I went into Section 31 with low expectations. I figured that it would be fun to watch Michelle Yeoh—because it’s always fun to watch Michelle Yeoh—and that the movie would annoy me otherwise because the very concept of Section 31 is stupid and wrongheaded and doesn’t belong in the Star Trek universe. And since I knew that it would be taking place in the early twenty-fourth century—the era between the end of the original series movies and before the launch of The Next Generation (there’s about seven decades of story time between The Undiscovered Country and “Encounter at Farpoint”)—I also knew that the movie would likely not do the one thing I wanted it to do, which is rid the Trek universe of S31 forever.
S31 was introduced in the Deep Space Nine episode “Inquisition” as a shadowy black-ops organization that operated outside the mainstream of the Federation. Every time they appeared on DS9 after that, it was clear that S31 was evil and rotten and needed to be gotten rid of. They did things like manipulate Romulan politics and commit genocide, and do other things that Star Trek protagonists are usually in the position of stopping and keeping from happening, even if it’s from people nominally on their side (e.g., the original series’ “The Omega Glory,” TNG’s “The Pegasus,” Voyager’s “Equinox,” Discovery’s first season). One of the many many many sins committed by the writers of Picard season three was giving us S31’s torture of changelings (one of the things that was directly responsible for the horrible things that happened in the season) and our heroes not confronting them and exposing them and doing something to make them see justice for that horrible act, which is contrary to the entire damn point of Star Trek as a storytelling vehicle.
Before folks go down into the comments that tell me that S31 is more realistic, please resist that urge for two reasons. One, it’s not realistic, because another of the big problems with S31 is that they seem to have super powers that keep them from ever being wrong and always being able to accomplish tremendous things with incredibly unrealistic perfection. (To give one example, in DS9’s “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges,” Sloan manages to sneak onto and off a military base in the middle of a war twice, get himself assigned to a sensitive mission, corrupt a Starfleet admiral, fake his own death, and get away from the most secure location in the Romulan Empire, with no explanation of how he does any of this, nor why S31 doesn’t share this miraculous technology with anyone else, which would be of way more benefit to the Federation than any of the bullshit they do.)
Two, Star Trek is aspirational fiction, not realistic fiction. If I want stark realism in my science fiction television, I have other places for that: The Expanse, Babylon 5, the Stargate franchise, etc. Trek has always—always—been about humanity at its best, or at least trying its best. Things like S31 are what the protagonists in Trek fight against, not what they work with or accept or anything like that.
And then I sat down at watched Section 31, and while the first part was true—it was, indeed, fun to watch Yeoh, as ever—the second part wasn’t, entirely.
Because this isn’t a movie about Section 31.
Oh, sure, it claims to be S31, but there isn’t anything in this movie that requires it to be the shadowy black-ops organization that does evil things in the name of preserving the Federation, as we’ve seen it in those DS9 episodes, in Enterprise’s fourth season, in Star Trek Into Darkness, in Picard’s third season, in Discovery’s second season, and so on.
No, what we get, instead, is a Mission: Impossible movie. More like the Tom Cruise movies than the 1960s TV show, though with nobody clinging to an airplane or running fast down an unconvincingly empty stretch of straight-line pathway.
But all they’re doing is retrieving a bit of tech from a dodgy buyer. That’s it. This isn’t a Section 31 story, it’s a Starfleet Intelligence story. There’s no need for the deniability required by S31 (and, to be fair, by an M:I story, but that also doesn’t take place in a utopian future, but the modern U.S., which is, um, not utopian by any stretch).
Instead, we get a ragtag team of misfits who go on an adventure to stop an evil Maguffin from blowing up the galaxy. And the only reason we’re given as to why this is S31 instead of, say, a team of Starfleet personnel undercover or something is that it’s outside Federation space, so Starfleet can’t go there. This has been a weird thing we’ve seen on the Secret Hideout shows of late, declaring that Starfleet can’t leave Federation borders, which is a hundred percent at odds with the entire point of Starfleet. Remember, “to boldly go where no one has gone before”? Can’t do that if you’re stuck inside the Federation, can you?
Along the way, we get some backstory on Yeoh’s Emperor Philippa Georgiou. The movie opens in the Mirror Universe, where the Terran Empire is picking a new emperor, a process that is pretty much the Hunger Games: a bunch of young people are all in a contest to see who is worthy. When it’s down to two people—Georgiou (played as a youth by Miku Martineau) and San (James Huang as a youth, James Hiroyuki Liao as a grownup)—they have a final test to perform. They have to kill their entire family, which Georgiou does, but San does not. San’s entire village is destroyed. This is basically the Family Extermination/Betrayal of Offspring trope that you see all over the very Asian cinema where Yeoh cut her teeth, especially in stories about antiheroes and/or villains. (Georgiou certainly qualifies for that…)
Georgiou keeps San as a slave when she’s emperor, and then later he died by poisoning himself, the same poison Georgiou used to kill her family. Except later we find out he didn’t really die, and he’s now the bad guy.
The thing the S31 team has been assigned to nab is taken by a mysterious figure who later turns out to be San. The team then has to track him down and stop him from using the Maguffin—which is a super-weapon that Georgiou created as a deterrent and, oh yeah, has no way to stop—on the mainline universe, thus paving the way for the Terran Empire to cross over and conquer the Federation.
(The script, by the way, gives you just enough information to be confusing. Georgiou’s entire time-travel odyssey on Discovery is ignored, both her jumping to the future and her Guardian-of-Forever-enforced trip to the past. There’s no explanation of why she’s in the early twenty-fourth century instead of the middle twenty-third, and nobody asks why she’s not noticeably older even though many decades of time have passed.)
