An improbable 14 films in, and the Star Trek franchise has finally delivered its first truly unwatchable feature film. It’s difficult to think of a previous low that even approaches this level of low in the tenured body of the series, and even those who come to Star Trek: Section 31 with nothing but fond memories and fuzzy feel-goodery in their hearts for Star Trek: Discovery will find little to redeem this Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou spin-off.
Section 31, as the secret wing of Starfleet charged with the shady, uncharacteristically Starfleet missions, is the CIA of the United Federation of Planets. Georgiou comes to them as the former familicidal and genocidal dictator of the “mirror universe,” the alternate reality where right and wrong trade places. Set in the time between The Original Series and The Next Generation, the Starfleet of Section 31 calls on Georgiou’s services to help handle a terrorism plot being cooked up on the outskirts of Federation territory. The Section 31 crew that comes in arrives with clumsy introductions and one-note caricaturistic quirks — Quasi (Sam Richardson) shapeshifts, Melle (Humberly González) seduces, and so forth. Meanwhile, future captain of the USS Enterprise-C Rachel Garrett’s (Kacey Rohl) one quirk is that… she is a future captain. And make sure to pay close attention to these quirks because, if you don’t, the characters are at risk of being forgotten as soon as the credits roll.
Discovery’s cinematic feel made it worth watching. In the grand scheme of the Trek television world, whether you like it or hate it in sum, no other show enjoyed as high of a production quality (or as big of a budget) as the series that began in 2017. It’s an ironic chagrin, then, that Section 31 suffers from a made-for-television immaturity. With the plot pausing to introduce characters and inject jolting flashbacks, the pacing never gets on track and appears the product of a hackneyed attempt to shoehorn into a movie some original plan for a show — some things rush, others drawl.
At the center of the pacing issues is the uncompelling romance between Georgiou and San (James Hiroyuki Liao), a lover from her sinful past life. The movie begins with a flashback of their young love, but strangely it begins at the end and never allows the viewer into their vulnerable “lover” phrase, a conceptual mistake that hinders any romantic empathy. Yeoh and Liao also share too many unemotional emotional scenes for there to be any meaningful claim of chemistry between the two. The degree to which Section 31 works at all will likely be decided for many viewers according to how successful they deem this romance — and, to this critic’s mind, that seems an ill-advised basket to have all your eggs in.
But even beyond that fundamental flaw, the film’s technical work is questionable at best. Even the camerawork is stilted compared to the best episodes of modern Trek iterations, from Discovery to Strange New Worlds, and feels too rife with endless close-ups and seemingly aimless movement. When even the most essential bones of a project are handled with this little care, there’s not a lot of salvaging that can be done. And it’s in this way that Section 31 becomes something of a lost type in the age of streaming: an insistent reminder of the qualitative difference between movies and “TV movies.”
DIRECTOR: Olatunde Osunsanmi; CAST: Michelle Yeoh, Omari Hardwick, Kacey Rohl, Sam Richardson; DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount+; STREAMING: January 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
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