“All for one, and one for all!” The immortal catch-cry is bellowed by a beloved group of Frenchmen in very large hats, moments before they engage in valorous swordplay. The Three Musketeers have been a cultural mainstay since 1844, and there have been countless screen retellings of their adventures since as far back as 1903.

So why not supercharge this exceedingly well-trodden tale with a duology of films; crammed with kinetic swordplay, long takes, and sets so filthy you can practically smell the streets of Paris?

In 2023, that’s exactly what we got. The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan (Les Trois Mousquetaires: D’Artagnan) was what the saga had been begging for – a big-screen adaptation with genuine cinematic heft, incredible production, and a steadfast devotion to the source material. With a whopping €70m budget and director Martin Bourboulon at the helm, it swiftly became France’s biggest box-office hit of the year.

The titular trio – Vincent Cassel as Athos, Pio Marmaï as Porthos, and Romain Duris as Aramis – are somehow fully realised the moment they appear on screen; deeply careworn and likable. Meanwhile the central hero, D’Artagnan, is played with youthful vigour and lust for adventure by François Civil.

The story itself is a tale of derring-do and political intrigue: a power struggle is under way in 17th-century France, between the scheming Cardinal Richelieu (Éric Ruf) and Captain de Tréville (Marc Barbé). Tréville is captain of the musketeers – the brave, swashbuckling guardsmen of King Louis XIII (Louis Garrel) – and the cardinal is using every tool in his arsenal to bury Tréville, destroy the musketeers, and run France from the shadows.

It opens on D’Artagnan en route to Paris to become a musketeer. In his possession is a letter of recommendation, a dream of becoming a hero, and an urge to fight anyone who so much as looks at him wrong. Almost immediately, he wanders headfirst into one of Richelieu’s plots – and a whole world of trouble.

But before D’Artagnan can carry out any actual musketeering, he accidentally lands himself in a duel – to the death – with all three musketeers, leading to perhaps the funniest and most action-packed sequence in the film. The fracas sees D’Artagnan adopted by the Musketeers as one of their own, and soon they’re embroiled in a plot by Cardinal Richelieu to catch Queen Anne (Vicky Krieps) in a secret tryst with the Duke of Buckingham (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd). D’Artagnan also swiftly falls into the orbit of Constance Bonacieux (Lyna Khoudri), whose role in the cardinal’s plot proves to be more than it seems at first glance.

The utterly thrilling two-and-a-half-hour film ends with a deeply moreish cliffhanger. But this was always planned to be a two-part saga, and in December of the same year, The Three Musketeers: Milady was released to thunderous critical acclaim. A sequel? In the same year? Magnifique!

Picking up where part one left off, this bombastic follow-up zeroes in on the true villain of the piece: the brilliant, devious, and incredibly complex Milady de Winter, played by Eva Green. Milady proves more than a match for the musketeers, who, thanks to Richelieu’s cunning plot to pit the Catholic King Louis against the encroaching Protestant threat, are stretched too thin to respond swiftly enough to avert disaster.

The action set pieces from the first film are stunning, even balletic, but this time around there’s a gear shift towards the operatic. There’s one particular sequence where Tréville and his musketeers carry out a daring night raid on a fortress held by the rebels. It’s rare for period pieces to buckle this much swash, but Bourboulon and company don’t put a single foot wrong. It’s superb.

Why do the musketeers continue to resonate? Lawrence Ellsworth – who recently finished what many regard to be the finest translation of Alexandre Dumas’s decades-spanning musketeer series – summed it up beautifully. He said they address “the central challenge of a life worth living: how to find the courage to adhere to a personal code of honor in the face of pressure from society and oppressive authority. How, in short, to do right”.

Perhaps these two films made such a massive impact, first in France and then the world over, because they perfectly encapsulate this aforementioned musketeer spirit. But it’s also worth noting that they are the first French film adaptations of Dumas’s stories in more than 30 years. Maybe these films are like D’Artagnan and the musketeers themselves – the longer you hold them back, the harder they’ll fight when they finally see some action. Here’s hoping we get a third film as soon as humanly possible.

• The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan and Milady are available to stream via SBS On Demand in Australia and via Starz in the US. Find more recommendations of what to stream in Australia here