The team includes an Augment (Omari Hardwick, evincing no interest in giving his character anything resembling a personality), a chameloid (Sam Richardson, who, bizarrely, hardly ever changes shape at any point in the movie, so why is he there, exactly?), a cyborg (Rob Kazinsky, who is at least entertainingly violent), a Deltan (Humberly Gonzalez, who is killed early on to show that there are stakes), and a tiny bug who is riding inside an android that looks like a Vulcan (Sven Ruygrok, who substitutes changing accents for acting). They also have a Starfleet chaperone: Lieutenant Rachel Garrett, who we know will eventually become Captain Rachel Garrett of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-C, until she dies and that ship is destroyed saving a bunch of Klingons on Narendra III (as seen in TNG’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” where she was played by Tricia O’Neill). Garrett here is played by Kacey Rohl, who does the best she can with a role that is saddled with ridiculously inconsistent writing, as she goes from being the only grownup in the room to a giddy chaos goblin with no explanation. Though I do like that she helps save the day in true Starfleet fashion by science-ing the shit out of something, in this case a child’s doll that can be turned into an explosive with the right technobabble.
The story makes occasional feeble attempts at making sense, but mostly just contrives excuses to go from set piece to set piece. We’ve got Georgiou and San (though we don’t know it’s him at this point) both being out of phase and having a chase-and-fight scene that’s very well staged and fun to watch. There’s the hot-wiring of a garbage scow to go after San when the team’s actual ship is destroyed. There’s the back-and-forth of trying to figure out who the mole is in the team, even though it’s ridiculously easy to figure it out. There’s the chameloid’s snotty commentary, which is at least well delivered by the always-reliable Richardson. And both Yeoh and Liao sell the angst and anger and frustration of the doomed lovers.
In the end we get what many may view as a continuity flub, but which really isn’t. What we were told of the Mirror Universe’s history between its introduction in the original series’ “Mirror, Mirror” and Kira and Bashir’s trip there a century later in DS9’s “Crossover” is that the Terran Empire fell because Spock tried to do as Kirk urged him in the original series episode and attempt to reform the empire. That led to the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance stepping in and conquering them. However that information came from Intendant Kira of Bajor who is, um, not a reliable narrator and has every reason to interpret history in a way that makes the Alliance look good and the Terran Empire look bad. Because what we get here, instead, is Georgiou shooting her superweapon—called Godsend, and there’s a cute exchange where the characters try to determine if it’s “God’s end” or “God send”—through the rift between universes to wipe out the Terran Empire once and for all.
In the end, the team is mostly still intact—the tiny bug’s wife replaces her husband on the team, and she’s pissed at her mate—and ready to go on more missions. Well, except for the poor Deltan, who was disintegrated, and pretty much forgotten by the final hour of the film. Of all the Trek tropes this movie had to dig into, it was the redshirt trope. Sigh.
This movie is ultimately a whole lot of meh. Yeoh is fun to watch, and the action is directed decently by Olatunde Osunsanmi (with his usual overuse of spurting flames), but that’s pretty much all there is to it. Usually, the saving grace of any Trek production is the characters, but aside from a bit of backstory that explains why Georgiou was so desperate for found family in Discovery (because she had to kill her blood family in order to rise to power), there’s not much characterization here. They’re all types, not people, and neither Craig Sweeny’s script nor the mediocre acting does anything to elevate them beyond that.
Oh, and Jamie Lee Curtis makes a cameo at the end as “Control,” who is apparently the head of S31. This would’ve been of much more moment if this was the TV series it was originally developed as rather than the movie it mutated into when Yeoh became too famous to have time to star in a TV show. (Well, this TV show. I mean, she had time to be in The Brothers Sun…) Instead, especially coming as it does at the end of this mediocre movie, it just inspires a shrug.
I haven’t seen. I probably won’t. I suppose I can understand why they made it, at least insofar as Michelle Yeoh is a big movie star, but like…who is this for?
This is one of the few marginally positive reviews I’ve read of the movie. This is the first Trek production I find myself uncertain if I even want to bother watching, though I probably will out of completism. I love watching Michelle Yeoh, of course, but Emperor Georgiou is a terrible, obnoxious character that I wish had never been created, as much as I wish Section 31 had never been created — except, as you say, this isn’t a Section 31 story, it’s an example of the common mistake of confusing Section 31 with Starfleet Intelligence, I guess because it has a pithier name. (Lower Decks had the same problem. Why the heck was William Boimler’s multiverse mission from Section 31 instead of just Starfleet?)
The other problem with the “dirty tricks are reailistically necessary in defense of democracy” argument is that it’s actually quite unrealistic to believe that. History shows that such dirty tricks do more harm than good in the long run. The CIA overthrew a democratically elected Iranian reformer and reinstalled the brutal, oppressive Shah because he was anti-Soviet, and the backlash to that caused the Iranian Revolution and endangered many American lives. The CIA also taught Osama bin Laden insurgency tactics in Afghanistan, and we know how much harm that ended up causing to America. Doing the wrong things for the right reasons doesn’t work, because those wrong things have harmful consequences that propagate outward. As you say, S31’s actions have tended to have equally harmful consequences, up to nearly destroying all life in the galaxy. Which is why I’m offended by the idea of a movie treating them as a fun group of heroic action spies.
I’d argue that what you’re describing isn’t even the heart of the matter, Christopher. Because the vast majority of the dirty tricks to defend democracy aren’t to defend democracy. As you say, they overthrew a democratically elected leader and replaced him with a authoritarian one. Likewise, groups are supported because they benefit the US economy over their own people. Which is so much worse because it removes the thin veneer of protecting the world from “communism” or “terrorism.” No, it’s just imperialism for the sake of profit.
