The High Crusade

A mildly amusing film. And I do put an emphasis in the word "mildly". It doesn't go further than that.

You get farcical treatments of cliche subject matter. The wide feels underappreciated, the barbarians just want to pillage, the advanced aliens try to explain basic scientific knowledge to medieval idiots, etc. And of course everything gets wrapped up in a quick and tidy happy ending.

It's a bunch of tripe capped off with an insufferable final tracked that puts quotes from the movie to an ugly techno beat.

The original book was a bit farcical and silly in its own right, but it had ambiance and an intriguing concept. It had runaway ambition and intrigue and sincere portrayals of betrayal, romantic and otherwise. This film doesn't amount to even a fraction of what the book was and in no way deserves to bear its name.

Honourable Mentions: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). Probably the darkest of the Disney movies. Turns a serious novel into a musical with comedy elements. It wasn't bad, though.

In one of his books Terry Pratchett describes a light that would "make Steven Spielberg reach for his copyright lawyer." I've always felt Mr. Andersons book was like that light. It was the sort of thing Spielberg or Lucas or the Disney studios could grab and run with. Unfortunately this version is a stumbling fumble. Hopefully Lucas or Spielberg or someone will read the book one day and go for a remake and we can forget that this wasted effort ever existed. My children bought me the DVD of this movie because I'd told them for years that someday the book would be a great motion picture...they still apologize now and then for not watching it first and buying me a tie instead.

This film has almost everything it needs to be first class science fiction, except a decent screenwriter. The effects, makeup, photography, and direction are all perfectly acceptable for the story. However, the script is a disaster. This is a highly inept adaptation of Poul Anderson's classic sifi novel. Most of the basic premise, and introduction, are preserved. However, the rest is terrible. Anderson's competent crusader knights are replaced by idiots and buffoons. The subtle humor of the original is replaced by inane slapstick. The result is implausible, and embarrassing. If they had simply cut for time, without trying to replace or add, the film would have been vastly better.

Poul Anderson's book "The High Crusade" is an enormous milestone in the rare genre of historic alien invasions, a true work of fine penmanship, and this movie doesn't hold a candle to it.

In all honesty though, alien invasion movies, and historical realism movies generally require huge budgets to be done "right" by Hollywood standards, and combining the two sounds to me like a movie maker's nightmare. While it would be great to see the original book done justice, the budget needed for an epic battle between knights and aliens isn't likely to be forthcoming.

The movie version of the high crusade sticks with the original premise, but due to the restrictions of a very tight budget, it was necessary to scale everything back. The special effects are sparing, the sets are repetitive, the script is a little worn around the edges, and the actors are, for the most part, not huge names.

All things considered, the movie does especially well for what it has. The slick, smart humor of Poul Anderson is cut out to make room for a lot of silly European humor, but thankfully, it all works great. Certainly, there are not a lot of surprises, but the gist remains funny, and it is the first movie I've seen my boorish father laugh at in over five years, which has to say something.

Also, the movie is pretty clean. The worst language is the repetitive use of "bloody," "bastards," "Hell," and "Devil's." The bloodiest wound in the movie is a bump on the head. Two battle scenes, and a severed leg don't spill a drop though. A certain amount of reproductive humor adds a bit of spice to the movie, but this is done in as tasteful a manner as the matterial can be done.

Certainly, a lot was lost from the book, but the movie that is left makes for several good laughs, and memorable one-liners.

A very bizarre movie but highly amusing, at least it was years ago, when I watched it on video. Back then, all the aliens had comedy Sean Connery accents which the English could not understand. All very high camp and kind of stupid, but definitely amusing. However, when I watched it recently on DVD, all the Aliens spoke alien gibberish which subsequently required subtitles. This lost a massive amount of the comedy value of the original version. It seems a shame that the directors or whoever, would mess with the original format when the end result is vastly less entertaining. The acting is still pretty good (for such a daft film) as are the effects. I guess the budget was pretty low but it doesn't show as much as you might expect. Certainly it has a better production values than so called "B movie classics" such as Spaceballs. For those who've read the book and are now complaining that the film is not the same, hard luck, get over it. As a movie, it was pretty good (originally).