If you want a case study for the expansion, then contraction, of branded properties in the now-dwindling streaming era, look no further than what Paramount has done with “Star Trek.” Just a few scant years ago, Paramount hosted no fewer than five different takes on the final frontier simultaneously: flagship show “Discovery,” dark legacy sequel “Picard,” animated workplace comedy “Lower Decks,” kid-focused CG adventure “Prodigy,” and whiz-bang throwback spinoff “Strange New Worlds.” Of those, only “Strange New Worlds” remains, the one fan-favorite leg of Alex Kurtzman’s NuTrek that didn’t get the axe due to bloated budgets or fan backlash, justified or no. But perhaps its last true gasp is “Section 31,” a shrug of a TV movie that looks and feels exactly like what it is: An aborted spinoff series whittled down to a one-off movie of the week. At best, it’s an olive branch to its contractually obligated megastar; at worst, it’s a “Rebel Moon“-level fiasco that doesn’t get why people watch “Trek” in the first place.
Said megastar is, of course, Michelle Yeoh, whose flowers recently came in her Best Actress Oscar win for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” but who’d been steadily reintroducing herself to Western audiences in the 2010s through, among other things, her recurring role as Phillipa Georgiou in “Discovery.” That show, ever the confused stepchild of the “Star Trek” universe, featured Georgiou as the straight-laced captain summarily killed off in the pilot to give the show’s true protagonist, Michael Burnham, some suitably Bryan Fulleresque gravitas. But a trip to the Mirror Universe and back later, and Georgiou returned, now a wise-cracking Section 31 agent who used to lord over the tyrannical Terran Empire. She made a suitably arch anti-hero, and Yeoh always gave her creaky Whedonesque quips some much-needed relish. But the prospect of centering a spinoff series around her, much less a film, was always a dicey proposition. With “Section 31,” we see exactly why.
After her jaunt to the 31st century led her to get zapped back to the 23rd century in the third season of “Discovery,” “Section 31” sees her lording over a ritzy nightclub space station where criminals come to relax before her old bosses come to recruit her for a mission. The job: retrieve the Godsend, a kind of super-doomsday weapon Georgiou built back in her megalomaniac days and ported over from the Mirror Universe. It’s now in the hands of baddies, and it’s up to her and a team of milquetoast misfits to save the universe—even as it puts her face to face with a few implausibly lingering demons from her past.
If this sounds a bit more like “Suicide Squad” than “Star Trek,” you’d be right, and that’s the first and foremost of “Section 31″‘s many problems. Section 31, in and of itself, is a bit of a wrinkle in Gene Roddenberry’s sunny vision of the future, best used in small doses for grimmer legs of the “Trek” universe interested in interrogating utopia (See: “Deep Space Nine,” the only place where such a shadowy organization even works). But in the Paramount+ universe, it’s painted as the leather-clad A-Team of Starfleet, the crew of the Enterprise if they just wanted to fly the “Millennium Falcon.” You won’t find a slick uniform, brain-teasing moral dilemma, or majestic starship; no trace of the “Trek” flavor lingers here.
The formulaic script, by TV stalwart Craig Sweeny, feels embarrassed to take place in the “Trek” milieu, content to repackage existing species and concepts through a smarmy scum-and-villainy lens. Each act is split into three “coded transmissions,” which only reinforces the notion that this feels like a discarded pilot episode awkwardly repurposed into a feature-length film. We’re treated to heists, escape attempts, and even the classic “who’s the mole?” subplot typical of these kinds of misfit adventures. What feels novel mostly comes down to the tech and how they inform the action sequences: phasing devices that let people and objects zap out of phase with the world around them, microscopic aliens who can pilot robotic humanoid suits. The film’s look doesn’t elevate itself beyond the muddy production design and cinematography of a given episode of “Discovery” (it’s directed, after all, by “Discovery” stalwart Olatunde Osunsanmi), and some of the chases, like a hovercart chase down a speeding tunnel, feel particularly ropey.
This would be all well and good if “Section 31” offered the kinds of character dynamics that have historically elevated even weak “Trek” entries, but no such luck. The dialogue is so agonizing and samey it feels like getting stabbed with a Klingon pain stick (Get ready to hear groaners like “Don’t get your prime directives in a bunch”); it’s frankly a blessing that the sound mixing and a few dodgy accents make it so you can barely hear the one-liners. (Sven Ruygrok’s giggly Fuzz speaks with a baffling Irish brogue that oughta get Liam Neeson on his tail.) What’s more, our main cast of antiheroes has absolutely zero chemistry, from Omari Hardwick‘s smoldering war criminal turned S31 handler Alok to Kacey Rohl’s goody-two-shoes version of a young Rachel Garrett (whom eagle-eyed Trekkers will know ends up captaining the Enterprise-C). Only Sam Richardson manages to put a little mustard on his moments as acerbic fixer Quasi, but it’s hard not to feel bad for the ways this script completely wastes him.
Which brings us, of course, to Yeoh, saddled with what little pathos “Section 31” attempts to muster in its tale of bad people trying to fit into a brighter future. The film opens with a flashback to young Georgiou making massive sacrifices to earn her place as Emperor, right down to killing her family and sacrificing her childhood love, San (James Hiroyuki Liao). Yeoh does her level best to balance the slinky swagger of classic Georgiou with these brief glimpses of humanity, but even she can only do so much with the shaky foundation Sweeny’s script offers. “There’s always a price to pay for people like us,” Georgiou says to Alok late in the film; but it rings false, and defangs what made the character so interesting in the first place. In “Discovery,” her villainy was so unapologetic, her shaky alliance with Starfleet a mere marriage of convenience. That “Section 31” awkwardly shoehorns in some scruples where there previously were none feels like the kind of hollow rehabilitation necessary to turn a baddie into a goodie for the sake of a lead role.
“Star Trek” fans have been waiting nearly a decade to see a proper film in the franchise since 2016’s sorely underappreciated Kelvinverse entry “Star Trek Beyond.” “Section 31,” a cynical whimper of a Trek adventure, isn’t likely to scratch that itch. It evokes nothing less than last year’s execrable “Borderlands“: both have Oscar winners slumming it for a paycheck, a suspicious cheapness to the special effects despite its budget, and the rancid stink of milking a franchise long past its sell-by date. Maybe it’s time for “Star Trek” to boldly go back into storage until different stewards can step up to take the universe to strange new worlds. The creaky old ones from better sci-fi franchises aren’t working.