Section 31 is a false equivalence because they actually are attempting to protect the Federation against existential threats like the Romulans who do use dirty tricks.
“Because the vast majority of the dirty tricks to defend democracy aren’t to defend democracy. As you say, they overthrew a democratically elected leader and replaced him with a authoritarian one.”
Yes, because they thought it was necessary to defend American and European democracies as a whole against the spread of communism. They sacrificed someone else’s democracy to protect their own.
“Section 31 is a false equivalence because they actually are attempting to protect the Federation against existential threats like the Romulans who do use dirty tricks.”
No, they claim they are, or they believe that they are. Which is exactly equivalent — letting bad things happen to other people in the belief that it’s necessary to protect their own society.
Yes, you are perfectly right about the backlash of black ops and foreign government tampering. But, as you see, Afghanistan and the Iraq were nonetheless invaded after everybody had already been aware of all that. There is always a powerful idiot who thinks he is smarter than all the others before him.
Thanks for saving me time!
IGN gave this a 2. I don’t remember the last time I’ve ever seen a 2 handed out. Yikes.
And that review was written by the former host of Engage: The Official Star Trek Podcast.
It’s currently at 18% with critics and 23% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.
If this movie is as badly received as it appears so far, I fear that Paramount and Secret Hideout will take the wrong lesson from it, as studios usually do, and assume that there’s no audience for Trek TV movies. I think there’s definitely an audience for good ones, but studios always blame the category rather than the quality of the individual work.
I worry the wrong lesson will be that audiences don’t want Star Trek to try new things. Then they’ll stick to the backwards-looking fare we’ve been inundated with since the turn of the century.
I think that that might make it the worst-reviewed Star Trek movie or series ever.
Checked the entry for the obvious Worst Trek Evah, and Final Frontier is ever so slightly ahead with 23% with critics and 25% with with audiences. Though the scores for Section 31 have changed since Christopher made that post, which are now at 23% and 17% respectively.
Interesting. Usually RT audience ratings are higher than critic ratings, although they can’t really be compared directly since they’re computed in completely different ways, and the critic ratings are just binary yes/no results which translate very badly into percent scores, since sometimes the difference between a “positive” and “negative” review is a matter of degree. I’ve seen cases where the listed audience percentage was far higher than the critic percentage, but if you actually read the specific reviews, the critics and audiences were actually pretty much in agreement about the films’ good and bad points. The critics just gave more weight to the bad points because it’s their job to assess technique and execution, not just entertainment value.
And yet, still not as odious as Into Darkness. Bad, yes, obviously, I have seen it, and it’s bad, but honestly, it mostly is just boring and pointless, not actively offensive.
I thought Into Darkness was okay but I assumed it was a critique of the Bush administration lying to get us into Iraq when, no it was a 9/11 Truther script.
Two very different events.
Sometimes a story can be interpreted very differently from how the author intended it. Once it’s out there, it has a life of its own independent of the creator’s intentions, and its meaning is a function of what the audience sees in it, which is often different from what the creator was trying to say.
I hope that kills any interest in telling a Section 31 story ever again. Let it die already.
I think the idea behind and concept of Section 31 is fascinating and hopefully can be further developed. But this film was an absolute terrible way to do it. But with some development, like Sloan on DS9 had, I think it is a concept entirely worth further pursuit. Much more so than Starfleet Academy. Though if I had my choice they would announced Legacy (or a similar concept).
Trek has already done more than enough stories exploring the moral gray areas of the utopian Federation. The more it gets done, the more cynical and unimaginative it feels, to the point of becoming a kneejerk rejection of the core idea of the Federation. I find it lazy and completely un-fascinating, because it’s regressing to the way present-day stories in our decidedly non-utopian society are told, which seems like taking the easy path. I’d rather see a thoughtful exploration of exactly how the Federation’s idealistic society actually works on a governmental and practical level, because that would be different from how things are today and thus would be interesting.
The way Section 31 was handled on DS9 was acceptable, in that it was never clear whether they actually did anything to protect the Federation, or were just a rogue collection of psychopaths with delusions of grandeur. Everything since has had them as basically a sanctioned branch of Starfleet Intelligence that does the “necessary” dirty work of keeping the Federation safe, which basically reveals more about the small-mindedness of the writers than anything. Post-9/11, it seems like people can no longer imagine a world where good can triumph over evil without turning to evil. We’re in a very “ends justify the means” era of history, and it’s so god damned depressing to see.
Star Trek needs to be put in new hands, with people who understand and respect its vision for a better future. It’s been controlled for too long now by people blinded by our present moment and unable to imagine that humanity can do better.
Quoth Allan: “Star Trek needs to be put in new hands, with people who understand and respect its vision for a better future. It’s been controlled for too long now by people blinded by our present moment and unable to imagine that humanity can do better.”
Star Trek is already in those hands. You obviously haven’t watched Strange New Worlds or the third through fifth seasons of Discovery or any of Prodigy or Lower Decks. They’ve all been about how humanity can do better.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“Everything since has had them as basically a sanctioned branch of Starfleet Intelligence that does the “necessary” dirty work of keeping the Federation safe, which basically reveals more about the small-mindedness of the writers than anything.”
