rphaned by an attack on a colony by evil alien Raiders (who don't raid anything, they just blow stuff up), young Zed, resplendent in his futuristic Dr. Denton jammies, is raised in the wild by Starforce soldier Temetrian (Garrison). After rescue by Starforce, Temetrian petitions to have Zed trained as a member of Starforce, despite the fact that Zed was not grown in a test tube specifically to be a warrior, and the fact that, upon rescue, Zed looked old enough to start kindergarten but could only make baby "goo-goo" noises.
Now a young man, Zed (underwear model and Baywatch star Bergin) is having a hard time fitting in at Starforce. "Having parents doesn't make you inferior!" says Temetrian. Zed gets his chance to shine when gets his first solo mission, complete with an obligatory post-Empire Strikes Back navigation through an asteroid field: an array of dazzling special effects that look like an option on a 1995 Macintosh screensaver program.
But all is not right. As Zed lands, there is a fire in the communications center that looks as dire as the short that'd happen if someone spilled Starbucks on a keyboard. It still manages to destroy the entire comm center. Zed crash-lands and is rescued by beautiful bio-scientist Dahlia (Weber, of Son of the Beach). Her colony is bad shape. There's a water shortage, even though there's a dry riverbed and thick vegetation nearby—seems the technology of digging wells has been lost in this future.
Her fellow colonists are acting strangely; they are obviously keeping some dark secret about their planet. What does this secret have to do with Zed's mission, of which his superiors seem to have no knowledge? Is some dangerous plot afoot?
NNNNNNNNOOoOOOOOOOOOoOoOOOoo!
Starforce is one of those films so lifeless, so devoid of apparent enthusiasm on the part of those who made it, so without potential to actually be good, that it begs the question: Why was this made?
Stinkers like Alexander and Plan 9, for all their faults, try to be good, and represent some kind of vision, both artistic and financial. In terms of content and market placement, Starforce has about as much capacity for true liveliness as a frog's leg wired to a spent battery.
Kudos must go to the set builders, who do their best to create alien worlds and spacecraft out of scraps and duct tape, and to a few of the cast, most especially Nicholas Worth and Vernon Wells (Wez from The Road Warrior), who infuse comic-bookish fun in their performances. But Starforce is simply the lowest form of adequate, so aggressively and actively mediocre that it's more un-engaging than Robot Monster ever could be.
Any savvy film fan, let alone a genre film fan, can guess all of Starforce's plot from a single 10-minute snippet. The objects of film cliche parody on The Simpsons make up almost the entirety of Starforce, right down to the crying of "NNNNNNNNOOoOOOOOOOOOoOoOOOoo!" as one character watches another get gunned down (by weapons, it should be noted, that seem to fire both bullets and plasma rounds simultaneously).
Consider the fun and delirious charm that the makers of Doctor Who could muster with a minimum of money while gleefully plundering SF and movie cliches. Entertaining and even thoughtful SF does not require budget or originality. Therefore, Starforce does not require viewers' attention.
