Star Trek: Section 31 is the newest Trek film, made as a straight-to-TV project and released on Paramount+. This film had a long, rocky development, starting as a spinoff TV series from Star Trek: Discovery, which got held up when COVID hit. It then started to go into production in 2023 when the Hollywood writer’s strike shut everything down again. After lead star Michelle Yeoh won an Oscar for her film Everything Everywhere All at Once, the team knew they had to kick it into gear, as she was going to get a lot busier moving forward. After all that, the movie feels extremely rushed. Doesn’t help that it isn’t any good.
Yeoh plays Philippa Georgiou from the Mirror Universe that was explored in Discovery. A main bad guy in that show, she fled before being arrested and has been hiding out in a corner of the galaxy. Starfleet’s CIA-like division, Section 31, has sent a team in to get her help in retrieving a bomb, but unfortunately, it’s not just any bomb. It’s a devise that she herself had built in her universe, which has somehow made its way to our reality. Georgiou built it with the sole purpose of killing everyone, should someone succeed in taking her out as the leader of the Terran Empire in her former reality. It houses a virus that would spread from planet to planet, with the potential to wipe out life in a quarter of the galaxy, a sort-of “you got me so I got you” final solution. Georgiou and this team of Guardians of the Galaxy-like misfits must find out who has the bomb and retrieve it before all life is extinguished.
There’s no other way to say it, this is just a really bad film, worse than even a bad Sci-fi channel movie. It’s not even so bad that it’s good, in a “gonna be a cult film one day” kind of bad. Bad story, bad dialogue, bad acting, bad editing, bad direction… Just bad. I can (almost) see that (maybe) it would have worked better as a series instead of a movie, because there are subplots that could be stretched out for a single episode, but when taken as part of a feature length movie, they don’t make any sense. There’s a scene with 20 minutes to go where a character starts chuckling and someone asks him why. He responds, “I can’t imagine things getting much worse.” Couldn’t agree more. ★
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