I don’t think so, because until recently, it’s been made clear that S31’s actions were not “necessary” but were actually threats to the Federation. In Enterprise, S31’s meddling in the Klingon situation allowed the Augment plague to run out of control and worsened the Klingons’ mistrust and resentment toward humans in the long run. In Into Darkness, S31 was willing to exploit Khan, which ended up backfiring spectacularly and causing mass destruction because Khan sought vengeance for how S31 mistreated his followers. In Discovery, S31’s Control AI literally nearly exterminated all life in the galaxy. And while Picard season 3 didn’t confront the role S31’s torture of the Changelings played in creating the situation, it at least acknowledged it. So until the past two months, I can’t think of a single S31 story that portrayed their dirty tricks as actually being beneficial to the Federation’s safety rather than a direct threat to it. (I think that applies to the tie-in literature as well as the screen canon. I’m not sure about the comics, but the novels have been pretty consistent that S31’s operations tend to cause more problems than they solve.)
That would be nice, but I suspect it will just end up killing the idea of Star Trek TV movies, like you suggested above.
I too am so torn over this. It’s Trek. It’s Yeoh. I want to support them both, but when someone tells you “It looks like Paramount saw the Borderlands movie and said, ‘Hold my beer.” I’m seriously considering making this the first Trek I’ve skipped, but like CbhristpherLBennett, I’ll probably watch it eventually out of completist sake.
I’ve seen it called a knockoff of Guardians of the Galaxy, [The] Suicide Squad, and Rebel Moon. Borderlands is a new one to me — I had to look that up.
Is this only me, or does Sloan very much resemble Col. Flack from M*A*S*H? To me, he always was a poor imitation of that character. A McCarthyan idiot, but Flack is much more credible – and that is saying a lot, as he’s basically a clown.
Your argument that sharing that technology would benefit Starfleet – here to win a war quicker and with less casualties – only applies to some extent. People like Sloan or Flack would rather have the world go to the dogs than share with other people which they believe might also harm their own ends.
But, and from that point of view your objection is correct, all the means required for S31 to pull of their stunts and also to develop the required tech must cost a fortune that needs to come from somewhere. Keeping that up, especially in times of war where surveillance is heightened and eyes are turned to anything fishy, is in my opinion not possible in the Star Trek universe.
I assume you mean Edward Winters’s Colonel Flagg. I think Sloan was a lot subtler than Flagg. https://mash.fandom.com/wiki/Colonel_Sam_Flagg
The problem with portraying S31 with super-advanced secret technology is that it’s just rehashing another of the tired cliches of the “secret all-powerful conspiracy” genre, the idea that the secret conspiracy has incredibly advanced technology that it hides from the world. This is one of the biggest sins of Section 31 as a concept — that pervasive conspiracies are a cliched and silly storytelling trope.
I just finished this movie an hour or so ago. I have all kinds of thoughts – and while the movie was hardly the worst I’ve ever seen, most of them aren’t good.
Firstly, did they ever explain how it is that San doesn’t look around 150 years old? After all, Georgiou has the Guardian of Forever time jump to keep her young, while San had no such excuse.
Secondly, wasn’t the whole point of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” that Bele and Lokai were the last two of their species? Where does Virgil, Georgiou’s assistant aboard the space station figure in to that?
Thirdly, I usually like Jeff Russo’s scores much more than I liked the hodgepodge here. Particularly his “homage/ripoff” of the RZA track that introduces Lucy Liu in “Kill Bill” that shows up at the beginning and end in seemingly identical shots of the space station.
Fourthly, this is definitely one of those “huge stakes that are just out of sight” kinds of movies, with the implication that the Terran fleet is lined up just behind the swirly-whirly “gateway” in the nebula. Meanwhile, there are a total of 4 people aboard SAN’s ship. I’m kinda sick of the whole idea of these big spaceships somehow run by a single individual.
Fifthly, isn’t this the bazillionth time that Georgiou has had to essentially face up to being the horrible creature that she definitely was? Wouldn’t it have been a much better idea to have her doing something like helping refugees or something like that than the tired trope of having the shady character essentially be Rick Blaine from “Casablanca?” It really grated in the end when Georgiou essentially laughs about being a genocidal maniac and the rest of them joke about it as well.
Sixthly, the whole “Out of Phase” maneuvering/fight is every bit as dumb as ever. Why didn’t the case fall through the floor? Why didn’t San or Georgiou?
Seventhly, the effects for this were incredibly underwhelming – with the fight aboard the speeding cargo platforms aboard the spaceship being truly awful.
Eighthly, did they actually explain what the Godsend would actually do (or did) other than to close the gateway ?
Ninthly, Jamie Lee Curtis deserved way better than the incredibly shoddy makeup and FX than she got here. This was embarrassingly bad.
Tenthly, “mechaboomboom?” “Chaos goblin?” “Friends with benefits?”
Re: Virgil, I think your confusion stems from not being familiar with the famous deleted scene in TOS that had Virgil in the background on the bridge spinning around in Uhura’s chair while she was in the restroom. In fact, IIRC, the episode’s original title was “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, and also Virgil”, but once they cut that scene, they must’ve decided that didn’t make sense anymore, and shortened it.
Regarding San’s age, this wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve seen a time discrepancy in travel between the Prime and Mirror universes. Prime Universe Defiant traveled backwards in time to the Mirror Universe, and Discovery traveled nine months forward in time returning from the Mirror universe. Perhaps the portal connects the two universes in two different time periods.
I like your comment about being out of phase. It reminds me of the episode “The Next Phase”. Why weren’t Ro and Geordi falling through the floor? What were they breathing? [Although it looks like from reading below that some others have tried to address these questions in the literature.]
Your tenth point about some of the dialogue caught my attention, also. Of note, Michelle Yeoh’s character is called a “bad bitch” in a conversation in which a Black man makes a “yo mama” joke. Just so disappointing. I also didn’t like that Kacey Rohl’s dialogue sounded like she learned English by reading Gen Z posts on social media.
