Directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi | Written by Craig Sweeny, Bo Yeon Kim, and Erika Lippoldt | 95 min | ▲1/2 | Paramount+
I’m a longtime Trekkie, having grown up with the original series and been a regular watcher of The Next Generation and subsequent series through Enterprise. Though I’ve enjoyed many of the crew’s cinematic adventures, TV is where Trek really works: episodic television using science fiction ideas to explore human ethics and experience. Trek isn’t an action show, or a space opera like Star Wars — it doesn’t need big budget effects to work because, at its best, it’s about ideas.
JJ Abrams changed that with his “Kelvin Universe” films, starting with Star Trek (2009). It wasn’t bad for a blockbuster version of Trek, even though Abrams was an admitted Star Wars fan and went out of his way to make Trek into an action adventure franchise. Abrams’ second film was the abysmal Star Trek: Into Darkness, the nadir of Star Trek to date. Star Trek Beyond was a moderate correctional to its awful predecessor.
The box office success of these films brought the property back to TV with a number of new series, including Star Trek: Discovery. It started well, telling the story of an outsider, Michael Burnham, who unexpectedly becomes a starship captain, but the show never quite delivered on its promise — the final seasons were a mess.
Early on in the show we were introduced to Emperor Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), a character from the so-called Mirror Universe and supposedly evil to her core, but who still ends up an ally of Burnham’s. We also meet agents from Section 31, an interstellar intelligence organization doing things Starfleet can’t do.
There was talk of a Section 31 series bringing Georgiou back after she left Discovery. That sounded promising — on Star Trek, a science fiction series built on optimism and exploration featuring an intergalactic bureaucracy, there’s room for a show that considers the corruption that can exist in enormous, multi-pronged organizations, and Georgiou is a fascinating, deeply flawed character. Then we got word it would be turned into a stand-alone movie.
The best I can say about Section 31 is it feels like a pilot for a series that we’ll never see, marketed as a self-contained film for fans of Discovery and Yeoh, who has won an Oscar since being on the show. I’m about to say a lot worse things, because the movie’s mostly rubbish.
Directed by frequent Discovery helmer Osunsanmi, this includes many of the most egregious flaws of that series — action-oriented hokum with very little in the way of science, exploration, or idea-based storytelling, the very things that made Trek so beloved through its first 30 years. We start with a flashback to Georgiou’s past when she murdered her family to prove her worth to the Terran Empire, before mutilating her main competition to the throne (who was also her boyfriend).
Years later and Georgiou is still in our dimension hanging out in a space nightclub outside Federation space where she encounters a man (Toronto actor Joe Pingue) selling a genocidal weapon called The Godsend, which Georgiou developed years before in the Mirror Dimension.
Trying to secure the device is a team from Section 31 — tough guy Alok (Omari Hardwick), shape-shifter Quasi (Sam Richardson), bio-mechanized Australian warrior, but not-a-Borg, Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), tiny alien controlling a Vulcan robot body with the world’s cheesiest Leprechaun accent, Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), and the only actual member of Starfleet, straight-edge Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl). Hardly the chilly space espionage agents you might expect of the Section 31 we got a sense of back on Discovery, this group feels more like a cheap Guardians Of The Galaxy knock off, a collective of moderately competent freebooters. They team up with Georgiou to figure out who’s behind the appearance of this other-dimensional super-weapon.
So, what can you say about an action picture where the action is so poorly done? Some effort has been put into giving us Yeoh’s balletic martial arts skills, but it’s all shot so terribly it’s hard to appreciate. Most of the new characters are dull or witless. Some mild efforts at humour are welcome, but given how silly all this is many more comedic notes would have helped. And the overall effects are leaden and poor, not much better than we’d get on Discovery every week. That would be fine if there was more to recommend this in the script or themes, but this a shoddy visit back to Discovery-era Trek without any real reason for it to exist, or feel connected to the Trek universe.
On Paramount+ other Star Trek shows like Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks are still very much worth watching, and another new show, Starfleet Academy, is expected soon, but this is just an example of a calculated brand extension that goes off the rails. Michelle Yeoh is better than this. Star Trek is better than this.
