The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan & Milady (2023)
Martin Bourboulon's two-part French production returns The Three Musketeers to its own national cinema after decades of predominantly English-language versions, and treats Dumas's novel with real seriousness rather than as costume-drama spectacle. Named Best Film of 2023 by The Guardian, it's widely regarded as one of the more thoughtful modern adaptations, while still making deliberate, substantial additions to the source material.
Two Entirely Invented Characters
The most significant departure from Dumas is the introduction of two characters with no basis in the novel at all: Mathilde d'Herblay, established as Aramis's sister, and Hannibal, a musketeer based on France's first documented Black musketeer, played by Ralph Amoussou. Neither exists in Dumas's text. This is a deliberate choice by screenwriters Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière to diversify and expand the ensemble beyond what the 1844 novel provides, reflecting a modern approach to historical adaptation that several recent prestige productions have taken: introducing new characters grounded in real historical possibility rather than simply restaging the original cast.
Porthos, Reimagined With a Different Private Life
This version portrays Porthos as bisexual, a characterization with no basis in the novel, where Porthos's most developed romantic subplot involves a wealthy older female patroness he's financially dependent on rather than any explored same-sex relationships. This is a modernizing addition rather than an adaptation of existing textual material, consistent with the production's broader approach of using the novel's setting and premise as a foundation for new character work rather than treating every detail as fixed.
Constance's Kidnapping Restructures the Second Film's Plot
The second film centers heavily on Constance Bonacieux's kidnapping as the engine driving D'Artagnan's alliance with Milady, a plot mechanism that compresses and reorders several of the novel's separate strands (the diamond studs mission, Milady's manipulation of Felton, Constance's eventual fate) into a more tightly unified thriller structure. The novel keeps these threads more loosely connected across many chapters; the film pulls them into a single, forward-driving kidnapping plot for narrative economy across two films rather than the source material's more diffuse, serialized structure.
Eva Green's Milady: Restoring the Novel's Intelligence
As discussed in this site's own blog piece on these films, Green's performance leans into Milady's true competence and psychological sharpness rather than pure seduction, arguably restoring more of what makes the novel's version of the character formidable (see this site's deeper character study) than several prior English-language adaptations managed.
Richelieu, Treated With Real Political Weight
Éric Ruf's Cardinal Richelieu is given real political motivation and screen time to develop his scheming as statecraft rather than simple villainy, closer to the novel's own more ambivalent treatment, and to the real historical Richelieu discussed in this site's dedicated piece, than the flattened cardboard-villain version many earlier film adaptations settled for.
Visual and Tonal Fidelity, Even Where Plot Diverges
Shot across 150 days at real French locations including the Louvre Palace and Château de Fontainebleau, with over 2,000 costumes and 9,000 extras, the production invests heavily in grounded, tactile period authenticity rather than the CGI-heavy spectacle of the 2011 version. Even where the screenplay adds invented characters and restructures plot mechanics, the film's visual and tonal register, muddy, violent, politically serious, arguably sits closer to the novel's actual atmosphere than any English-language version since Richard Lester's 1973 film.
Read the source material at The Three Musketeers, or see this site's full essay comparing these films to the novel.