2000s Space Movie Led By Star Trek’s Best Engineer, Has Been Erased From Existence

By Joshua Tyler
| Published 5 seconds ago

In 2009, with time running out for the Sci-Fi Channel, which was soon to change its name to SyFy so it could run less science fiction, they threw one final Hail Mary in the form of a made-for-TV space movie called Star Runners. To make it work, they plucked the best cast member out of Star Trek: Enterprise and made him their lead. Then they botched everything else.

Star Runners starts out with old-school pulp lettering in the credits and an outer space chase sequence. That seems sci-fi enough, doesn’t it? Former Trek helmsman Connor Trinneer stars as Tycho, and Heroes’ best-buddy James Kyson Lee is Lei Chen, a pair of transport pilots or “star runners” with an illegal shipment to slip past the feds.

At first, despite the cheaply constructed sets around them, the duo’s chemistry works. They’re going for a Han Solo/Chewbacca dynamic here, with our heroes as smugglers shaking patrols and cracking wise at one another.

It doesn’t last, and Star Runners never quite works. Trinneer and Lee soon devolve into playing their characters as if they’ve just taken a heavy dose of sleeping pills, despite the fact that the script seems to be trying, even if it’s not succeeding.

Unfortunately, Tycho and Chen are soon captured and blackmailed by the government into picking up a mysterious shipment and dragging it back to them. The bad acting in Star Runners continues as they hop in their ship and jump into hyperspace using special effects taken straight out of the original Star Wars.

That’s not a complaint, mind you; some of the outer space effects in Star Runners have a great, retro feel, and when they don’t feel like an homage to something else, they turn into a straight ripoff of the more recent Battlestar Galactica, which isn’t really such a bad thing. The outer space effects nearly work, but before they cost them too much money, everyone ends up on the ground.

Tycho and Chen get the package. It’s a girl with amnesia, and they immediately dress her to look exactly like Alice in Resident Evil. It’s the same outfit, in a slightly different color, but it’s obvious that the costuming department has read the script and realized that we’re headed for a Resident Evil ripoff.

Or maybe it’s more of a Resident Evil, Pitch Black ripoff since it happens on an alien planet and we’re fighting head-decapitating spiders instead of the undead. Either way, as soon as our mystery girl gets dressed, it’s off to find an excuse to strand them all on a dangerous planet.

The problem here is that Star Runners eventually ends up where every bad Sci-Fi Channel project from that era does: fighting badly rendered CGI monsters. Once upon a time, when you didn’t have the budget necessary to make your sci-fi flick happen, you’d throw in an alien in a bikini or something to distract your audience from the bad matte paintings and cardboard control panels.

By 2009, we were long past the age of movies like Species. Those space babes had been replaced by computer-generated monsters.

So after the most PG strip club scene in the universe, Star Runners skips past the idea of bikini babes and instead hides its puritanical inefficiencies behind half-assed CGI spiders. When it comes to those spiders, it’s quantity over quality.

The working theory here seems to be that the quality of the CGI monsters doesn’t matter as long as there are a lot of them. Having just sat through Star Runners for two hours, built almost entirely on this assumption, I’m pretty sure the opposite is true.

Star Runners was the last gasp of a different era, but also a prime example of what killed it. The Sci-Fi Channel died, partly because it leaned into low-effort movies like this one rather than the edgier content that made it relevant in the first place.

Today, Star Runners has been all but erased from existence. It’s not available on legal streaming anywhere, and good luck finding a DVD. Only a very few exist, and none of them are for sale on Amazon. Some are old copies of the official DVD; most are probably burned copies taken from someone’s grandpa’s DVR recording.

Maybe erasing Star Runners from existence is for the best. We’re all better off remembering Connor Trinneer’s career high point as Enterprise’s affable Trip Tucker.