Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer

The Adventures of Captain Alatriste is a lengthy series of novels by Spanish author Arturo Perez Reverte. In Alatriste, director Augustin Diaz Yanes takes the sensible course of adapting only the first of these novels, introducing the character and his page/chronicle Inigo, their friends and enemies at court, and their involvement in the upper echelons of 17th century Spanish politics through Alatriste's unlikely rescue of the visiting Prince of Wales and Duke of Buckingham.

Oh, no; wait. what I should have said is that he shoves the central plots of the first five novels into a single, sumptuous two-hour-plus epic. At the very least, I can say that it never drags.

Make no mistake, this is a film that demands your attention and mocks you mercilessly if you let it slide. It's in Spanish, for starters, so if you're not a Spanish speaker, you'd better be watching the subtitles. The plot is also pretty Machiavellian, so try to keep up, and given that most of the characters are swarthy, mustachioed soldiers in the Spanish tercios, the casual viewer could easily get lost.

That said, it is a magnificently shot movie, with superb action sequences, and it never gets bogged down in all that politics. I suspect that I would have been in absolute throes of ecstasy over the cinematography if I knew more about Velasquez, and I was pretty impressed as it was.

Worth a watch, certainly, although it's two hours in which you won't really be chatting much.