disappointing one because it feels like it could have been great and yet it barely achieves mediocre. The acting is great, lead by Viggo Mortenson as the title character. Apparently his accent is off and he sounds strange to Spanish speakers, but since I don't know any Spanish it didn't affect me one way or the other. The cinematography is superb, reminding me of nothing so much as the Spanish renaissance paintings that it seems to be imitating. Occasionally this leads to overly staged scenes, such as the surrender of Breda where everyone poses as they did in Velasquez's famous painting, but more often it achieves a rare level of beauty. The story, or what little I can make of it, is solid if dense. Essentially, the movie gets everything perfect except one thing. The script.I understand that they were adapting a series of novels but did they have to combine them all into one film? Couldn't they have spread them out some? Even if they never finished the series they could have gotten a few solid pictures out of doing that. As it is the film is a jumbled mess. You never get to understand any of the characters as they simply react to things in ways that don't make sense. Why did Inigo decide to kill his lover's uncle? Why did Alatriste change his mind about marrying his? They don't explain either of these things, and those questions are just the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps someone who read the books will know these answers but you shouldn't have to read the books to understand the movie. Characters come and go without any reasons or motivations. Alatriste meets someone who he seems to get along with, and then later he seems to truly hate him for no reason. Incidentally, there are too many characters to keep track of. Especially since everyone looks alike in those beards.The other major problem with the writing is in the way events are connected. Scenes follow each other rapidly that have no connection with each other. Again, this all comes from trying to include too much. They jump from Flanders to Madrid, then back to Flanders, then Madrid (But ten years later), then somewhere on the coast, and finally back in Flanders again. At the end of the movie the two main characters are civilians in Madrid and then it suddenly cuts to them in military uniforms with a subtitle reading "Battle of Rocroi, 1643." No explanation is given either to how they got there or why that battle mattered at all. In fact, there is never any context given throughout the film. You get the impression through dialog that Spain's empire is failing but you never understand why or how. Again, Spanish students might know all of this like the back of their hand but nobody who hasn't studied this period will understand any of it. In short, this movie is near perfect except for an absolutely rotten script that ruins everything.

"Alatriste" is a masterpiece that will undoubtedly be misunderstood for years to come...though set in the same period as the more familiar and light-hearted "Three Musketeers", it is one of the few films that realistically portrays life in that era. This is a much darker view of the age: only the wealthy elite live well, and the degree to which others toady to them is the degree to which they too, will live well and succeed. Justice is rare; starvation and poverty, religious fanaticism is rife. Spain, the great power of Europe, is well on the road to economic collapse after years of squandering its wealth and manpower in costly wars under the weak and incompetent Hapsburg monarch Felipe IV. Its valiant surviving veterans like Alatriste are given nothing but the proud but empty title of hidalgo and are reduced, if not to begging, to hiring themselves out for private vendettas and treacherous assassinations plotted by one or another vicious "noble" faction, thus incurring the enmity of another faction. This is not your usual flamboyantly flimsy swashbuckler, but a grim and gritty picture of the near destitute and perilous life of a soldier who must support himself as best he can with the only skills he has as a mercenery for hire in civilian life. This is more of a film depicting the specific problems of life in this period and setting than it is about a story plot; it is a profound meditation on a great and glorious imperialist nation eroding from within, slowly going the course of ruin and as such it gives one of the most unforgettable glimpses of a bygone age ever to be captured on film. It's a magnificent work of art but will probably be appreciated only by those with a great interest in history which, alas, is not the general public.