Star Trek: Section 31 review: An embarrassment from start to end
Get enough Star Trek fans in a room and the conversation inevitably turns toward which of the series’ cinematic outings is the worst. The consensus view is The Final Frontier, Insurrection and Nemesis are duking it out for the unwanted trophy. Each film has a small legion of fans who will defend each entry’s campy excesses, boldness and tone. (I’m partial to watching The Final Frontier every five years or so, mostly to luxuriate in Jerry Goldsmith’s score.) Thankfully, any and all such discussions will cease once and for all on January 24, 2024, when Star Trek: Section 31 debuts on Paramount+.
It is the single worst thing to carry the Star Trek name in living memory.
Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Section 31.
Star Trek: Section 31 is a made for TV streaming movie focusing on Philipa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) after her departure from Star Trek: Discovery. It was originally greenlit in 2019 as a series but, for a wide variety of reasons, it languished in development hell until 2022. In the interim, showrunners Bo Yeon Kim and Erika Lippoldt, along with credited screenwriter Craig Sweeny, sweated the idea. Director Olatunde Osunsanmi told SFX Magazine (via TrekMovie) that Sweeny would eventually write (and re-write) the project seven different times, first as a TV series, then as a movie. Trek head honcho Alex Kurtzman was eager to get production underway to take advantage of Yeoh’s 2022 Academy Award win for Everything Everywhere All At Once.
The result is a film that, even if you’re unaware of the pre-production backstory, sure feels like a series hastily cut down to feature length. It’s not incoherent, but suffers from the same issue that blighted Discovery, where you’re watching a dramatized synopsis rather than a script. There are thematic and plot beats that rhyme with each other, but the meat joining them all together isn’t there. It’s just stuff that happens.
It doesn’t help that the plot (credited to Kim and Lippoldt) is very much of the “and then this happens” variety that they warn you about in Film School 202. So many major moments in the film are totally unearned, asking you to care about characters you’ve only just met and don’t much like. There’s a risible scene at the end where two people who haven’t really given you the impression they’re into each other have to hold hands and stare into their impending doom. The pair in question have shared their backstories with each other, but there’s no suggestion that they are anything more than just people working together on a job, let alone friends.
Weak material is less of an issue if you have a cast who can elevate what they’ve been given but, and it pains me to say this, that’s not Michelle Yeoh. Yeoh is a phenomenal performer who has given a litany of underrated performances over her long and distinguished career. But she made her name playing characters with deep interiority, not scenery-chewing high-camp villains. Even in her redemptive phase, it’s impossible to believe Yeoh is the sort of monster Star Trek needs Georgiou to be. Rather than shrinking the scene, and the stakes, to suit her talents, the film makes the canvas wider and expects Yeoh to fill space she’s never needed.
The rest of the gang is similarly underserved by the material and the sheer volume of clutter the film has little time to get past. Making the Section 31 team six people deep before they meet Georgiou means every character beyond her is a thumbnail sketch at best. There’s the broody one, the “funny” one, the uptight one, the robot one, the hot one and the one with the bad Oirish accent.
If Section 31 was a series, you’d forgive the pithy introductions, knowing you’d get to fill in these characters over the coming weeks, maybe even grow attached to them. In the space of a movie, it doesn’t work since the shocking twists — like an early character death to raise the stakes or a sudden heel-turn in a moment of crisis, don’t work. Worse still, the dialog is so often indecipherable crosstalk that feels more like woeful improv than useful characterization. That, or it’s just characters reminding the audience of basic story points over and over again, like the fact Georgiou used to be a baddie.
Olatunde Osunsanmi’s direction has always made an effort to draw attention to itself, with flashy pans, tilts, moves and Dutch angles. Jarringly, all of his flair leaves him when he needs to just shoot people in a room talking — those scenes invariably default to the TV standard medium. Worse still is his action direction, that loses any sense of the space we’re seeing or the story being told. There’s a final punchfight that requires the audiences to be aware of who has the macguffin at various points. But it’s all so incoherent that you’ll struggle to place what’s going on and where, so why bother engaging with it?
And that’s before we get to the fact that Osunanmi chose to shoot all of Michelle Yeoh’s — Michelle Yeoh’s — fight scenes in close-up. When Yeoh is moving, you want to capture the full extent of her talents and allow her and her fellow performers a chance to show off, too. And yet it’s in these moments that the camera pulls in tight — with what looks like a digital crop with a dose of digital motion blur thrown in. All of which serves to obscure Yeoh’s talents and sap any energy out of the action.
Before watching Section 31, I re-watched the relevant stories from Deep Space Nine and tried to interrogate their ethics. That series asked, several times over, how far someone would, could or should go to defend their ideals and their worldview. The Federation was often described as some form of paradise, but does paradise need its own extrajudicial murder squad? It wasn’t a wicked cool plotline, but a thought experiment to interrogate what Starfleet and its personnel stands for when its very existence is in jeopardy. If there’s one thing that Section 31 isn’t, it’s cool, and if you think it is, then your values are at least halfway in conflict with Star Trek’s founding ethos.
Unfortunately for us, Trek honcho Alex Kurtzman does think Starfleet having its own space murder squad is wicked cool given their repeated appearances under his watch. Kurtzman has never hidden his love of War on Terror-era narratives, which remain as unwelcome here as they were in Star Trek: Into Darkness. Sadly, Section 31 is Star Trek in its face-punching, forced-interrogation, cheek-stabbing, eye-gouging thoughtless grimdark register. Fundamentally, it’s not a fun thing to sit down and watch, beyond its numerous deficiencies as a piece of cinema.
The biggest tell that Section 31 wasn’t going to be a winner was when Rob Kasinsky, who plays Section 31's Zeph, started getting his excuses in early. He said (via ScreenRant) he was worried the film would be received poorly given all the fans want is “just 1,000 more episodes of TNG.” I’ll admit, there is a chunk of fandom who do just want to be fed a conveyor belt of ‘memberberries. These are the people who thought season three of Picard was good and are clamoring for Star Trek: Legacy. I, and a lot of other people, just want something that’s halfway thoughtful, entertaining and well-made, and this is none of those things.
I keep checking my notes for anything positive and the best I can manage is that the costumes, co-created with Balenciaga, are quite nice. They’re a bit too Star Wars, but I like the focus on texture and tailoring in a way that’s better than Trek’s current athleisure trend. Oh, and the CGI is competent and doesn’t slip below the standards set down by Strange New Worlds. There you go, two things that are good about Section 31.
Fundamentally, I don’t know who this is for. It’s too braindead for the people who want Star Trek in any sort of thoughtful register. It’s not shot through with the fan-service onanism that would pander to please the Star Trek: Legacy crowd. It’s not quite shamelessly brutal enough for the gang who want Star Trek to turn into 24. And it’s not high camp enough for the folks who’d like to coo over Michelle Yeoh in a variety of gorgeous costumes. Remember how Warner Bros. junked several movies for the tax break? I wish Paramount’s accountants had been as ruthless here.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/star-trek-section-31-review-an-embarrassment-from-start-to-end-150051501.html?src=rss
Get enough Star Trek fans in a room and the conversation inevitably turns toward which of the series’ cinematic outings is the worst. The consensus view is The Final Frontier, Insurrection and Nemesis are duking it out for the unwanted trophy. Each film has a small legion of fans who…
