They Say Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

It's been a long, strange week. Lots of thunderstorms have come in and out of the area, which makes me nervous for hurricane season. I mean, we get rain in the spring and early summer, but not severe storms with lightning, thunder, wind, and hail, and not several times a week. Yikes. Our little section of the Eastern Shore hasn't been directly hit by a hurricane since the sixties. Makes me wonder if we're due.

So while the yard sale of several weeks ago was a complete bust, our trip down south to a local flea market was not. Roomie and I loaded up both of our cars and sold about a third of what we took (not quite half). Lots of big stuff went away, and we both have extra cash for Shore Leave next month (woo hoo, it's almost here!). Plus I got a nice tan, and local veggies were cheap at one of the stalls. Definitely a win.

Needless to say, getting up 4:30 am to trek to the flea market and being in a sun all day made for fatigue. So I vegged on a couch for a while and watched the end of Serenity on the SciFi Channel. As it ended, they played a preview for their Saturday night movie of the week, and I didn't pay attention until the voice over guy said "starring Enterprise's Connor Trinneer, and Heroes' James Kyson Lee."

I perked up. I decided to give it a chance.

The movie was called Star Runners. The effects were pretty cheesy. The storyline was very derivative. But you know what? The acting was overall very good, so I found myself entertained for two hours. Plus, scruffy Connor is always a win for me. I liked seeing him play the lead/hero for a change. Even if he was playing some odd amalgamation of Malcolm Reynolds and Han Solo.

It was Serenity, Pitch Black and Star Wars, rolled up with a small side dish of X-Men (gotta love the "next stage of human evolution" line).

Here's the gist (SPOILERS): a pair of smugglers (*cough*) played by Trinneer and Lee are captured by the insidious, intergalactic ruling body (*cough*) and blackmailed into helping them retrieve a package from a space station. Instead of a package, they find a frozen girl in a box (*COUGH*) who is very, very special (*cough*COUGH*). They get off the station on board a public transport ship, which then crash lands on an uncharted planet (*cough*), and only a handful survive. They aren't alone on the planet--giant carnivorous insects live there, but they only come out at a certain time of day (*cough*), which had something to do with solar flares. Survivors start getting eaten. We start to see there's something unusual about the frozen chick (like rapid healing, impervious to radiation, being a human torch, those sorts of things). (*snort*) Turns out the insidious, intergalactic ruling body was part of some slimy cover-up to do with both the uncharted planet and frozen chick's home town. The good guys want to get the word out and make sure people know this. **COUGH** *gasp* *wheeze*

Anywho, the movie was built on the spare parts of things we've seen and were done better, but it was still entertaining. There was a death I didn't expect when it happened, and the climax was a little unbelievable. They didn't do the cliched "rugged hero gets the girl" thing at the end.

And like I said, scruffy Connor is made of WIN!