There’s not much for anyone to like in the Star Trek: Section 31 movie

[Karlston]

Even for fans of Discovery or franchise completists, this one is hard to watch.

First floated as a part of Deep Space Nine's Dominion War arc, the concept of "Section 31" has been divisive among Star Trek fans. Here's the idea: Buried deep within Starfleet exists an anonymous, ruthless intelligence agency that operates out of sight of most Federation citizens and Starfleet officers. Section 31 exists outside of typical Federation safeguards and restrictions, getting its hands dirty so that others in the Federation can pretend that dirt doesn't exist.

 

Subsequent Trek series would sometimes make a nod toward Section 31 or do contained Section 31-adjacent episodes or story arcs. But the inherent conflict between "post-scarcity utopian future where diplomacy and compromise are always the answer" and "autocratic future where shadowy extralegal spy agencies secretly pull all the strings" kept Section 31 from really feeling like a fully integrated part of the universe.

 

Surely a Section 31-themed direct-to-streaming feature film called Star Trek: Section 31 would be interested in exploring these contradictions? Surely it would have something thoughtful to say about our current age of misinformation and paranoia—the future reflecting and commenting on the present, as the best Star Trek media always has?

 

Well, no. It doesn't do any of that.

 

I am not a reflexive hater of modern Trek. I will go to bat for a lot of it, including all of Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, the third season of Picard, and even the middle seasons of Discovery.

 

But the Section 31 movie is an hour and 40 minutes of mess. It's a muddy story with bad character building, made worse by ridiculous performances and a script I can only describe as "embarrassing." And it's such a huge departure—narratively, tonally, thematically, and aesthetically—from most Star Trek that even die-hard fans will struggle to find anything to like here.

 

It is, in a word, awful. Which is really a shame!

Putting the “TV” in “TV movie”

Sam Richardson as Quasi, a shape-shifter. Comedy and melodrama coexist uneasily throughout Section 31.

Credit: Michael Gibson/Paramount+

The movie explains its premise clearly enough, albeit in a clumsy exposition-heavy voiceover section near the beginning: Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) was once the ruler of the bloodthirsty Terran Empire, an evil mirror of Star Trek's utopian United Federation of Planets. She crossed over into "our" universe and gradually reformed, sort of, before vanishing. Now Section 31—Starfleet's version of the CIA, more or less—needs to track her down and enlist her to help them save the galaxy from another threat that has crossed over from the evil universe to ours.

 

Emperor Georgiou originated on Star Trek: Discovery, and she was a consistently fun presence on a very uneven show. Yeoh clearly had a blast playing a sadistic, horny version of the kind and upstanding Captain Georgiou who died in Discovery's premiere.

 

But that fun is mostly absent here. To the extent that anything about Section 31 works, it's as a sort of brain-off generic sci-fi action movie, Star Trek's stab at a Suicide Squad-esque antihero story. Things happen in space, sometimes in a spaceship. There is some fighting, though nearly all of it involves punching instead of phasers or photon torpedoes. There is an Important Item that needs to be chased down, for the Fate of the Universe is at stake.

 

But the movie also feels more like a failed spin-off pilot that never made it to series, and it suffers for it; it's chopped up into four episodes "chapters" and has to establish an entire crew's worth of quirky misfits inside a 10-minute montage.

 

That might work if the script or the performers could make any of the characters endearing, but it isn't, and they don't. Performances are almost uniformly bad, ranging from inert to unbearable to "not trying particularly hard" (respectively: Omari Hardwick's Alok, a humorless genetically augmented human; Sven Ruygrok's horrifically grating Fuzz, a tiny and inexplicably Irish alien piloting a Vulkan-shaped robot; and Sam Richardson's Quasi, whose amiable patter is right at home on Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave but is mostly distracting here). Every time one of these characters ends up dead, you feel a sense of relief because there's one fewer one-note character to have to pay attention to.

 

The film's action sequences use quick camera movements to make things seem faster and more exciting than they often are.

Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+

The action sequences rely overwhelmingly on fast camera zooms and flips, which try to instill some motion and energy into scenes that are mostly just people punching each other. The tone is all over the place, whipping back and forth between end-of-the-world seriousness and bland comedy. The script is littered with bits and pieces of anachronistic slang that make it feel like everyone is hanging out on Twitter in 2013, not in a futuristic space night club in the 23rd century ("whatevs," deadpans Kacey Rohl's Rachel Garrett, before telling Georgiou that she is "a bad bitch." "Does that come with fries?" wisecracks an alien hostage.)

 

I could maybe see myself getting more attached to members of this team over the course of a season of television. Maybe. But in the space of a frenetic, not-quite-two-hour action movie, it never really gels. It passes right over you, leaving no lasting impression other than, "Well, I don't need to watch that again."

It’s also not very Star Trek

If it doesn't work as a sci-fi action movie, then maybe it at least works as a bit of fun Star Trek apocrypha for franchise completists?

 

This gets iffy because the line of what qualifies as "Trek enough" is inherently subjective and gatekeep-y and is often used as a cudgel to complain about all of the 2010s and 2020s Trek shows. But whatever it is that you like about Star Trek—whether it's the series' world-building and continuity, its character-driven stories, or its vision of a utopian egalitarian future—there's almost none of that present in Section 31.

 

The movie goes out of its way to make a few nods to more obscure corners of the franchise's continuity. Sam Richardson plays a Chameloid, a member of the same shape-shifting species that broke Kirk and McCoy out of Klingon prison in Star Trek VI; Humberly González (briefly) plays Melle, a Deltan, a species mainly featured in 1979's The Motion Picture; a bartender working at Georgiou's Las Vegas-style space nightclub appears to be from the planet Cheron; Rachel Garrett is in fact the same Rachel Garrett who will later captain the doomed Enterprise-C.

 

Michelle Yeoh as Georgiou in Star Trek: Section 31.

Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+

But the specificity and relative obscurity of these references actually work against the movie. Star Trek portrays its most familiar alien species as monocultures; even more casual viewers generally know what behavior to expect from a Klingon, a Romulan, or a Ferengi. Writers and actors can then reinforce or work against these audience expectations, which is an easy way to establish characters and make them feel like an integrated part of the series' universe.

 

Section 31 is uninterested in taking advantage of most of Star Trek's mythology, and it's not very interested in trying to build it, either. It doesn't try to pick up any specific thread from Georgiou's arc on Discovery. You don't even get to see any cool starships, really—the ships you do see mostly aren't Starfleet ships, and they have the same kind of bland, angular designs typical of Discovery. Almost all of it reads as "generic sci-fi," which means it won't even satisfy the kinds of people who will watch anything with "Star Trek" attached to it.

 

It's not satisfying as a sci-fi action movie. It's not satisfying as a Star Trek property. It falls squarely into that valley between "good" and "so bad it's good." It's mostly forgettable, and best forgotten.

 

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