Don't you guys think so?
I personally loved the French cavalry charge and the different warshouts
"Pour le Roi! " vs. " ESPAGNA! "
Ubber cool clash of arms.
signature :
...something deep and overwhelming...
Well realy it was not full 100% accurate.
When enghien saw than his cavalry charges and pikeman charges where not enough to broke the last tercio square he just send his muskett soldiers to shoot the spaniards because they where out of amno.
Also moved his artillery to close shoot them.
I think they could have put a little more effort in the battle. There was like 50 men on the Spanish side, is that an army? Nonetheless they put heaps of extras on the Madrid street scenes. I didn't imagine the battle of Rocroi to have been fought with 50 men or so. Even if they couldn't afford real people they could have used CGG or something. The battle looks kinda lame, sorry.
shareCGI? CGI would have ruined the historical depiction of the battle. To me, CGI is like makeup, so it should be used lightly, if you use it too much you can ruin a scene (not to mention the whole movie...)
There is a fine line between trying to be historically accurate and becoming totally "anal-retentive" about historical facts, this movie did a great job reaching that compromise. IMHO, Alatriste was great. I have a tendency to like historical movies that are raw and undigested. I also tend to like movies that other people seem to hate with passion. This includes classic movies such as Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Barry Lindon and also new movies like Alexander and of course, this one.
If they wanted historical depiction they should have put more men on that field. You say you liked Alexander yet the battles featured on that film have mostly special effects and it looks amazing. I just can't believe that a battle between the French and Spanish armies had so few men. I thought there'd be thousands of men. I know the Spanish army was *beep* up at the time, they didn't have men and they had rebellions in many parts of the empire, but it just looked like if they had run out of budget when they filmed that scene and had to complete it with the only extras they could afford. They should have put more effort or money on that.
shareIt was supposed to be 8 hours into the battle, when there weren't any more thousands. But in any rate, IMO it was as effective as filling the screen with extras. You watch the individual faces and bodies in a way unusual to viewers used to American movies. ADY has a strongly individual way of shooting that I found quite interesting and effective, especially in he way he uses foreground in crowd (and battle) scenes.
shareArturo Pérez-Reverte said that if the battle shown was going to be that last cavalry charge, he would have wanted thousands of dead people lying around the living, because that's what it was like after hours of killing on both sides. However, Agustín Díaz Yanes made an artistic decision, not a historically accurate one. He wanted to depict the last hours in the life of Diego Alatriste, in a moment when he has lost almost everything, symbolising the decline of Spain. Visually, this translates into those shots of only a few Spaniards left, looking like mere specks of dust in the middle of a desolated plateau hammered by the sun. Whoever is watching that has to think 'these guys have got no escape, this is going to be their last stand'. If he had crowded the scene with many extras, that sense of being against insurmountable odds at that point in the battle would have been lost visually. It wouldn't have looked like the few versus the many.
shareI just figured everyone else had run away.
shareI agree, the battle of Rocroi was completely LAME. It looked like 50 Spaniards out there in that field. If anyone is interested, try comparing old maps of the battlefield and fortress, with the Googlearth satellite view, not much has changed from the looks of it.
sharethose are not reiters a. those are french ligth cavalry. was Henry of navarre who reformed the french ligth cavalry much before G adolphus did improving his quality and numbers .
while the spanish rely on the mercenarys like everyone at this age the spanish etrcios where not mercenarys but profesional forces than obey just one master the king of spain.
the battle or final scene is just the last stand of one of the last 2 tercios on combat .
not the whole battle .
the last square would be the tercio of mercader or idiaquez . the spanish numbers on the battle where btw 3000 and 5000 the units where not on full force as usual.
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According to my research, the Spaniards DID accept the offer by the Duke, and retired with their colours...so historically not accurate at all in the end....
shareIt's been years since this was posted, but I thought I'd correct a few errors in it.
mercenaries are professional soldiers per definition. thats just for your a).
moreover, the economic fact in that concept "mercenary" makes your point of an abstract term like (national) loyalty useless. one can sure not reduce the theoretical term "mercenary" just to money and has to add (abstract) political loyality. a point our modern world still has its problem with (just to put the modern phenomena here)! so, obeying a king's order, or the field-commander's order, to be precise if you please, has nothing to do with your nationalistic reference, speaking of all spanish/french units. its much more an hirarchic moment, or, the spoken of above profesionalism. means in short/generaly speaking: who will pay me i will follow: pour le roi.
I did not like the movie as a whole, but the last battle scene was intense. I did not find it unrealitic, too - as far as I understand, the Spanish tercios were completely annihilated then, so just one tercio on the battlefield makes sense if it is the last one.
shareI read it's supposed to be the Battle of Rocroi but in real life when the Spanish were offered surrender they accepted it.
shareIt's not historically accurate for sure, due to the lone fact that Alatriste is a completely fictional character. Aside from that, I have to agree that the battle scenes are pretty well executed. It's a rare thing to see land armies from that era clash on the screen, so that's nice. If only the battles were longer in this movie...
Scale is another thing, the battle of Rocroi featured like 50.000 soldiers, so the scale of it as it was being depicted is ridiculous. And the Siege of Breda never ended because of some Spaniard crew crawling in a tunnel and blowing up a grenade. Well, you can't have it all.
"And the Siege of Breda never ended because of some Spaniard crew crawling in a tunnel and blowing up a grenade."
The point of the scene was that what they did was useless because Breda had already surrendered. It's emphasizing the waste of war and men in war.
the final scene of battle if just a aprt of the whole battle and the last stand of a spanish tercios by the time of the films the rest of the army and cavalry where of leaving 4 tercios than mixed on 2 to resists.
on the sisge of breda where digged more than 15kms of tunnels to blow up the wall and actually 3 of them worked and one bastion fall into spaniard hands .
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