Preview: The Three Musketeers

PG-13 for explosions, bullet dodging, airborne warships, and all the other historical touches that made the 1840s novel such a well-loved classic

Release Date: October 21, 2011

My favorite lecture in Intro to European History was definitely the one about how four Frenchmen saved the continent from an armada of flying war machines.

“17th century France was a land of deadly female assassins and sophisticated trap door technologies,” I remember my professor saying.“The kingdom was ruled primarily by a politics of fear, leaving many citizens struggling to leap away from fireballs just in the nick of time. The lower classes did not speak modern French, but an earlier form of the language, which consisted of ominous predictions and action-movie quips.”

“What did they look like, Professor?” someone asked.

“Well,” he said, stroking his professorial beard, “one of them looked kind of like a long-haired Michael Cera, with about as much credibility as an action hero.” ~Ben Orlin