Section 31 had a lot stacked up against it—not just as Star Trek‘s first streaming movie, but one controversially centered around one of the franchise’s most divisive concepts—even before reviews this week largely slammed the film. But now that the film is out, we can take a look at just where the film falls flat… and where the flickers of potential lie that made its failures all the more frustrating.
The Chemistry of the Cast
Regardless of how you ultimately feel about the tone Section 31 goes for—which definitely leans hard into trying to be cool and cynically jokey a lot of the time—and perhaps even regardless of how threadbare most of the primary cast is treated by Section 31‘s script, Section 31 has a genuinely compelling cast trying to do the best with what they get. Even though almost half of them get unceremoniously bumped off throughout the film leaving little time to flesh them out (justice for Star Wars Outlaws‘ Humberly Gonzalez as Melle the Deltan femme fatale, who gets to be a bit more fatale than she bargained for when she’s disintegrated about five minutes in), what little of Section 31‘s character moments actually works leans heavily on great performances more than anything else.
The (Rare) Moments It Actually Engaged With Star Trek
For as much as the broad swath of the movie barely even acknowledges it’s set in the universe of Star Trek, two members of Section 31‘s crew do at least give the film a flicker of potential, and a glimpse of what could’ve been a more thoughtful Trek movie. The first is Kacey Rohl’s Rachel Garrett, here a young Starfleet lieutenant years before she eventually ascends to the rank of captain to helm the Enterprise-C as seen in TNG‘s “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Putting aside the peculiarity of having an official Starfleet minder on the team for a black ops organization that is meant to be actively disavowed to even exist by the Federation, once the film gets over treating Garrett as a potential stick-in-the-mud getting in the way of letting everyone else do cool action stuff and letting her be treated as an equal, there’s a glimmer of getting to see what actually drives her as an officer that will eventually lead the Federation’s flagship.
The other glimmer is Omari Hardwick’s Alok, the leader of the team who quietly confesses to Georgiou at one point that like she, he is a man out of time: a displaced veteran of the Eugenics Wars that ravaged humanity in Trek‘s 20th century that was forcibly transformed into an Augment before being put on ice and awoken centuries later. Alok is the exact kind of character that has a ton of potential in a story about Section 31: a man fighting for a utopia he believes in, having endured terrors that paved the way for it, but forced to do so from the shadows in an ethically compromised position because that same utopia hates what he represents. Alas, Section 31 acknowledges this backstory for a single scene and then forgets about it.
The Fabulous Stylings of Michelle Yeoh
Is this one an excuse to make a “great gowns, beautiful gowns” joke? Kind of. But as far as Trek-y sci-fashion goes, Yeoh does get some genuinely incredible looks throughout the film, whether it’s the high glam aesthetic she adopts as the persona of the proprietress of Baraam station, all high heels and glittering dresses, or her high-shouldered, all-black look once she’s back on board with Section 31. There’s some great costuming across the board that feels like it embraces Star Trek‘s weird and wonderful fashion sensibilities beyond the Starfleet aesthetic, but Yeoh definitely gets to sashay and stay here.
The Complete Lack of Engagement With What Section 31 Is…
From the minute it was announced, making a project centered around Section 31 was an incredibly risky, and intriguing, endeavor for Star Trek as a franchise. Since the group was introduced in Deep Space Nine, what it means for Star Trek‘s utopian vision has always been challenging. If a project potentially glamorizes what is essentially Starfleet’s own super secret warcrimes division, then you completely miss the point about what people have been interested in with Section 31 (or hated it for) for almost 30 years. But then a project that really grapples with the aberration of Section 31’s existence, and how people inside and outside the organization view it, runs the risk of making a film about deeply, unsympathetically unpleasant people, which is then much harder to make a “fun” action film out of.
Section 31 fails to rise to the challenge of its premise in the least interesting way imaginable: it just doesn’t ever think about Section 31 at all. For the little dramatic weight the movie puts into the people its protagonists are working for, they might as well just be generic Starfleet officers on a mission beyond Federation borders (something Star Trek does all the time!), there is never any pushback on the fact that Section 31 is any different from the rest of Starfleet, and the film just feels all the more hollow for it. Even bad Star Trek at least tries to engage with a sense of curiosity, even if it falters in the execution along the way. Section 31 just doesn’t try at all.
… Or the Wider Star Trek Universe in General
While Section 31 not grappling with the titular organization itself might fall into judging the movie for what it is not rather than what it is, its fundamental failure beyond that is that, for most of the time, the movie feels like it could be any humdrum sci-fi action film—rather than anything that is particularly interested in playing with the world of potential it finds itself in, being set in Star Trek. There’s terminology thrown about here and there of course, and part of the joy of Star Trek is that it should constantly push itself to try and do new things, but Section 31 doesn’t feel like that: it just feels like it couldn’t care about being Star Trek either way.
It’s absurd that this is the first live-action Trek material to explore the time period between the original Trek movies and TNG, the so-called “Lost Era,” and yet does nothing with it than giving a character the name of Rachel Garrett. It’s absurd that the Mirror Universe plays a crucial part of the narrative thrust of the film, yet muddies that conflict between what the Mirror Universe is in contrast to the prime reality in a nonsensical Macguffin-driven plot around a nebulously apocalyptic doomsday device. Even small aesthetic details that could’ve nestled the film in the visual language of Star Trek design are largely wasted here—either in Discovery‘s re-imagining of classic Trek design hallmarks or even something more akin to Strange New World‘s retro-new approach. Section 31 is just so uninterested in exploring anything about itself in depth that it’s this sense that makes it feel less unlike Star Trek than anything “new” it does for the franchise.
