Josh Suffers Through Star Trek: Section 31

Star Trek: Section 31 is the new streaming Star Trek movie, a first for the franchise.  It stars Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh, reprising her role from Star Trek: Discovery as Empress Georgiou, and also features fantastic comedic actor Sam Richardson.

It’s also a catastrophe of epic proportions, and encapsulates everything that stinks about most modern Star Trek under the supervision of Alex Kurtzman.  (The only bright lights in modern Trek have been the animated Lower Decks show and Star Trek: Picard season three.  I also thought the animated kids show Star Trek: Prodigy was OK.)

I love the idea of telling Star Trek stories in different formats, and the idea of feature-length movies for streaming (obviously created on a far lower budget than a feature film would be, but at the same time offering a more epic canvas for storytelling than the average episode) is a terrific idea.  Michelle Yeoh is an incredible actress, and bringing her back for a Star Trek project after she won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once makes perfect sense.  And I’m thrilled that they were able to get a high-caliber actor like Sam Richardson (Veep, The Afterparty) involved.

But oy, what a waste!  The film is a nonsensical mess.  The story makes little sense and lacked the excitement and propulsive energy this type of gang-on-an-impossible-mission story needs.  The characters are flat and uninteresting.  This movie wants to be Guardians of the Galaxy so desperately, but the script isn’t funny, and I didn’t care about any of the characters.  Star Trek: Section 31 is ugly-looking, with a generic sci-fi-weird design style that has zero connection to the look and feel of Star Trek and instead feels like a warmed-over version of The Fifth Element.

In short, it’s exactly what I should have expected from a spin-off of the awful Star Trek: Discovery.  (I have watched every single episode of every single Star Trek show since the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation when I was a kid.  But Discovery broke me; I made it through three episodes into the fourth season and then gave up.)

Star Trek has a long legacy of telling great sci-fi stories, in which interesting characters are put into complex sci-fi situations and/or moral dilemmas.  This is what Star Trek is all about.  There is none of that here.  There is nothing for me to recognize as Star Trek.

I loved when Deep Space Nine (my favorite of the Trek shows) introduced the idea of Section 31, a super-secret organization hidden within the Federation that were willing to protect the utopia of the Federation by any means necessary.  Some Trek fans objected to this idea, but I thought it was brilliant!  I loved that the DS9 writers didn’t just accept the idea of the utopian Federation of Planets, but instead dug deep and explored how such a utopia might actually function, and what extreme lengths some might go to in order to protect it.  This was a juicy moral dilemma that was, in my opinion, classic Star Trek.  Unfortunately, after DS9, future Star Trek writers on lesser projects kept using and over-using Section 31 — the organization appeared in the Enterprise show, the JJ Abrams Star Trek movies, and then Discovery.  To make matters worse, the Discovery writers seemed to completely misunderstand this organization, presenting it as a black-ops division of Starfleet that everyone knew about.  (The Section 31 people were walking around Discovery in their own uniforms, with their own insignias, and even had their own ships!)  That complete misunderstanding continues here in this movie, in which we see none other than Rachel Garrett (a Starfleet officer who would go on to become captain of the Enterprise-C, as seen in the classic TNG episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise”) get roped into this Section 31 mission.  No!  If Section 31 was a complete secret in the DS9 era, then NO ONE — certainly not the woman who would go on to become captain of the Federation flagship — should know about them!!)

This movie is set during the time-frame of the original series movies.  But you’d never know it!!   The original series movies have a very distinct visual style, and yet there is nothing, and I mean NOTHING, here in this Section 31 movie to give any sense of connection to that era of Star Trek.  What a shame!  What a waste!  The movie-era is an awesome time-frame of Star Trek!  There are LOTS of wonderful stories that could be told in this “lost” era!  And the movies have an incredible visual style that I would LOVE to have seen brought to life with modern visual effects!  (The movie-era “refit” Enterprise is my all-time favorite starship design.)  But, nope.  The makers of this movie either don’t know or don’t care about established Star Trek visual continuity.  (Again, this was a major sin of Discovery and also most other modern live-action Star Trek, including the first two seasons of Picard and Strange New Worlds.)

