Most English-language versions of The Three Musketeers treat it as a swashbuckling romp first and a historical novel second — understandably, since that's the tone most adaptations, from the 1993 Disney version to Paul W. S. Anderson's steampunk 2011 take, have leaned into. Martin Bourboulon's two-part 2023 French production, Les Trois Mousquetaires: D'Artagnan and Les Trois Mousquetaires: Milady, makes a different choice, and it's worth looking at exactly where that choice pays off and where the films still have to compress a very long book.
What the Films Keep
The broad shape survives intact: d'Artagnan's arrival in Paris, the triple duel that becomes a friendship instead of three separate fights, the mission to England for the queen's diamond studs, and Milady's long, patient campaign of manipulation and revenge. Eva Green's Milady in particular leans into the character's genuine intelligence rather than playing her as a simple femme fatale — closer to how the novel actually writes her, as someone consistently smarter than the men trying to outmaneuver her, than how several English-language film versions have flattened the role.
The films also restore some of the novel's political seriousness. Dumas's Richelieu, as covered on this site's own Historical Figures page, is a genuinely formidable, even respected antagonist in the actual text — it's mostly the movies that turned him into a cartoon villain over the decades. The 2023 version pulls back toward the book's more ambivalent treatment, giving Richelieu's political reasoning real weight rather than reducing him to an obstacle for the heroes to outwit.
What Gets Cut, and Why That's Inevitable
Sixty-seven chapters of a serialized 1844 novel simply cannot fit into two films without real compression, and the cuts here are mostly the expected ones: subplots involving minor nobility, some of Porthos's comic set-pieces, and a fair amount of the novel's wry narratorial commentary, which doesn't have an obvious cinematic equivalent. What's interesting is less what got cut than what got kept in its place — the films spend real time on the siege of La Rochelle, a genuine historical event that many adaptations treat as a footnote, giving the story's second half a weight closer to the book's own balance between personal adventure and national politics.
A French Production, Finally
There's something notable about the story returning to French hands after decades of primarily English-language, English-accented versions. The 2023 films don't play the material as a costume romp for an outside audience; they play it as their own national epic, which changes the texture even when the plot beats are identical. It's the same shift in perspective you get reading the original novel itself rather than a version filtered through a different country's assumptions about what French history is supposed to feel like — see our piece on translation for more on how much that kind of filtering shapes the English reading experience too.
If you've seen the films and want the source material, The Three Musketeers is here in full, or start with the d'Artagnan Romances reading order to plan out the whole trilogy.