The Incoherent Action
Section 31 sacrifices so much in the name of just being an action movie, then manages to biff that too. Not only is it actually kind of action light—each divided “act” of the film basically has one setpiece in it—what action is there is muddily conveyed, either through restrictive edits that make them difficult to track or peculiar execution. Case in point, the first big brawl of the film, in which Georgiou battles a mysterious masked assassin who steals the dangerous device Section 31 wanted to acquire on Baraam station, has an incredibly fun idea: both the assailant and Georgiou use technology to “phase” themselves out of sync with reality, so they are either protected from harm or can pass through people and objects freely.
A fight in which the combatants are swapping between being in and out of phase as they battle both each other and the crowded environment around them should be a cool idea, but Section 31 not only shoots and edits it messily enough to make the flow incoherent, it also shows the phased effect by essentially putting a blurry filter over the person that’s currently out of phase… so you have one of the most beloved action stars of her generation in Michelle Yeoh, and you can’t actually see her fighting all that well. That’s just kind of emblematic of all the action in the movie: any potentially cool idea, like pitting a garbage scow against a heavily armed ship, or a hovering mine-cart chase, gets undercut in boring, messy execution.
Fuzz’s Whole Deal
Star Trek loves a lot of things, but two things it loves almost more than anything else are big new ideas, and cool little freaks. Fuzz, Sven Ryurgok’s bizarro character—an android Vulcan body with a questionable accent choice piloted by a micro-scaled, foul-mouthed upstart little alien flying around in a tiny bug ship—should be the embodiment of this, but he is both simultaneously too weird for the film to just glaze over exploring like it does the rest of the characters, and yet also subject to its dullest takes on spy-fi tropes.
Pretty early on in the film’s second act it gets established that there’s a mole among the team, only for Fuzz to be exposed as said mole almost immediately—a blessing if only because the film otherwise manages to throw out a dozen ham-fisted telegraphs that of all the potential candidates for the mole, the guy who repeatedly highlights how he can hide anywhere and be inside anything as he flies his tiny bugship around is the most obvious one. And even if he seemingly gets what’s coming to him by the end of the film, Section 31 almost immediately undoes it in its last moments by bringing his Vulcan persona back, only for it to be piloted by Fuzz’s estranged wife. It’s doing simultaneously too much and not enough.
The Rut It Puts Georgiou In
Yeoh’s Discovery character at least gets the bulk of the character work in Section 31, but actually getting the time every other character in the film is sacrificed for doesn’t exactly mean that it’s spent well. The Philippa Georgiou we meet in Section 31 feels barely in sync with the character we left behind in Discovery‘s third season, one who had been given the time to, controversially or otherwise for the former evil tyrant of the Cartoonishly Evil Alternate Universe, grow and develop as a person and at least come to terms with having changed beyond being the tyrant she once was.
In Section 31, not only is Georgiou thrust back into the same premise she was put into after she first left the Mirror Universe at the end of Discovery‘s first season, running a dubiously above-board bar, her relationship with both her past (represented here in James Hiroyuki Liao’s antagonist, San, a former lover from the grim competition that made Georgiou the Terran Empire’s leader) and to Section 31 is completely filed away. Some of that might be necessary for people who paradoxically didn’t want to watch that but do want to watch this movie about a Discovery character, but Section 31 basically junks it all out of the metaphorical airlock, meaning that it just has nothing interesting or new to actually say about Georgiou’s character. It’s not only a disappointing climax to her arc across nearly four years of TV, it’s a waste of the one thing Section 31 actually spends any decent amount of time on.
The Pacing
Section 31 started out life as a TV series when it was first announced, and you can feel the bones of a season of television still somewhere in its final form as a movie—whether that’s the clunky way the film is sliced into three sections punctuated by on-screen title cards, or in the broader sense that the film is racing through what could’ve been multiple episodes of premise in a show. It’s constantly stopping and starting as the breaks are slammed for a dump of exposition, only for things to quicken up again for a jolt of unsatisfying action, and as previously mentioned, the film is so utterly uninterested in exploring any of its potential ideas outside of the moment they’re first invoked leads to a bizarre sensation where its simultaneously overstuffed and empty.
That Unhinged Final Cameo
Section 31 saves a baffling choice for last in its epilogue, which catches up the surviving members of the team on Baraam station after the day’s been saved. There, Alok makes a formal offer to Georgiou for her to rejoin Section 31, and they open up a comlink to receive their new mission from the group’s handler, Control—now no longer the evil AI from Discovery season two, thankfully, but an actual person… played by Jamie Lee Curtis with a chunk of her face covered up by a tech-greebled plate. It’s such a weird cameo, not because of who Curtis is playing, but because it comes completely out of nowhere—the identity of Control was not a mystery at any point in this movie—but because it’s played almost exactly as “Oh my god, it’s this person you know!” instead of it being about the character or having a tangible impact. Star Trek is no stranger to stunt casting (see, arguably, Yeoh herself in Discovery, telegraphing her captain’s death from a mile off before the show premiered), but rarely does it lean on the stunt aspect in totality. It’s a very bizarre moment to end what is ultimately a very bizarre movie.
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