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).

Thankfully I've not read the book because this incredibly silly medieval comedy entertained me from start to finish. Some friends made a double-feature with this and A Knight's Tale and I Knew next to nothing about it, which added to my enjoyment because the alien focus came somewhat unexpected. Mild Spoilers: It tells the tale of a knight and his soldiers that kidnap a spaceship and try to use it against the Saracens in the Crusades, but the ship ends up heading to an alien planet and they must fight using their medieval mentality. The movie looks nice for a mid-nineties European flick, and even some cheesy special fx add to the fun so, no problems here.The humor is what will certainly put some people off, but if you dig flicks like Monty Python's Holy Grail, Brancaleone, A Knight's Tale or even Kung-Pow, you may find something to like here.The annoying french bard reminded me of Asterix.

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 had done all the screenwriters' work for them. With a solid historical backbone, subtle wit, and an engaging story, his novel was enough to relegate the writing of the script to a fill-in-the-blank exercise. Instead, the movie emerges as a pale ripoff of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, yet with even more historical inaccuracies (HIGH CRUSADE has Jerusalem falling to Saracens in 1345, not 1187, and even has a trio of Saracens attacking a keep in England!)The dialogue does flirt with intelligence, as when John Rhys-Davies's character, Brother Parvus, insistently tries to "educate" spacefaring aliens about the Holy Trinity and geocentric cosmology, but ultimately it's just a tease. Things quickly descend into weak farce, and some devices, such as the aliens' construction of an evil human clone, are pure throwaway filler.I sure hope Poul Anderson never saw this film. My fear is that he would never sell film rights for one of his excellent books again, which would be a shame, since in the right hands some fine movies could be produced.