There have now been 14 Star Trek movies over the last 50 years and yet the franchise has always had a bit of a reputation of cinematic struggle on the big screen. From the filmic continuations of the original show all the way to the Kelvin Timeline reboots, Star Trek has always been dogged with the question of just how you adapt a TV series that prides itself on talky diplomacy and meetings of scientific minds into a blockbuster medium that warrants the spectacle of sci-fi action. Can Star Trek still be Star Trek in such an environment? This week with the arrival of Section 31 on Paramount+, another question is boldly asked instead: what if a Star Trek movie was neither interested in being a Star Trek movie or even being a particularly interesting action one?
Section 31 took a long road from being one of the first teased TV spinoffs of Star Trek‘s streaming era after Discovery‘s first season, before vanishing into the shadows and re-emerging years later as a movie vehicle for now-Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh, a bumpy journey keenly felt throughout its nearly two-hour runtime. Starring Yeoh as her Discovery character Philipa Georgiou—the former Emperor of Trek‘s alternate mirror universe, re-examined and redeemed in part over her time in the show before being sent off to times unknown to live a new life—the movie follows Georgiou as she is forced to cross paths with agents of the titular black ops spy organization first introduced in Deep Space Nine, and offered a place on a dangerous mission out beyond the fringes of Federation space with ties to her bloody past.
That team is made up of an eclectic mix of characters—led by the straight-laced Alok (Omari Hardwick); his right hand man and strongarm, the mechsuit-wearing Zeph (Rob Kazinsky); shapeshifting team genius Quasi (Sam Richardson); Deltan operative Melle (Humberly Gonzalez); wild card Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok); and their Starfleet oversight Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl, playing a younger version of Tricia O’Neill’s captain of the Enterprise-C from Next Generation‘s “Yesterday’s Enterprise”) who, alongside Yeoh, get to then spend the next few hours running, shooting, and snarking their way through a galaxy-threatening plot. And that really is the vibe of Section 31: it’s a little less James Bond, and a little more Guardians of the Galaxy, if the latter series forgot to maintain any sense of the sincerity underpinning its oddball humor. This might be fine, were it not a Star Trek movie titled Section 31—which it is, so it’s not fine, and we’ll dig into why later. But as a Star Trek movie titled Section 31, it trades any inquisitiveness about its world and the organization it’s named for to instead enshroud itself in a slick, but ultimately hollow sci-fi aesthetic.
Section 31 deeply wants to evoke to its audience that its heroes are cool, what they’re doing is cool, and even that the way that they’re all atypical for what we’d expect of Star Trek heroes, they are all the more cooler for being so. Garrett, as the sole official Starfleet officer among them, has to straddle this line of team stick-in-the-mud—”Starfleet is here to make sure no one commits murder,” she snaps during her introductory scene—while also being suitably kooky enough to be one of the gang, which feels emblematic of one of the film’s fundamental failings. It’s so interested, desperate even, in communicating its quirky tone that it forgets to ask anything remotely interesting about its premise, or the loaded intent behind its title as a movie about Section 31 and its place in Star Trek‘s universe.
Not once does the film engage with the controversial legacy of Section 31 in Star Trek history, nor does it ever really show its heroes treading a kind of moral line that would make them anything other than unabashed heroes: the most that is presented to the audience to hint that is that this is an unsanctioned-by-design entity is merely that the team’s mission is set outside the boundaries of Federation space, as if Star Trek hasn’t sent its regular heroes across the boarder countless times before. Section 31 acts as if all this is bold and new for the franchise, while at the same time ignoring the reality of what could have made it at least interestingly so: examining what people who live and breathe Section 31 actually think of the organization and its place within the Federation, and what the cost of defending a utopia from destruction might enact on someone eagerly willing to bend those ideals.
If Star Trek is a series that prides itself on thinking about big ideas and asking big questions, Section 31 is obsessed with the small, because it’s easier to crack an abrasive joke than it is to reckon with the complex ideas behind its namesake that the series has explored in the past. All this might sound like lambasting Section 31 for being a movie that it is not, and perhaps was never going to be, but it reflects a lack of curiosity felt throughout the film. Its characters are threadbare beyond being presented as quirky and fun in a surface-level capacity—no matter how good the supporting cast are, anchored around a fun, but similarly scant performance by Michelle Yeoh, as Georgiou gets the bulk of the film’s character work. It ticks off a series of spy-fi genre tropes, from betrayals to subterfuge and interrogation, but in manner that’s less about actually playing with those tropes in Star Trek‘s setting and more to simply point at them as it ticks them off Its pacing is awkward and jarring, moving from one moment to the next quick enough to never let the film sit with its characters or the stakes of the plot to have anything meaningful to convey.
This lack of curiosity might at least be slightly more forgivable if Section 31 was at the very least a good action movie, but it unfortunately flounders there too. The handful of action sequences throughout have some interesting ideas, and yes, Yeoh gets to delight in all of those sequences—there’s high kicks galore, even as some of them drag out a little longer than they’re necessarily welcome. But those interesting ideas are frequently undermined by lacklustre cinematography and editing that often obscures the impact of that action, leaving them hollow.
All this is to say that this is not a case of Section 31 being different to what’s expected of Star Trek, and therefore bad because of that. Instead, it’s simply a movie that struggles to convey any kind of meaningful identity for itself, all while ignoring the one it could establish with the wider Star Trek franchise, regardless of whether or not it ultimately stood in contrast or in resemblance to it. A movie that comes in just under two hours probably shouldn’t feel like a slog, but Section 31 does, with neither the spectacle to dazzle audiences away from its anaemic character work, nor the thematic meat on its bones for them to sit and chew on. Instead, beneath its skin-deep quirkiness, the only thing hiding in the shadows here isn’t a secretive, morally-compromised spy group: it’s just a pretty dull movie milling about there instead.
Star Trek: Section 31 begins streaming on Paramount+ this Friday, January 24.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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