Somewhere between being typecast in Star Wars in the early 80's and being typecast in Batman in the mid-90s Mark Hamill had to find some way to pay the bills. On the upside that era included the wildly successful "Wing Commander" video game of which he owns a percentage. The downside included several trips to the direct-to-video shelves. Unfortunately, Time Runner was on of them.

Time Runner finds The Artist Formerly Known As Skywalker playing a very scraggly refugee in the midst of an alien invasion about 20 years from now. They live in one of those odd, post-apocalypse futures where everything is a smoking crater and man has evolved beyond fingernail clippers and soap. Yet judging by the outfits, business at The Gap seems to be booming.

Anyway Raynor (Luke) and his cohorts are trying desperately to find the launch codes for an old Russian missle base from a space station so that they can launch an assault on alien starships which are lobbing lasers at our civilization and turning our cities into charcoal briquettes. Having no manner in which to fight the intergalactic menace we humans are getting our asses handed to us. Apparently having not forgotten all that Yoda taught him, Mark has to use all the power of his Jedi mind to find a way to keep the aliens from turning humanity into slaves or sweepings, whichever comes first.

In ways too complicated for the screenwriters to explain, the station is destroyed by a battlecruiser just as Raynor escapes through a wormhole and lands headfirst into the year that the movie was made, 1992. Raynor falls asleep in a barn a few feet from his downed craft which is then discovered by two wanderers from the present. That is, until one of those movie Generals shows up and begins babbling the usual military-style garbeldy-gook about "matters of national security".

The aliens operate on the plane of the "Idiot Plot", that being a plot so ill-concieved that the movie would be over in five minutes if they weren't complete idiots. Not only could they not hit the side of a barn but I think these boneheads are more likely to get lost on the WAY to the farm. It's possible that they could simply give up and shoot themselves but they would probably miss their own temples!

While Raynor attempts to change the future, we keep flashing back (actually forward) to the day-players who are cast as Raynor's crew who are still trying to find a way to combat the giant space aliens. The scene where the complex is overrun by alien humanoids is just plain nutty. Useless extras are dispatched but anyone with a moderate speaking role can stand in plain sight and never get a scratch. I think the aliens much have bit-player-seeking bullets in their guns. I really wanted to see them attempt a suicide mission by blowing up a city block with a missle. I can imagine a smoking crater and right in the middle is a small untouch patch of earth on which stands the three members of the lead cast.

All's well that ends well, Luke succeeds at his mission but no one is ever able to understand why nobody slapped the screenwriter who named the alien Senator, Senator Neila (read that name carefully). Ohhh, wayt'll I get my hands on him!!