Star Trek: Section 31

Our Review

Section 31 is the worst Star Trek movie ever released, a distinction that required effort in a franchise that produced The Final Frontier. Michelle Yeoh’s Emperor Philippa Georgiou, the magnificent sadist who was the best thing about Discovery, gets her own streaming movie and it is a catastrophe of tone: a wisecracking heist caper where a squad of operatives chases a doomsday device through a space station casino, shot like a syfy channel pilot and written like a table read nobody rehearsed. Yeoh brings real danger and pathos to her flashbacks as a murderous emperor facing her own dead sister’s judgment, and the film keeps cutting away from that material to jokes about nanobots.

The rest of the squad is a collection of quirks in search of characters: Omari Hardwick plays the handler Alok with weary professionalism that belongs in a better movie, Sam Richardson plays a chameloid with a trivia obsession, and Kacey Rohl’s young Vulcan agent exists mainly to say numerals aloud. The villain, a shape shifting weapon courier, is afforded roughly four minutes of development before the plot’s moral dilemma lands with the weight of a form letter. The action choreography is competent and entirely without geography, and the finale resolves its stakes off screen while a character lectures about the Federation’s hypocrisy.

There was a real movie here about a war criminal recruited by the Federation’s dirty tricks bureau, and traces of it surface whenever Yeoh is asked to be still. Everything else is noise. Three out of ten, and points only for the cast trying to save it.