By Lindsay Traves | Film | January 27, 2025 |
This casual Trekkie was admittedly intimidated to take on reviewing a Star Trek movie in the time of streaming sequels, prequels, and spin-offs branching off coveted franchises. But don’t worry, lapsed fans, Star Trek: Section 31 will spend a lot of time explaining the science fiction mumbo-jumbo to you. A LOT of time.
The eponymous Section 31 is a division of Starfleet like the IMF or another black-ops org able to put their hands into things that’d make the Federation’s hands dirty. Their current mission is to hunt down Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), a lapsed emperor from the Mirror Universe who got her position by winning a Hunger Games-style battle royale to prove her ruthlessness. Defecting from the Terran Empire (and Section 31) to the prime universe, Georgiou has taken ownership of a nightclub outside Federation space. Georgiou has a checkered past, one mostly explored in Discovery, which left her committing to becoming a better person before being sent to this place and time. Section 31 does the audience a favor by not relying on the past lore for the audience to know what’s happening, but it does its canon a disservice by chucking history in the trash in favor of an overly explained heist story that functions as a redemption arc for a genocidal anti-hero.
But, we’re left with the story Section 31 is telling us in all its TV Movie glory: a gang of quirky black-ops soldiers abandon the capturing of their target to focus on tracking down a mysterious MacGuffin. It’s as much Oceans 11 or The Dirty Dozen as it is Mission: Impossible, but it’s saddled with the veneer of Guardians of the Galaxy. If you thought hearing Glenn Close say, “Ronan is destroying the Xandarian outposts,” was silly, wait until you hear this Oscar-winner explain space antennas … or something. Section 31, made up of a straight-edge chaos loving science officer, Rachel (Kacey Rohl), a brute soldier in a mech suit, Zeph (Rob Kazinsky), a quirky leader in Quasi (Sam Richardson), and a bleached blonde Vulcan bot piloted by a wisecracking mite, Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok) quickly flips their mission into a heist that soon turns into a “find the mole” story that later becomes a redemption arc. Section 31 never seems to know exactly where it’s headed and instead crams together clashing movie tropes as a means of giving Michelle Yeoh something cool to do while the others explain away plot points using made-up words.
This purple-tinted Trek installment might have looked well enough for the DTV screen, but the action sequences are well out of the depth of the movie’s resources. We all know what Yeoh can do by now, but more came from her commanding clap in Wicked than it did in all of this movie’s action sequences. Pairing her up with James Hiroyuki Liao and throwing in some vibration-plane-fight-nonsense made for some watchable scenes, but it simply plays like a discount version of larger features or a rushed spinoff for a well-cast character from a TV series.
Section 31 is, unfortunately, a pile of floating space refuse (and I’m not just saying that because they teased me with a Vulcan and then took it away). It’s a movie that seems to have tried to meander on its way to a predetermined finale so ends up feeling like its still defining its conflict by the midpoint. Stretching itself out with rising actions made up overly explained sci-fi-bullsh**, this otherwise zany spin-off feature named for a controversial Starfleet org is nothing but a hunk of space junk with really cool eyeliner.
Section 31 lands on Paramount+ January 24, 2025