For a follow-up to Justin Lin's Star Trek Beyond, we had to wait nine long years. The sequel S.J. Clarkson produced fell short. The reboot by Noah Hawley never left space docks. Even Quentin Tarantino's unplanned adventure caught in a pre-production black hole. Thus, the franchise has since set phasers to streaming, ushering in a vivid new era of TV Trek under the auspices of Alex Kurtzman in the absence of a big-screen excursion to delight the Trekkie faithful. Drawing its first Trek TV movie from that side of the aisle, Paramount+ is leveraging this long-gestating spin-off from Star Trek: Discovery.
Section 31 deftly uses Discovery's most intriguing character, the sociopathic former Emperor of Star Trek's dystopian Mirror Universe, played by now Oscar-wielding Michelle Yeoh, to create a surprisingly accessible (for Star Trek) story that draws heavily on both Guardians Of The Galaxy and Mission: Impossible. Once news breaks that a stolen MacGuffin called the Godsend is to be trafficked through her establishment, Yeoh's Georgiou once more throws her lot in with Starfleet's answer to MI6, now set up as the unusual proprietor of a space nightclub — having stepped through a time portal from the (even further) future in Discovery Season 3.
Undertaking this operation-cum-heist is a ragtag band of agents — Starfleet’s Seven, if you will — comprising Georgiou, Deltan seductress Melle (Humberly González), ornery cyborg Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), shape-shifter Quasi (Sam Richardson), buttoned-down officer Garrett (Kacey Rohl), no-nonsense leader Alok (Omari Hardwick), and a nano-sized lifeform called Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok) inside a robotic Vulcan body with an inexplicable (and borderline criminal) cod Irish accent. Skirting the reality that such a colorful bunch of misfits would be totally unfit for covert operation of any stripe, the basic set-up does have possibilities. Leaning especially heavily on comedy, the screenplay doles out jabs and banter quickly ("So you're like mecha boomboom? Lots of people are, no shame” “Don’t get your prime directives in a bunch”) and a surprisingly bleak flashback prologue prefaces the whole affair with a kind of intergalactic Hunger Games.
However, after the heist itself — which peaks with an elaborately choreographed ‘phasehopping’ fight sequence from Yeoh — the story grinds to a shuddering halt, turning into a slight and somewhat disposable game of ‘sniff out the traitor’ (the identity of whom might as well be spray-painted on the hull of a starship) as they sit marooned on a barren planet. The squad, although obviously colourful, lack the heart or depth of Guardians’ motley group, and with each of them being characterized mostly by snark and flippant asides, there’s little to separate them beyond the surface. Meanwhile, the annoying amount of 2020s meme-speak (“I adore that for us!" “Chaos is my buddy with benefits”) jars and feels glaringly ‘now’, losing sight of the reality that, at its finest, Star Trek should feel ageless.
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Yeoh tries her best with what’s available, but with such a full call sheet, Georgiou all too frequently gets lost in the noise. Worse, hard-hitting prologue aside, her character feels badly sanitised, vicious edges sanded out, giving way to an inexcusable blandness that severely defangs one of the franchise’s most consistently fascinating anti-heroes. The film is directed by Discovery veteran Olatunde Osunsanmi, and scripted by former Discovery producer Craig Sweeny, based on a narrative by two of the series’ principal writers (Bo Yeon Kim and Erika Lippoldt). Given this pedigree, the findings are disappointing — if not wholly shocking. Section 31 began life as a series in its own right until schedule and a pandemic got in the way. Re-tooled as a movie from episode scripts, it ends up feeling neither one nor the other: a boring comic spacecapade caught between two (weird new) universes.
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