While there’s something to be said for using common language so the viewer understands what’s going on, I felt like this movie overdid it to a huge degree. On one hand, having Pike talking about the “phone ringing” in episodes of SNW works because phones have been around enough to be effectively timeless. Whereas Garrett talking about being “friends with benefits” is language so recent that it feels like it’ll be dated in a couple years – kinda like the reference to “rizz” I heard in a sitcom the other day.
“Secondly, wasn’t the whole point of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” that Bele and Lokai were the last two of their species? Where does Virgil, Georgiou’s assistant aboard the space station figure in to that?”
I’m willing to let that slide. It’s a whole species, and apparently they’ve had spaceflight for thousands of years. It’s improbable that all of them were on their homeworld when the end came.
On the phasing question, I posited in DTI: The Collectors that a phasing device could be polarized so it only worked horizontally. (I also posited in DTI: Forgotten History that the gravity plating in starship decks phased them enough that they felt solid to someone out of phase. I needed the other explanation since the scene in that story wasn’t on a ship.)
If I might offer an alternative no-prize explanation, it’s possible that Virgil is doing a little cultural appropriation – having himself made up based on a striking ‘Look’ without really thinking about where that ‘Look’ originally came from.
Given that Georgiou is a towering jerk, it’s not exactly out of the question for her minions to be likewise jerks.
On the positive side, I like the Rachel Garrett character and the idea that she would need to embrace something beyond simple rule following. I liked the strange design of Georgiou’s space station from the outside, even if it was “generic space bar” on the inside. I liked that Alok was a follower of a non-Khan Eugenics Warlord.
What’s weird about Alok is that, according to what I read, he was Augmented as a child or something, which is not how genetic engineering works, certainly not with the technology available in our era. It would have to be pre-conception, or at most in utero.
Didn’t Julian Bashir’s parents have him genetically engineered as a child too? If I recall it was because he was having some developmental difficulties, so it couldn’t have been in utero
Yes, but in the 24th century. Presuming that such technology existed in the era of the Eugenics Wars is vastly more implausible.
@ChrsitopherLBennett, you are rather assuming that this was a safe, established process rather than an explicitly-cruel warlord using war captives as her own little Guinea pigs (Then putting the survivors to work as her own janissaries).
No, I’m recognizing the scientific fact that genetic alteration is done before birth, not after. Trek’s depiction of genetic therapy altering the phenotype or abilities of grown adults is sheer fantasy, a fundamental misunderstanding of how genetics and cell growth work, akin to assuming that redrawing a completed building’s blueprints will magically transform the building itself. It can be handwaved if we presume the application of some far-future medical science that hasn’t been conceived of yet, the same way we handwave warp drive and transporters and universal translators. But to postulate that something that completely fanciful could be done using present-day technology is just ludicrous. Safety or cruelty has nothing to do with it — it simply shouldn’t be possible in the era of the Eugenics Wars. It’s like claiming that Benjamin Franklin invented the smartphone.
And yet we’ve successfully accomplished after birth genetic modification using viral carriers to
modify the hosts DNA today.
It hardly seems a stretch to assume it will be much more powerful in 300 years.
Again: What we’re talking about is the movie’s claim that the technology for post-natal augmentation to superhuman level existed in the twentieth century, at the time of the Eugenics Wars. That is the part I object to. I’ve said that multiple times already.
This being STAR TREK, I’d argue that it’s more like the genetics equivalent of Cochrane’s
Phoenix: a potentially astonishing paradigm change engineered under deeply adverse circumstances because the alternative was giving up entirely (Albeit with this genetics initiative going up in flames in the way that Phoenix so narrowly avoided via the events of FIRST CONTACT).
Why? If genetic engineering was banned after the Eugenics Wars, it stands to reason the technology behind it couldn’t have advanced that much in the absence of active research and development/iteration…
But it’s nothing remotely like how genetic engineering works today, so it’s pure fantasy. The idea that Augments could be created in the 20th-21st century (now that SNW has rewritten the Eugenics Wars timeline) using germline genetic engineering, as assumed from TWOK onward, is fanciful enough, but at least it’s an extrapolation of a technology we actually do have. (And “Space Seed” said they were created through traditional selective breeding, the way plants and animals have been domesticated since antiquity, implying that one of the eugenics programs that proliferated in the late 19th century had continued and eventually succeeded in its goals.) Positing that the magical ability to alter people’s genetics postnatally was invented by humans in our own past or present is much, much more absurd.
Star Trek? Pure fantasy?
Say it isn’t so!
That dismissive attitude is exactly the problem. Star Trek is not supposed to be the usual mindless crap that passes for science fiction in mass media. A major part of the reason it became such an enduring success when all its contemporaries failed is that it wasn’t as stupid as they were, that it aspired to a degree of intelligence and credibility and respected its audience’s intelligence, so it made its viewers care enough to buy into its reality. For decades, ST was the smartest, most sophisticated SF show on TV. It saddens me that so many people today see it as no different and no better than everything else, just another piece of shallow fantasy.
Even if they wanted to make a movie about rough-and-tumble misfits going off an a dangerous, gritty, high-octane adventure, why couldn’t they have made it about the Maquis or the Fenris Rangers or something? Why did they feel that the space Stasi were ideal for this role? I mean, I know that the character Michelle Yeoh was playing was a member of Section 31 when this movie/series was announced 6 years ago, but that was before Discovery seasons 2 and 3; they could have easily changed the concept. Just a complete lack of imagination all around.
Good point. We could’ve used a Fenris Rangers movie, and there was no reason to involve Georgiou with S31 yet again.
