Unfortunately, “Section 31” is Not Good Star Trek – Movie Review

Meant to be an action movie, Section 31 is among the most static, uninteresting two hours of Star Trek I’ve ever seen. It’s a mediocre pilot treated as a movie.

I’ve lived through a lot of different Star Trek at this point. The pre-Y2K shows and movies hold a special place in my heart, but I also embrace Enterprise and the JJ Abrams movies have grown on me. Recent addition Lower Decks, an animated comedy show, might have somehow become my all-time favorite.

Sometimes, Star Trek is also terrible. You don’t get incredible flicks like Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country without also sometimes getting Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

I embrace the extremes. In my experience, any Star Trek is better than no Star Trek. But sometimes that opinion gets tested.

Reviews for Section 31 have been mostly terrible.

In defense of the movie, a lot of fans were prepared to dislike it anyway. The existence of an organization called Section 31 is controversial among fans of Star Trek.

Star Trek, as a universe, debuted in the 1960s with a TV show about humans teaming up with aliens to explore the universe. Ostensibly, this is a positive — or at least constructive — experience for everyone involved. Starfleet has careful rules to guide its influence toward nurturing rather than conquering.

From the beginning, creator Gene Roddenberry used his show to tell stories of a hopeful future where everything has turned out okay.

The first Star Trek show debuted with a metaphor for racial division in America using aliens with skin vertically divided into black and white. Another episode had TV’s first interracial kiss. Throughout all seasons, The Enterprise was staffed by a multicultural crew of humans united by a common goal of Learning From the Universe.

It makes for a fun science fiction playground where almost anything can happen. The good guys usually win, but if they don’t, the show is making a thoughtful point about it.

A shadow organization like Section 31 doesn’t make much sense among Star Trek apocrypha. Introduced in the 90s on Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Section 31 is meant to be like the super-CIA. It’s so segmented that even operatives don’t know their colleagues. Most of Starfleet doesn’t even know they exist. They have no morals, unlike the super-moral Starfleet, and will get the dirtiest jobs done.

You can imagine them existing in a real-world Starfleet. But Star Trek wasn’t originally meant to model the real world. It’s aspirational.

A lot of Trekkies still don’t like Star Trek: Deep Space 9 because of its moral ambiguity. It was the first show that felt like it was in the IP’s universe without the lens of Roddenberry’s idealism.

Over time, Star Trek has felt like DS9 more often than it’s felt like its progenitors. At least in terms of its utopian vision.

The movie Section 31 doesn’t feel like either of them.

Or any other Star Trek, really.

Or a movie that I want to watch ever again.

I think this started out as a fine concept.

If you’ve seen the swaggering, evil-bisexual confidence of Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou, you wanted to see more of it. She’s smoking hot! Charismatic! Sinister! Weirdly hilarious! Did I mention hot!

The intrigue of Section 31 has its appeals, too. Strange New Worlds does well recalling the idealism of early Trek. Why not have Michelle Yeoh helm a recall to the shadowy corners of 90s-era Trek?

The idea of the characters in this movie, likewise, is perfectly good. One can understand the impulse to create a Star Trek Suicide Squad movie.

Not that anyone asked for a Star Trek Suicide Squad movie. If they had, they would have assembled a team like Harcourt Fenton Mudd, Q, Q, q, Sela, Seska, and Captain Lorca.

But a Suicide Squad concept is fine.

They made some deep cuts on lore while shuffling these guys together. Sam Richardson plays a Chameloid akin to Iman’s character in Star Trek VI. Sexy bald Deltans like Humberly González’s Melle came out of the very first Trek movie. We also meet a sassy guy from Cheron, the planet with the black-and-white people, but he doesn’t get to “adventure” with the team. Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl) is the future captain of the ill-fated Enterprise-C.

Likewise, the backstory is reasonably Trek-appropriate. Philippa Georgiou comes from the Mirror Universe. An old enemy from the Mirror Universe now has an evil plan. She must thwart it.

Everything after this setup, including the way they explain the setup, is where the movie fails hardest.

The screenplay never met an event it couldn’t talk about instead of showing. Everything gets explained multiple times. The core characters are introduced at least twice. The characters meet and talk a lot. They move to a planet and talk a lot more. They decide there’s a mole in the group, and they… talk a lot about it.

Sometimes action is dropped in so that we remember this is an action movie.

People monologue about their character’s backstory while staring intently at others.

The actors do fantastic work with questionable dialogue. Yeoh is a genuine superstar who never falters in commitment or charisma. Hardwick does a great job selling the walls of text they gave him in lieu of revelatory events.

As deflated as it feels, there is a discernible plot about trafficking a weapon of mass destruction and trying to prevent Mirror Universe incursion, but it’s structured without an ounce of charm. It barely feels like Star Trek after we exit the initial flashback to the Terran Empire. All those deep-dive character references are so deep as to be meaningless.

I’m still wondering whether the writer and producers are even fans of Star Trek.

We can’t really blame the team for this mess, though. Section 31 was delayed thanks to COVID-19. The Writers Strike of 2023 most likely led to Paramount redeveloping a pilot script as a feature-length film. Who knows how much writer input they solicited during this transition?

The creators fought a lot of obstacles to get this to our screens. You can see the struggle all over it.

I’d feel more patient with its flaws if it were a mediocre pilot. I find the characters charming enough that I would try to watch the first season, and it might grow on me over time.

As far as I know, we aren’t getting more from this.

Star Trek fans aren’t missing anything important from the universe if we skip Section 31. And you can watch vastly better movies if you’re in a Michelle Yeoh mood.

Author: SM Reine

Half-Tellarite SM Reine is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of fantasy. She’s been publishing since 2011 and a nerd since forever.

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