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Musketeer (Less Ambitious Cut), The - Fanedit.org
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I'm a big fan of most every Musketeer movie I've ever watched. There's just something about the swashbuckling and characters. That being said, The Musketeer is probably the weakest of the cinematic outings that I've watched. This is party due to the Reader's Digest approach to the narrative, lacking character development and teen level romance/dialogue. Another offset is Xin Xin Xiong's fight choreography. It's impressive and fun fight choreography, but it just doesn't work for me visually with the French backdrop and story. That last sword fight felt like the precursor to the Revenge of the Sith fight on Mustafar. It even has the swinging clashes. Anyway, I rewatched the movie and watched it specifically to see if the shots would flow if some of the more Eastern choreography was removed. I think it could be achieved and now I'm planning out just how that could occur. I looked up the translation of Xin Xin Xiong and from what I found, his name has a meaning along the lines of Great Ambition or Lofty Aspiration. I thought it might be interesting to name this edit idea The Musketeer: The Less Ambitious Cut, as that's basically what it would be.
General approach
Remove some of Xin Xin Xiong's more ambitious choreography that suspends belief
Remove cringey dialogue
I've scoured the internet to see if I can find a blu ray of this movie and the only one I can find is a German release. There seams to have been quite the battle with the studio/publisher that appears to have all but erased this film and removed the ability to access it in the states. I'm also struggling to find a copy of the German blu ray that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. What I've found so far is $50+. I'm not willing to drop that much on a sub par movie. I've also looked into digital copies, but Amazon detects VPN's and doesn't allow their files to be accessed, so the streaming downloads seem to be out. SO, I may just use the dvd and try to make it not super ugly, but if anyone has a line on a good deal for the German blu ray feel free to reach out. It's been so long messing with DVD's that I don't know if I even remember how to prep the files so they're in the correct 23.976 fps. Anyway, this will most likely sit in the ideas area unless I can find a way to get amazon.de to work or iTunes.
Original Run Time
144 min
Fanedit Run Time
136 min
Total Time Cut
9 min
Total Time Added
1 min
Format
1080p DVD Upscale at 6gbps and 5.1 audio
Brief Synopsis:
I love the Three Musketeers. It's a timeless tale that I probably played out thousands of times as a kid. 2001's The Musketeer is a mixed bag. Aesthetically it's on point. The sets and costumes are great. The dialogue, narrative and choreography however leave much to be desired. This is the early 2000's MTV version of Disney's Three Musketeers. As a result, it's all flash and no substance. With the Matrix and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon bringing Eastern choreography to the forefront of American cinema, it seemed like everyone wanted to replicate the look and feel to get a slice of the financial pie. Unfortunately, movies like Mission Impossible 2, The One and The Musketeer lost sight of their storytelling in favor of choreographed fights and bedazzlement.
Intention:
This edit will attempt to remove Xin-Xin Xiong's fight and stunt choreography that distracts from the immersion and believability during action scenes to create a straightforward Musketeer action flick.
Additional Notes:
This edit will be sourced from the DVD and upscaled to 1080p using VidCoder as the Blu Ray was impossible to find and Universal appears to have removed any previous HD digital options in the US. While the image is less blurry on HD TV's and monitors after the upscale, artifacts from the source DVD are still present. While these could be smoothed over, what detail is scene would suffer from an aggressive denoising.
Editing Details:
Any scene that made me roll my eyes or felt extremely out of place was removed. The dialogue and poor ADR in this movie is unfortunately unavoidable as we do need some of it to move the story along.
Cuts and Additions:
+Added custom FE Warning and title cards (Special thanks to Tremault for the awesome FE WB style logo!)
-+Replaced original text scroll intro with custom fade in and out text
-Cut opening credits
-+Rearranged tavern fight and cut over the top Xin-Xin Xiong choreography (barrel and rafter fighting)
-Cut woman creeping on D'Artagnan about polishing his "sword"
-+Cut and rearranged the horse carriage fight scene to remove Xin-Xin Xiong's more over the top choreography (removed over the top horse riding, carriage and horse jumping, woods scene, etc.)
~Zoomed in when D'Artagnan ignites the gun powder barrels so it isn't clearly seen that the bridge has zero damage in an attempt to make it somewhat believable that Febre would turn around and leave
-Trimmed D'Artagnan and Francesca's love scene and swimming scene
-Remove the ridiculous twirling sword when Febre fights Rochefort. Now he simply and quickly dispatches him
-Removed all scenes of D'Artagnan rope fighting on the tower
-Cut Francesca's line to D'Artagnan "I'm not dead. Now can you please go kill him?" as the line and delivery are horrible, imho
~Massively trimmed D'Artagnan and Febre's duel to remove as much of the ridiculous ladder fighting scenes as possible. It's now a frenetic, albeit focused and concise, duel. I think RotS stole a lot of this choreography for the Battle of the Heroes scenes.....Their duel is also broken up into two separate pieces with previous Musketeer battle scenes inserted to allow D'Artagnan and Febre to make necessary movements without having to see the ladder fighting.
-Removed Buckingham talking to the Musketeers and D'Artagnan's horrible ADR line to Cardinal Richelieu "Forgive me father for I will sin. One night I will come for you".
-Removed Francesca's line "I'm not made of lace" and her pulling D'Artagnan into the carriage making him fall
+Slightly extended closing credits music to match extension of credits.
+Added faneditor scrolling credits and logo
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