But then, everything about Georgiou is the consequence of the show failing to let go of bad ideas. Arguably killing off Captain Georgiou in the first place was their first mistake. Bringing her back as the Terran Emperor was the next mistake (she was originally just meant to be Captain Georgiou from a slightly different universe, not the Mirror Universe, and she certainly didn’t have to be the genocidal dictator herself). The next was bringing her back into the Prime universe and attempting to convince us that a genocidal monster who’d literally eaten sentient beings was somehow a redeemable antihero. And so on. The one good choice they made was casting Michelle Yeoh, but everything they’ve done since then has been one bad idea after another.
Why in tarnation this couldn’t have been a Captain Georgiou movie is beyond me.
I may be oversimplifying or misinterpreting things, but this might be the most cynical Star Trek outing ever. I’m not a huge Trekkie, but from my vantage point, Star Trek seems like a community. The Star Trek community is a group of sci-fi writers, small screen directors, character actors, and dedicated fans who all need each other, even when they disagree with each other.
That community doesn’t need much. You give them some plastic, cardboard, paintings, smoke canisters, blinking lights, and model ships, and they will turn it into TV worth watching.
Section 31 feels like something different. It’s neither for the Star Trek community nor by the Star Trek community. It’s a contract between a big movie star and a big studio to blend a bunch of derivative pop cultural concepts together and force it onto the Trek world.
Section 31 isn’t a movie. It’s a proof of life video. Paramount has taken the Star Trek property from its community and is holding it hostage. Section 31 is a loud, ugly, and obnoxious exercise, completely “bereft of passion and imagination.” It’s the broken and bloodied brainchild of Gene Roddenberry, pleading for its life while the studio ups the ransom.
I’m glad Shatner lived long enough to see The Final Frontier no longer be the worst-reviewed film in the franchise. Apart from that, I can’t think of anything good that came out of this. There are a smattering of moments that are at least fun in a dopey sort of way, and Yeoh usually feels like she’s trying, but that’s about it.
I wanted to like this, but alas, I found myself mostly bored.
While I agree the movie had problems, I didn’t think it was as bad as mostly everyone else thought. I liked it overall. It was fun. I agree that it seemed like Mission Impossible. However, people are always saying they’d like to see a Star Trek outside of Starfleet. That’s exactly what this was.
The thing I hated most was the Fuzz character. A small creature inside an android conveyance? It was stupid. Quasi was my favorite character, but I agree it made no sense for him to be a Chameloid when the power was never used for the mission.
I loved Garret being described as a chaos-goblin.
I found the ending interest. I felt like a lead off to a TV series, which I know that was the idea, originally. I just figured with the plan changed, they’d change the tone of the ending.
I hope we see more Trek movies, not necessary Section 31, but Trek in general. Though I’m worried about comments I’ve seen on-line about this not being Star Trek. I agree, it didn’t look like Star Trek. However, that makes me wonder if people would even like something like Star Trek: West Wing or would the naysayers complain that it’s not Trek because no one is boldy going?
“However, people are always saying they’d like to see a Star Trek outside of Starfleet. That’s exactly what this was.”
That doesn’t make sense, because “outside of Starfleet” could be anything; it’s a general category, not a specific one. Just because people want an alternative to Starfleet-centric Trek doesn’t mean they wanted this alternative.
“However, that makes me wonder if people would even like something like Star Trek: West Wing or would the naysayers complain that it’s not Trek because no one is boldy going?”
Keith DeCandido’s novel Articles of the Federation was very much Star Trek: The West Wing, by conscious design, and it’s one of the readers’ all-time favorite Trek novels. What defines Star Trek is not spaceships boldly going, it’s intelligent, well-made, moderately plausible, character-driven science fiction that explores ideas and has something to say on a philosophical or ethical level.
I actually agree with you. I was commenting on the complaints I’ve seen about this not “looking like Star Trek.” Well, to me “looking like Star Trek” means having a mission on a starship and being in Starfleet.
I just don’t know what “looking like Star trek” is supposed to be, other than Starfleet.
As I said, the reviews I’ve seen aren’t saying it doesn’t look like Star Trek, they’re saying it doesn’t have the substance of Star Trek, the willingness to explore the ramifications and ethical questions of what Section 31 is or even to explore the universe it inhabits beyond lip service to a few familiar concepts. They’re saying it’s a generic sci-fi action movie that has only token connections to either the continuity or the conceptual foundations of ST, and none of its depth. I haven’t seen any reviewers reducing it to anything as shallow as the look of the film.
Technically, I’m talking about comments on discord and X regarding the trailer when it came out. They were like “It doesn’t look like Star Trek. Where are teh ships?”
I’m not talking about reviews.
Oh. That kind of pre-release chatter is just empty noise, people trying to attract attention to themselves rather than to say anything of substance. It’s not worth a moment’s consideration. It’s a waste of time to consider the opinions of people who haven’t even seen the thing. (I’d say that includes me, but I’m not offering my own opinion of it, just reporting other opinions I’ve read.)
I am a long time Star Trek fan, and I will skip this one.
One point for discussion: Star Trek is good at capturing the zeitgeist of America and it says nothing good about the current zeitgeist. The inability to understand that Section 31 is unlawful and undemocratic and confusing it with the intelligence branch, and the further information in the review above, sounds like the franchise decided to make a movie about Section 31 that lets authoritarians not think hard. No thank you. Star Trek needs to move forward to a timeline when Vulcan was NOT destroyed, unlawful undemocratic rogue operations are not glorified, and democratic and ethical values and optimisim are centered.
Dystopias are easy to churn out without deep thought and a cynical viewpoint is also easy and dull at this point unless it is matched with Rickie in Casablanca striving to uphold good values before and in the end even if the middle looks bleak. It takes skill to produce utopian-striving visions of a better future and/or people struggling to uphold good values. That can be done with explosions and exciting story telling.
