There are so many things that are wrong with Section 31, and none of them have to do with what everybody else has a problem with. Guaranteed.
Section 31 is the brand new Star Trek movie from Paramount+, and it went straight to the streaming service. It stars Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou, the character that was created and introduced to us in Discovery, with Omari Hardwick as Alok Sahar, Sam Richardson as Quasi, Kacey Rohl as Rachel Garrett, Sven Ruygrok as Fuzz, Robert Kazinsky as Zeph, and a slew of other characters who are either forgettable or you won’t really care about.
I’m a Star Trek fan. Star Trek’s my fandom, always has been. One of the things I love most about doing what I do is being able to talk about the things I love, and I usually don’t talk about the things I don’t love. This is one of those rare instances where those two things clash. With Star Trek as my fandom, I have no real choice.
I was away the weekend it dropped, so I didn’t get to review it right when it came out. I’ve talked to Salty about it, and he and I are dedicating Wednesday’s show completely to reviewing this thing and tearing it apart from the ground up, because there’s a lot to look at. I’m not going to do that here. This is my review. And there are spoilers, so if you haven’t watched it, go watch it first.
I Saw the Vision
I wanted to like this, on so many levels. It’s funny, within about thirty minutes of it beginning I called Salty up and I said, I see the vision. And he was very much, what are you talking about, you see the vision. Because he has his opinions. He’s salty. It’s literally in his character.
But I did see what they were trying to do. There’s a world in which you start this thing, and by the end of whatever series they were going to do, Philippa Georgiou gets a redemption arc. She finds some kind of redemption. That’s what you’re here for.
My issues with this are the same issues I had with Star Wars: The Acolyte. This whole thing tells you a story and at no point shows it to you.
The action scenes felt weak. They’re hypercut. I don’t know if that’s because Michelle Yeoh is getting older and certain things aren’t as easy to do. I don’t know the situation, I have no clue. But it felt to me like they were intercutting things to hide bad choreography or personal inability. They even have one fight scene early on where the characters are literally phased, so they’re all staticky and shaky, and it serves the purpose of hiding who’s doing the fighting. There are key moments where you get to see a face, but it felt very disconnected for me.
They Don’t Understand What Section 31 Is
The other thing is that this movie lacks an understanding of what Section 31 is.
We have two very good appearances to work from. We have the original appearances in Deep Space Nine, where we meet the character of Sloan. He shows up every now and again, gives Bashir some little mission to do, and then he’s gone. And then we got to see something like the origins of Section 31 in Enterprise, and I thought that was handled somewhat well, even though I wasn’t a big fan of that show. (I’ve since come around to it past season three. Salty and I are watching it on the Patreon for Nerd Fights, if you want to see us react to it.)
So you clearly have an origin story. And between the series they were going to do and the information that already exists, we got this.
Clearly there was a plan that went off the rails. If you remember, there were several production announcements about the development of this thing. It was originally planned to be a series. At some point it got shifted into being a miniseries, or a movie, or a series of movies, whatever. And it wasn’t until right after Michelle Yeoh got her Oscar win for Everything Everywhere All at Once that they kicked this into high gear.
From the word go, in the very opening credits, you get a voiceover. I immediately checked, and it’s Jamie Lee Curtis. You find out later, when you see a hologram of her, that she’s the person giving them their orders. She’s their version of a Sloan, I suppose. So what you get is a version of Section 31 that feels like it wants to be the Mission: Impossible franchise. Maybe that was the original intent. You get a mission, you’ve got to go find this person, you put your team together, and you go do your thing.
Rachel Garrett, Miscast and Misplaced
Rachel Garrett is both miscast and misplaced here.
The character is based on a captain from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The episode is Yesterday’s Enterprise, where the Enterprise-C comes through a rift and changes time. Because it wasn’t there to save a thing, there’s a war with the Klingons, and the war goes very badly. She’s the captain of that ship. And in that episode they flat out ask her what year it is, what the stardate is, and she tells them the exact stardate she comes from. Salty’s done the math and he’ll talk about it in more depth, but she’s misplaced already.
Not to mention her character feels like she was written specifically to be the stereotype of bad Starfleet. She’s written super cliche, and none of her dialogue is good. That’s really a shame, because I think Rachel Garrett could have cemented a position for Starfleet in this.
As it stands, there’s very little to no connection to Star Trek. I don’t even know why they called it Star Trek. They purposely went out of their way to set this way out in the far reaches, very far, far, far away if you will, from Federation space, so now they don’t have to follow any rules. If they hadn’t put a stardate on it, I’d have no clue where this takes place in time. It could have taken place during Discovery’s era in the 31st century. It could take place after Picard. It could take place anywhere you wanted it to. It doesn’t connect to anything.
You Can See the Episodes It Used to Be
It kind of felt like it might have been a good arc for a Discovery season. And you can see the seams. They have mission title cards breaking up the movie that clearly outline where each piece is going, and I bet those were the episode titles. Mission such and such, do this other thing. You can see the pieces.
The thing is, they don’t have time for character development because they’re too busy telling us who everybody is.
Everyone keeps trying to compare it to Guardians of the Galaxy online. I don’t see that. This is more Suicide Squad, and maybe a really bad discount Guardians of the Galaxy. These aren’t bad guys, per se.
There are a couple of weird twists. Alok Sahar, Omari Hardwick’s character, is an augment. We’re talking Khan-style augment. He was actually a soldier from the Eugenics Wars who was apparently captured by an augment, turned into an augment, and forced to do things. My thing is, how often are we going to keep going to the augment toy box? In their effort to reinvent Star Trek, they keep recycling their own tropes, in ways that don’t make sense for what they’re trying to do.
Then you have a shapeshifter. A Chameloid, a callback to Star Trek VI. And there’s nothing chameleon about them. They changed shape maybe twice that I can remember. Once was an example of the thing, when they became Georgiou, and the other was toward the end, looking like Hardwick’s character. There’s nothing hyper unique about any of these characters. They aren’t even done very well. None of them are memorable.
The People Who Made It
The actors are doing the best they can with what they have.
And I appreciate that people worked on it. I appreciate that people put their time and effort into it. I appreciate that this was one of those few projects that was able to get done through the pandemic. Heck, one of the guys I love to watch worked on it, as an assistant to the head writer or something along those lines, and I love that. It’s all commendable.
It’s not a good show. Hell, I can’t stop calling it a show. Nothing about this feels like a movie. I could never see this on a big screen. It wasn’t filmed to be a movie. It was filmed the way they film all of it, at the same Canadian quarry where they shoot everything when it comes to Discovery or any of the modern Star Trek.
Is this Star Trek? No, it isn’t.
There’s a better version of this somewhere in here. On Wednesday, Salty’s going to have a whole list of things he wants to complain about, and I think we’re even going to go through the effort of trying to rewrite this and figure out what that better version is, similar to what we did with The Acolyte. There are a couple of dumb things in it too, and I don’t even get to the stuff Salty doesn’t like, the new Trek and old Trek of it all. I don’t even get there, because it’s just bad storytelling.
The Verdict
Star Trek: Section 31 lands at a 4 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
I’m afraid my first movie review back is kind of a sad one. Sorry if you thought it was going to get a seven. It did not.
I’d love to know your scores and what you thought, so let’s have some constructive conversation. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
