A List of Many of the Things Wrong With "Star Trek: Section 31"

Section 31 opens in the Terran Empire, with large letters helpfully telling you "THE TERRAN EMPIRE" without explaining what that means, such as its being in an alternate universe where the Roman Empire never fell and instead became full of crazy murder hobos. The landscape is blighted desert where young Philippa Georgiou returns from The Very Hungry Games to her family who, uh, farms odd plants and makes swords. None of this is referred to or explained. Why is this family trying to make a go of it in a ratty desert compound? Why is Malaysia (the canon home of Georgiou) a desert now instead of a lush jungle? Why should we care about any of this? Why is Young Philippa whispering so much? Oh, she's evil, got it. Anyway, we'll get back to Dune: Malaysia soon.

When Philippa Georgiou was sent back in time from 2000 years into the future by the Guardian At The Edge Of Forever, Currently Slumming In A Much Worse Series, she, by the definition of time travel, could have been sent at any point in the timeline where she could live out her life, as, say, a pirate queen, or a doomed queen, or a queen of cinema who makes bad career choices. Instead, she was sent right back to where she was originally. Great originality there, GatEoFCSiaMWS.

At the end of Discovery Season 1, Georgiou was (in an inexplicably never shown on TV clip which, incidentally, is more tightly plotted and better shot than this movie) in charge of a bar in the bad part of galactic town, where she was then recruited for Section 31. At the start of Section 31, Georgiou is in charge of an entirely different bar in an entirely different bad part of galactic town, where Section 31 recruits her. At this point we should just let Georgiou have her own damned bar already.

All the aliens in Star Trek's vast cosmology, and you go with the species that looks like it had an unfortunate accident with a can of spray paint and issues involving blackface? Really? Did you forget the whole thing where the entire species murdered each other over racial issues? Really? OK then.

Someone watched "The Fifth Element" and thought, "let's get the singer like in that stunning dance number, but only not nearly as interesting, and have her sing forgettable early 21st century pop music written by AI."

I can only conclude they had Georgiou and Alok do SPACE DRUGS to explain why they saddle Michelle Yeoh, an Academy Award winning actress, with hysterically awful lines like "I’m not feeling motivated to be valuable to anyone but myself." They were good SPACE DRUGS - you can tell because it took up valuable CGI time rendering Space Cocaine falling down the actors' faces.

Most of the Suicide Squad, er, I mean Alpha Team, makes so little of an impression that you don't care when one painfully dies literally five minutes after her introduction. The exception is not good. That would be Fuzz the Vulcan, who's introduced generally acting like the complete opposite of a Vulcan (laughing, joking, walking normally), which is just the sort of randomly calling attention to yourself in a crowded venue you would expect an experienced intelligence undercover operative to do. It turns out that Fuzz is not actually a Vulcan, something you probably guessed about 30 words ago, but is a host robot for what I think is supposed to be a sentient COVID molecule. Why Section 31 is using sentient COVID molecules, and why the consequent sudden and inevitable betrayal of a sentient COVID molecule was not easily predicted is not explained. Nor why this sentient COVID molecule has quite possibly the worst fake Irish accent in modern recording, or why, after his sudden and inevitable betrayal, Section 31 immediately hires his wife, who is also a sentient COVID molecule piloting a Vulcan host robot, but she instead has a horrible American Southern accent. Basically, everyone involved with this entire character arc should be properly ashamed of themselves.

Michelle Yeoh has fight scenes! Yay! Too bad the director has no idea how to film an action movie and constantly uses weird close-up angles, CGI post processing shimmer and a host of other things designed to make you forget that Michelle Yeoh is also 62 years old and is officially too old for this Crouching Tiger shit.

After the Suicide Squad, er, I mean screw it, finally makes it out of Georgiou's bar halfway through the movie, a move that had everything to do with the necessity of plotting and nothing to do with a constrained shooting budget for a project trapped in development hell, they for some reason strand themselves on a planet where fire randomly blorps from the ground. This is never explained, either why they chose to hide on Planet Fireblorp or why it just randomly blorps fire. Just one of those mysteries of space life.

Surely the most annoying character introduced so far isn't the guy who sold them all out for money! Oh, wait.

Then there's the sequence where everyone gets Unearned Emotional Catharsis, because this entire movie is essentially "Discovery But Edgy", the same people are involved in writing and production, and Discovery was also chock full to the brim of Unearned Emotional Catharsis, where characters have emotional moments together because the script said they had to. So Alok tells Georgiou he's actually from 21st century Earth (the entire explanation: "I slept through a lot") and fought in the Eugenics Wars for a tyrant so he totally gets where Georgiou, the Queen Bitch of the Mirror Universe, is coming from because he worked for a genetically enhanced forgotten warlord and that's totally the same thing. This is obviously a very important moment of character development, which is why the movie never refers to it again.