I don’t think it’s a problem with the era of Trek storytelling in general. Both Into Darkness and Discovery season 2 were unambiguous that Section 31 were the bad guys whose schemes did more harm than good, and their first appearance in Lower Decks seemed to imply that as well, given the evil cackling. It’s just the more recent stuff that seems to blur the question, with Picard season 3 shrugging off S31’s unethical actions as Keith mentioned, and both LD: “Fissure Quest” and this movie positing “Section 31 missions” that have no conceivable reason to be Section 31 missions instead of just Starfleet missions.
I guess it had to happen eventually. Alex Kurtzman and Secret Hideout had a pretty good run with Trek over the past 7 to 8 years with few blemishes up to this point – aside from a few bumps early in Discovery, and some occasional plotting flaws in the later seasons of Picard. They didn’t yet have a real stinker on the level of the worst ones such as “Profit and Lace” or “Code of Honor” (but still better than “Elaan of Troyius”, thankfully).
I’m really stumped as to how Kurtzman, Sweeny, Osunsanmi and Michelle Paradise (who was apparently a producer in this as well) pulled this off – all four of them Discovery veterans who somehow managed to take one of the better characters from that show and really screw things up (can’t think of another word for this). And given Yeoh was also a producer, one could wonder whether she had any say on how it would turn out. I’d say not really. But at least they can hopefully learn from this and do better next time (which of course also now depends on the whole Paramount/Skydance situation happening behind-the-scenes).
I saw it as more of a Suicide Squad-esque adventure than anything else. But I agree. Section 31 is a misnomer. This is a Georgiou story, and a very specific one about her Mirror Universe legacy. And if I didn’t know the story or the characters involved, I could have easily confused this with some other deep space sci-fi franchise, because it barely feels like Trek. Even Final Frontier has some semblance of what made Star Trek its own thing. This could have been done anywhere else with little changes.
For an action-adventure chase story, it’s well paced, but that’s about it. It had that promising teaser with young Georgiou and San before it went full Suicide Squad, borrowing many of the same beats we see in heist movies. I liked the notion of Georgiou poisoning her family as a Terran rite of passage, and I would have thought the movie would have delved deeper into the psychological implications of this. Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be. The supporting characters are ciphers. You can call ahead every twist and turn, and even the VFX is lacking, especially during that high-speed tram set piece (I’m glad this was spared a theatrical release).
All that aside, I did find one small beat that was actually good. Not nearly good enough to redeem the whole thing, but still worth pointing out: during the final battle between Georgiou and San there is this moment where she recognizes just how much she hurt him in the past and tries to reach out to him by touching his face – a reminder of their love – and he rejects it outright, choosing to end things the worst way possible. One of the few moments where the characters feel like actual characters with complex emotions and backstories and not chess pieces. And at the very least, it gives us viewers some of that Phillipa Georgiou we knew that actually went through a major character arc on Discovery and made peace with Michael Burnham four years ago before parting ways. I wished the movie would have leaned more into these moments – it would have improved things considerably.
Speaking of the movie trying to be Suicide Squad, they had the worst timing in releasing this, given the recent conclusion of the excellent animated Suicide Squad sequel Creature Commandos from James Gunn – a truly promising start for his take on DC.
There is no way that is how the Terran Empire selects a new leader. I mean, I guess it is now.
This was written to give Georgiou a back story and not to give the Empire a backstory. Which, duh, but they could have done both.
How much of a head start did San have for killing his family that he had already failed?
What if the both had failed?
Does this S31 “crew” even belong together? They do not behave like Starfleet. And S31 recruits from Starfleet, yeah? They don’t behave like officers. Like a crew. Like a unit. They’re a random group that has somehow been tossed together. Did they all just get out of jail? Is this Suicide Squad?
So, a secret organization that operates outside of the chain of command, that no one /should/ know about. They have a Starfleet officer assigned to them? TF‽
The tricorder beeps were the most Star Trek part of the movie.
If you can phase through walls, you can phase through the floor.
I can accept that Georgiou arrived at this point in time.
But how did San? Does the portal traverse time as well? Which, yes, we have seen, but I still want answers.
The words. The on screen words for the audience.
No. Just no. Hated them.
Stardates. Did the stardate actually and accurately tell us when this is? Or is it calculated based on the age of our lone Starfleet officer?
Or is it just from publicity material?
And why this date?
Absolutely nothing got me invested in this film.
Star Trek V did better.
For real, they almost lost me as a diehard Trek fan with the opening scene. They pick 18 kids from across the empire and Hunger Games it? Really? Really?
This was a terrible Trek movie. If you take the Trek out, you still have a boring shell of a movie that’s extremely predictable.
“Does this S31 “crew” even belong together? They do not behave like Starfleet. And S31 recruits from Starfleet, yeah?”
Oh, good point. S31 doesn’t just recruit from Starfleet, it’s a branch of Starfleet, whether in the original DS9 concept of a conspiracy of Starfleet officers or the retconned interpretation of it as an actual secret branch of Starfleet. So most or all of its personnel should be Starfleet officers.
“Stardates. Did the stardate actually and accurately tell us when this is?”
That has never happened outside of the TNG era. Gene Roddenberry didn’t want to get too specific about how far in the future ST was or how much time passed between episodes, so stardates were invented for the specific purpose of conveying no meaningful chronological information of any kind.
Stardates
Exactly. If the stardate doesn’t tell us when this is, then when is it?
