Star Trek: Section 31 comes with some baggage. And I’m not talking about the tsunami of negative reviews. I’m talking about the backstory upon which the movie hinges.
If you’ve seen the five-season Star Trek: Discovery series, you’re aware there’s a Prime Universe, the one we currently live in, fast-forwarded several centuries, and there’s the Mirror Universe, a dystopian alternate universe subjugated by the despotic Terran Empire. In Discovery, Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) in Prime is a wise and accomplished starship captain who meets an untimely end. Her terrifying counterpart from the Mirror escapes into Prime. (To acquaint us with that vicious Georgiou, the opening scene in Section 31 takes place in Mirror, where teenage Philippa murders her family and enslaves her best friend in order to prove herself worthy of ascending to Emperor.) After a stint working for Starfleet in Prime, evil Georgiou disappears and turns up running the space station Baraam, outside Federation space, as Madame du Franc. Really.
Phew, that’s a lot. And so we’re finally ready to engage. It comes in the form of a Mission: Impossible-type briefing by Control (voiced by Jamie Lee Curtis) for Starfleet’s secretive Section 31 team, a rag tag group of operatives. They have 24 hours to find out why arms dealer Dada Noe is headed for Baraam. If they’re caught and killed … yada yada.
On Baraam, the Section 31 crew enlists Georgiou to help them capture Noe, torture the reason for his trip out of him, and stop whatever he had planned from happening. Turns out he’s lugging a weapon that evil Georghiou herself had built and thought had been destroyed. Yikes. That’s when a masked intruder pops in (literally) to abscond with the weapon. Prompted not by benevolence, but pique at having “her” property snatched away, Georghiou decides to help the Section 31 team in the pursuit. The weapon – as it so often does in Star Trek tales – turns out to be portentous enough to threaten the very existence of the universe – the Prime Universe, that is. Oh my, is there any suspense about whether the universe will be saved?
Skip It
And oh gosh, with a movie this awful, might we legitimately be tempted to hope that the universe won’t be saved? Burn it down, beg for a do-over.
What can I say? Am I mad and pissed off, or just, you know, “disappointed” in this movie? I grew up on the original Star Trek series in the ‘60s. I shrugged off the first full-length movie and was rewarded with the next one; Wrath of Khan is in my top 10 best movies of all time. I’ve followed all the movies and many of the spinoff series. So I really, really wanted to find a reason to pronounce a pox on all the negative reviews and reveal the overlooked aspects that made it at least … watchable. After all, I couldn’t imagine declaring “skip it” for a Star Trek movie.
Alas, I just can’t discover enough … actually, hardly anything … to recommend it. The pacing is slow, the attempts at humorous dialog are strained, the action scenes are woefully underpowered, and the final reveal is no surprise given the heavy-handed foreshadowing. And there’s just no chemistry among the actors, whose quirks are grating rather than interesting. Could I ever care about what happens to them? Gheorgiou yes, of course. The rest: nope.
It doesn’t even feel like a Star Trek movie, with scenes like the blatant reference to Mission: Impossible and the cliché’d “walk of the team” shot. With a laughably deficient sense of self-awareness, the final scene plays out as if they believed there would be a series of Section 31 adventures. Did they really think Section 31 was so well executed that Trekkies would want more? Would offending Star Trek fans provide firm grounds for hoping to pile on continuing insult?
I feel sorry for the exceptionally talented Michelle Yeoh, who does her absolute best with the few snarky lines of dialog she’s given. They did not play to her strengths; she so excels at martial arts and yet the choreography of the drawn out contests is mediocre at best. And as for the rest of the cast, I feel so sorry for them too that I’ll forego mentioning them by name.
I suppose every now and then you just have to expect a misfire. Let’s hope those who are plotting the future of Star Trek stories got this out of their system and will come back with a story actually worthy of calling itself Star Trek.