In the nearly 40 years since Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek: The Next Generation sparked my enthusiasm for Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi saga, I’ve seen the franchise through its highs (the Dominion War arc on Deep Space Nine, the First Contact movie, the ongoing Paramount+ series Strange New Worlds) and its lows (the Voyager episode “Threshold,” the finale of Enterprise, the grim tedium of Picard’s first season). But through it all, there’s one phrase I’ve never said in reaction to any movie or series under the Star Trek umbrella — especially since it’s the rallying cry of so many bad-faith morons who monetize negativity on the internet. But the straight-to-streaming Star Trek movie Section 31 has driven a wedge into my soul, and my reaction is simple: “This is not Star Trek.”
While it would still be boring, Section 31 might be better if you watched it without knowing anything about Star Trek history. This way, at least, you won't end up wondering how writer Craig Sweeny and director Olatunde Osunsanmi completely ruined the spirit of Star Trek — its admittedly cheesy core tenets of exploration, optimism, and the pursuit of righteous achievement. (There's a reason we Star Trek nerds got bullied a lot in high school.) Section 31 is nothing more than a lousy, uninteresting adventure movie with mediocre special effects, bad acting (yes, even Yeoh), cringeworthy dialogue, and characters you don't care about.
Director: Olatunde Osunsanmi
Writers: Craig Sweeny, Bo Yeon Kim, Erika Lippoldt
Stars: Michelle Yeoh, Omari Hardwick, Sam Richardson
I'll try to lay out the premise as quickly as possible, though Section 31's simplified form doesn't make that an easy task. After flashing back to Philippa’s bloody rise to the throne of what we used to call the Mirror Universe, we find out where she landed after peacefully leaving Section 31 in Discovery’s third season: “outside Federation space,” running a cosmic Rick’s Café Américain where the main attraction seems to be dim lighting and music that sounds like it was produced in 2024. Her former, secretive team has been reimagined as an Impossible Mission Force or Charlie’s Angels, with Jamie Lee Curtis, Yeoh’s friend from Everything Everywhere All at Once, doling out assignments, and somehow the group has tracked Georgiou down and knows that a bad guy is coming to do an illegal arms deal at her club.
So a ragtag group of quirky, Guardians-style characters is sent to intercept and prevent this dangerous development. In addition to the leader, a cool guy (Omari Hardwick), there’s a witty shapeshifter (Sam Richardson, who does the best he can with this material and gets away with it from Section 31), an “I’m Juggernaut, bitch!” mechanical brute (Robert Kazinsky), a sexy Deltan (Humberly Gonzalez), and a crazy Vulcan (Sven Ruygrok) who’s not actually a Vulcan but a microscopic organism on a tiny spaceship inside a Vulcan-shaped golem body (think Men in Black). When his little ship moves, it looks and sounds like the flying cars from The Jetsons, which is unintentionally hilarious.
Embedded into this squabbling crew is a Starfleet observer, a young girl named Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), who hardcore fans know will grow up to be a pre-Picard Enterprise captain. Garrett's presence, combined with that of a figure from Georgiou's past, makes the Section 31 storyline totally confusing, as if Sweeny gave us nerds a bone by giving us people we know but made no attempt to fit them into a coherent timeline. Agonizing over this is the least of everyone's worries, though, because the rest of this movie is awfully boring.
With Georgiou (who, mind you, brutally murdered thousands of people, including her parents and younger brother) as part of the fun new Section 31 gang, we get to experience some hijinks, like a phase shield fight with the gun smuggler that was done much better in Dune (both versions) and a runaway train-style chase that looks like something out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but now made to look like CGI trash. It is also revealed that someone in the group is a mole, but these are characters we've only just met, so there's absolutely nothing at stake. Someone whose name you barely know isn't who they seem? Who cares?
Even with the golden opportunity to play interplanetary outlaws, none of the cast members (except Richardson) are anything but annoying. The blame can be shared, though. Not only is there an unoriginal script, but also totally uninspired direction. When the entire team is together, they're left with a lot of trouble.
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