It seems the only indicator of the date is Rachel Garrett’s age. If we assume the character’s age matches the actress’s age in both of her appearances, then she would’ve been 44 in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and therefore born in 2300. Kacey Rohl is 33, so that would put this movie around 2333. However, 33 seems old for a Starfleet lieutenant, so it’s possible that Garrett is meant to be younger in this movie and it’s sometime in the late 2320s.
I thought I read somewhere Section 31 was supposed to be a tv series then decided to make into a movie because Michelle Yeoh was getting movie offers thanks to her Oscar win. Thus, freeing up her schedule and letting her honor any commitment she made to Star Trek.
Maybe you read it in the last paragraph of this very column, since Keith mentioned it there.
I think that my wife and I did not have quite as negative an experience with this movie as some, but we agreed that it did not seem like a Star Trek movie. I was able to accept it more when I thought of it as a Star Wars movie with a Star Trek label: we had the nightclub/cantina as a wretched scum of hive and evil, the “piece of junk” spaceship (the Millennium Falcon vs. the garbage scow), the resort to violence as a means of solving problems; as my wife pointed out, the scene with Garrett in the hold of the garbage scow even reminded her of the trash compactor scene in the original Star Wars movie (a.k.a. A New Hope).
I don’t think using a super-nuke to kill trillions of innocent people is quite the moral flex you think it is, Empress.
But shame on you, KRAD for mentioning Mission Impossible and not Leonard Nimoy!
The good news is that, if anything in this movie is ever referenced again in canon, it will probably be a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag on some future Lower Decks-style series, so I won’t let it bug me. Until then, let us retire both S31 and the Mirror Universe and speak of them no more.
I hate the dark Dystopie they made out of the real star trek Utopie. Its a shame. Or a plan to destroy the biggest Utopie in TV and Cinema.
Paramount should have told viewers in advance they were presenting Section 31 as a Comedy with clownish characters. And worst of all they turned Georgiou all warm and fuzzy. Stealth Black ops Section 31 members stand out like glow in the dark kid sneakers. Nothing subtle about weapon suit dork could have put Christmas lights on him and it would have played the same. Should have lost him on the writers room floor.
Wow a Vulcan with emotions. But wait he’s a robot that can be put on auto pilot.
Section 31 an idea with great potential that somehow got in the hands of second generation Gilligan Island writers and producers
I’m late to the postmortem but… Ugh. Just a waste of time and money. Kind-of funny that it’s not even necessarily a Section 31 story — the group could’ve been Starfleet Intelligence proper, as has been noted here, or a rag-tag bunch of misfits like the one in Picard’s first season — and yeah, Emperor Georgiou being celebrated has never sat well with me despite Michelle Yeoh being a hoot. I did enjoy young Rachel Garrett, though.
You can almost literally see the seams from this movie’s origins as a series pilot. The second communique drops at 40 minutes in, with a perfect spot to break between two episodes. (Of course that’s simply dramatic structure to a certain extent but I recall a line of dialogue practically crying out for “To Be Continued”…)
What even is the point of all those flames venting in the junkyard?
By the Great Bird of the Galaxy, that was terrible. I am having trouble understanding how this got out of the writing room never mind actually filmed.
The Terran Emperor is selected via the Hunger Games. Yeah, that makes more sense than a lifetime of working one’s way into a position to assassinate the actual emperor.
Rachel Garrett– so we’re going to start by removing stakes as she canonically can’t be killed or the traitor.
As for most of the rest, don’t worry that they don’t have much personality, most of them will be gone soon.
On that note, given when this is set, the events can’t actually have any major effects on anything, so even fewer stakes.
Oh, a masked thief intervenes — did anyone have any doubt who that was? Masks, they’re terribly comfortable, soon everyone will wear them.
Hey, it’s the planet of pointless flame plumes — we’ve found Planet Fire Swamp!
Oh, we have a traitor — did anyone seriously have any doubt who it was? (The only clever bit was his use of the dead cyborg’s body.)
I had some vague hopes they were going to let Georgiou and Sahar actually die — this being a movie not a series pilot, but no, their intended sacrifice is for naught. Even though Georgiou is holding the McGuffin, she’s beamed out without it to have more adventures.
This could have been ok. Smaller stakes, give Georgiou an actual arc and some decent supporting characters. But no….
I suppose I was hoping for a kind of Banksian special circumstances for Star Trek… Thank you all for saving me the time!
Well, I finally watched this out of a sense of completeness, and it lives down to the bad reviews. I found the whole thing quite boring despite (or rather, largely because of) all the overblown action and noise, because it never made the story or the characters engaging. It didn’t help that they were starting with Philippa Georgiou, a character so obnoxious that even Michelle Yeoh couldn’t salvage her, and making yet another failed attempt to portray her as simultaneously a genocidal monster and an endearing antihero somehow. But then they surrounded her with a cast of equally unlikeable characters engaged in unfunny, unappealing banter. I didn’t even like Garrett, even though I usually like Kacey Rohl. I did somewhat like Sam Richardson as Quasi, but only intermittently. Sven Ruygrok was simply terrible, and the others left little impression.
As for the story, it’s just a hodgepodge of bad ideas and nonsense. I don’t even want to get into the specifics, since there’s so little that does make any sense. I found the action directing mediocre too, relying too much on flashy CGI and wild camera moves to distract from the underwhelming fight choreography.
“is Georgiou shooting her superweapon… through the rift between universes to wipe out the Terran Empire once and for all.”
There’s no indication that she did that, and indeed she couldn’t have, because they said the whole quadrant would’ve been annihilated, and it’s obviously still there in DS9. All we saw was the Godsend blowing up and the rift collapsing, so I’d assume that the device collapsed the rift around itself and otherwise did no damage, since it was between universes at the time.