Pretty much every plot beat is like this: Georgiou and Garrett (the cameo appearance from, again, a much, much better story), the Federation stick-in-the-mud liaison officer, bond over Garrett really secretly being down to clown with chaos because, uh, why? Who knows, the plot said Garrett had to randomly turn into Chirpy Science Officer Tilly right about then, so she did.

Even the final scenes, where it's revealed that the antagonist is San, Georgiou's boyfriend from the Very Hungry Games who she defeated, enslaved, and drove to suicide except psych! No, now he's back to blow up this universe because who knows why, allied with the Terran Empire he hated because can anyone really say what's in people's hearts, and at the very end discovers he really does love Georgiou because he wanted to go out like Darth Vader did, muttering "You were right..." while his ship blows up. Alok and Georgiou then proceed to pilot the Genocide Bomb into the mirror universe because if you're gonna genocide a universe, it should be the one full of fascist baddies, only they then get beamed out at the last minute ensuring no one has to pay any price for their actions at all. All's well!

Look, it's Annoying Vulcan, only with a different bad accent! Look, it's Jamie Lee Curtis, who apparently is a computer that Discovery spent the entirety of Season 2 melting into slag! No one cares! Let's send the Suicide Squad to the Planet of the Rape Gangs, that'll be fun!

This entire movie has four underlying problems at its core, which doom it to... what it is.

First, an essentially unlikeable cast, aside from Yeoh, who tries and fails to carry the entire thing on her own shoulders. The best that can be said is that two of the characters are so ill defined that they elicit no feelings whatsoever. The others are all annoying. Oh, look, a shapeshifter with mental problems. Oh, look, a dumb soldier with mental problems. Oh, look, a sentient COVID molecule with mental problems. Oh, look, a Delta... oh, she died. But I bet she had mental problems.

Second, Yeoh's character has the problem of being an intensely awful person who has to be the anti-hero around whom the movie is built. The problem is that the movie doesn't actually show Yeoh being truly evil - she murders her family, but the Empire made her do it! She ran a brutal fascist murder machine, but, you know, she felt really bad about it! - so instead all the references of her being this hideous monster just seems like everyone is being mean to a nice old lady who just wants to run a bar somewhere.

Third, the writing is very, very bad. I don't mean it's bad in the sense of being cringe inducing - although it certainly is - but so bad that it actively stops you from understanding anything that is going on.

The Mirror Universe is described as "a universe full of CRIMINALS" which, I suppose, is a way of describing very bad people but I'm pretty sure it's not against the law to be a Mirror Universe fascist. I mean, they kind of insist on it, really. The dialog in general is Marvel Whedon; lots of quips to elbow the viewer, "we're having FUN now, right? This is FUN!"

But the worst part of the awful writing is the constant unearned Deep Moments which feel as though they were pulled out of a much longer script. For example, the opening scene in the helpfully labelled THE TERRAN EMPIRE, set in a desert. Some sort of expository dialog of why Georgiou's family is eking out a life as dirt farmers/blacksmiths, possibly relating to, in this universe, Earth being devoured of anything that makes it green and pleasant thanks to climate change from rampant over-industrialization might have made some sort of point. And it was probably a point they intended to make, based on a throwaway comment an hour later!

But that point is never made. You're just shown a weird desert compound, everyone dies, moving right along. I can only imagine how someone who hasn't watched every piece of Star Trek marginalia would be able to follow along - and to be fair, that clearly is not the target market for this. But even someone like me who has religiously watched every piece of Star Trek, no matter how awful, is lost.

And fourth, and finally, there is absolutely nothing about this movie that makes it "Star Trek", other than the title and the fact that one of its characters was previously in Star Trek. There is no sense of optimism, or really any philosophical outlook at all, other than "tyranny is bad, we should perhaps not do that". Canon, adherence to which is Star Trek's prime directive, is not so much ignored as just simply irrelevant.

For example, there's a character in the Suicide Squad whose entire identity, literally, is "guy in a mech suit". Except Star Trek has never had mech suits. That's from a level of technology the Federation surpassed long ago. It'd be as if, in a gritty James Bond movie, one of the CIA agents set to work with him, for some unknowable reason, walks around in a 15th century set of plate mail.

This could have been any low budget straight to streaming service sci-fi thriller about a Suicide Squad of mooks who somehow save the universe in spite of themselves. But it's not. It's a Star Trek movie. It has Star Trek in the name. There are expectations here. And those expectations are very much not met.

And that is what really makes this, as almost every review is labelling it, the worst Star Trek movie ever made. Congratulations, guys, you made Star Trek V look good.