I vastly preferred Michelle Yeoh’s performance as the main-universe Captain Georgiou in the first two episodes of Discovery over the evil mirror-universe counterpart Empress Georgiou that Ms. Yeoh played for the rest of the series.  Still, I understand that main-universe Georgiou is dead, so if they wanted to bring Ms. Yeoh back, this was the character they had to use.  It’s a bummer, because Empress Georgiou is saddled with a very confusing history that makes this stand-alone movie feel bogged down right from the beginning.  (She was from the Mirror Universe but then came to the main Discovery universe, they got sent into the far future, then got sent back to the past…  Actually, when she was written off Discovery, I thought Georgiou was sent back to the Mirror Universe, so I was surprised to see her start this film back in the main Discovery timeline, though maybe I’m just not remembering an episode I watched years ago and disliked.)  But, OK, so this is the character we have.  I couldn’t believe what a lame non-story they gave Georgiou here.  The Hunger Games backstory for Georgiou’s rise to power was derivative and ludicrous.  (There’s absolutely no way the Mirror Universe Terrans would pick a child to rule their empire.)  And if her murder of her family was supposed to give the character an emotional arc, from heartless murderer to someone who cares and helps others, the movie that follows fails to deliver that.  Georgiou is exactly the same person when we first meet her adult self in the space station bar to when the movie ends.  There’s no character arc, no emotional journey.

They’ve assembled what’s supposed to be a fun, motley crew to go on this mission with Georgiou (again, this movie wants to be Guardians of the Galaxy so bad it hurts), but first off, I don’t understand why this bunch of off-kilter losers are sent on this mission, as opposed to actual trained Section 31 operatives.  And second, this might have worked had any of these characters had any actual depth.  But they’re all just flat archetypes.  Nothing in the story gives us any reason to like or care about them.  The movie starts with a Mission: Impossible style opening briefing (another much-better movie franchise this movie is shamelessly trying to emulate) — and let me say, a Mission: Impossible style Star Trek adventure could have been very cool!! — but the actual adventure is pretty boring.  We spend most of the movie on Georgiou’s space-station or on a really ugly-looking junk planet set filled with lots of fire and smoke that I guess is supposed to look “cool” and “gritty” but I thought was lame.

There’s a mid-movie chase on the back of a techy sled thing that is one of the most embarrassingly awful visual effects sequences I have seen in years.  It looks so fake, like a low-fi video game.

The inclusion of Rachel Garrett feels like it’s an attempt to say: “Hey look, Star Trek fans!  We do care about continuity!  We’re including a young version of this popular character!”  Maybe that would have worked had 1) they given Rachel Garrett any sort of actual character or depth, or 2) had anything about this Rachel Garrett felt like it connected to the character we’d met in “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”

The makers of this movie seem to think the identity of the masked villain is a compelling mystery, but it’s so thuddingly obvious that I couldn’t believe it.  (We see young Gergiou betray her lover in flashback at the start of the movie… and guess who turns out to be the villain?  Anyone who’s ever seen a TV show or movie before could probably see that coming.  I know I did.)

The ending is laughable.  The gang is hanging out talking about their next secret mission in the middle of a very public, crowded bar?  The inclusion of Jamie Lee Curtis was meant to be exciting — and the idea of Jamie Lee Curtis in a GOOD Star Trek story would be awesome!! — but here it just lands with a weird “so what?” feeling.  Then the entire space station goes to warp.  What??  Why??  OY VEY.

So, yeah, this was a stinker.

They finally, finally assembled a great team of modern Star Trek storytellers for Star Trek Picard season three, led by show-runner Terry Matalas and production designer Dave Blas.  It boggles my mind that, rather than allowing that team to continue on and build on the creative and popular success of that season, they let them go and instead are continuing to make this type of trash.  It makes me very, very sad.

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