"The rarest and most precious knowledge is not that which is imposed, but rather, that which is absorbed, inhaled almost, from the ephemeral substance of the world in which we are contained."
Moving on....
The film was visually superb, bringing to vivid life the squalor and the splendour of the times, and the plentiful fight scenes are authentically brutal in a way that Hollywood never dares manage. But plot-wise, it was a fragmented mess, mainly through having tried to condense episodes from five novels into one film. However, the characters and the of the period (Hapsburg Spain) were fascinating enough to make me curious about the actual novels by Arturo Pérez-Revete. I read his The Fencing Master several years ago and remember it as an interesting and elegant historical thriller - an Alexandre Dumas for the modern age.
Talking of Dumas, it's interesting to compare Alatriste's brutal moral ambiguity with the Three Musketeers' relatively merry swashbuckling. Alatriste is a better hero for our times than d'Artagnan, I think, we prefer the anti-hero nowadays.
