Posted by Joey Peters on Jan 29, 2025
Star Trek is a TV franchise and it’s cinematic adaptations are profoundly hit or miss. I find that the original series movies-that is to say the first six movies, mostly work because they adapt a general type of episode you would see in the series: the ponderous new age gibberish episode that thinks it’s smart, the submarine movie episode, the up it’s own ass canon jerking episode, the comedy episode, the ponderous new age gibberish episode that goes off the rails and is a complete mess, and the political allegory episode. Star Trek isn’t just one type of thing. More than that all of those movies tried to make some kind of bigger artistic point. They were a firm foundation (regardless of whether you hate The Motion Picture or Star Trek V) and they are the reason the franchise persists to this day.
Even in that era Star Trek fans divided these movies into the even and odd ones, with the even movies (Wrath of Khan, The One With the Whales, and The Undiscovered Country) being fondly regarded and others (The Motion Picture, The Search For Spock, and The One Where The Gang Kills God) widely hated. There was a pattern in the production of these movies where the odd films would have bloated egotistical productions and the even numbered films would have more desperate hard-scrabble productions. The desperate hard-scrabble productions fuckin' rule, so then the next movie is a bloated egotistical mess.
I’m a rare crank, but I think that basically all the Star Trek movies since then have been worse. The TNG movies suffered because Hollywood tried to fit them all into an action movie milieu and specifically Patrick Stewart wanted to make Picard an action hero. Having Kirk be old and regretful and full of pathos was one of the great creative decisions of the TOS movies. Having Picard suns out/guns out on dune buggies was one of the the worst creative decisions. Then after that the franchise was handed off to JJ Abrams, a popular hack director who makes creatively empty movies, but most of them were still less bad than the TNG movies.
Finally that brings us to Star Trek: Section 31. It’s a mess of a movie, but at least it’s not as bad as Insurrection, Nemesis or Into Darkness.
Section 31 had a troubled development. As they were trying to work out the logistics of making a Michelle Yeoh TV series her career took off and they pared it down to just a movie. Honestly, that’s the best thing for everyone involved. A full series of this would be horrendous, it would blow the doors off Enterprise as the worst Star Trek series. Michelle Yeoh can pick and choose what jobs she wants to take. Everyone’s happy.
The end result is… I think what they’re going for is an action comedy in the vein of, uh, the 2016 Suicide Squad movie? There’s tons of bits that are shaped like they should be jokes, sound like they should be Marvel movie level quips, and none of them work. There’s action sequences. They get points for the action sequences having at least some wide context shots, but the cuts are so fast it’s difficult to make sense of what the hell is going on anyway. An action comedy without comedy and with action too incoherent to follow is just a failure.
So the movie focuses on Section 31. The Federation gets a lot of credit for being a vegetarian space socialist society, but the real truth is that it is written by unimaginative navy kid liberals who haven’t really thought about what a truly socialist society would look like. The Federation as portrayed in Star Trek ends up being a space social democracy that looks a hell of a lot like Space America, but a little bit less evil.
Section 31 in the franchise comes from Deep Space 9, the greatest Star Trek show (this is fact, not conjecture). It was at least somewhat aware of the limitations it operated under, and it nibbled on the edges of the cage. In DS9 Doctor Bashir gets press-ganged into working for Section 31 which is the secret black ops intelligence service that operates off the books in the Federation. It’s a running sub plot for a while and it’s portrayed as a horrifying thing that Bashir and the DS9 crew, the darkest and cruelist Star Trek cast, still want to destroy for the good of the Federation.
After that Section 31 was hinted at in an episode of Enterprise where Malcolm Reed (the security officer) looks directly at the camera and says, “Hey Lois, remember that time the Federation had an unlicensed off the books black ops spy agency in Deep Space Nine?” in a perfect Peter Griffin voice.
The real problem of Section 31 emerged in Star Trek Discovery. Disco was between a rock and a hard place in trying to revitalize a dead franchise and I appreciate what it was trying to do in it’s first season, it fell flat and ended up super contrived. I want to avoid getting dragged too far into the weeds (they say after writing a page and an a half with only one paragraph on topic) but I have to discuss some of this to establish context. In DS9 it’s unclear if Section 31 is a real thing or just one crank’s mad project. In Discovery Section 31 is established as a catch all place for characters who are too traumatized to be in Starfleet can go to still have cool space adventures and go do cool evil spy stuff. Section 31 in DS9 at least tried to evoke Le Carre, while in Discovery it evokes the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies. Discovery wants to have it’s cake and eat it too. The Federation and it’s Starfleet are well meaning but gormless liberals trying to make the best of the universe and also they have an evil spy outfit that does evil spy stuff.
And that brings us to Philippa Georgiou. She is a refugee from the Evil Universe, which in this period is exactly the same as the regular universe, except everyone is evil. Cartoonishly, ridiculously evil. Until the end of Discovery Season 1 she was the emperor of a brutal genocidal empire and she has an unrepentant taste for sapient flesh. Once trapped in the regular universe she was hired by Section 31 for her knowledge of being extremely evil. In Discovery Season 2 it turns out Section 31 is run by an insane evil AI, and so they have to recombooble the energymotron or whatever, and so they have to cover up Discovery having happened up to this point. Georgiou helps out and learns a lesson about eating intelligent, sapient beings and doing genocide (not anything specific, but a lesson) and when she has to leave all the space liberals on Discovery cry that their friend has to leave now. That is what you need to know as context. Discovery’s only lasting contribution to the Star Trek canon is that Klingons canonically have two hogs.
Now… after two pages I can finally talk in detail about Star Trek: Section 31. I will be discussing the plot, so be forewarned. Unless you are an irredeemable Star Trek nerd I suggest you do not watch this movie.
To start it, I think it’s a bold move to start the movie as it does. Inadvised, but a bold move none-the-less. We start out and learn how Phiippa Georgiou became Emperor of the Evil Universe. Evidently they were doing Hunger Games to pick their new emperor for some reason. That makes me really curious how they pick the president of the Federation. Philippa had a pact with another contestant, and to win she poisons her own family, who die vomiting blood everywhere. She is crowned emperor and burns her boyfriend with a red hot sword to give him a cool Prince Zuko scar. This ends up being the problem of using the Evil Universe as a plot device in Star Trek. It worked when the show was fairly impressionistic in it’s storytelling (the original series) and stretches the limits of credulity when used in a context that’s supposed to be naturalistic. Again, DS9 sidesteps this by having the evil universe evolve so that while yes, every character has their own evil version at least politically it doesn’t operate exactly the same except evil. The whole sequence is not intended as a joke but it’s one of the funniest things in the movie just for how sheerly over-the-top it is.
We catch up to the current time. After leaving Disco Georgiou has abandoned Section 31 and runs a space night club and has the job of Quark from DS9. Section 31 sends some agents to her night club because some space terrorist is trying to sell a super weapon and they want Georgiou’s help. They are Grim Badass who is in the movie instead of the character instead of the character who would make sense from Discovery, presumably because his actor couldn’t be secured, one of the bald sex ladies from The Motion Picture, a guy in a really stupid looking robot suit, Ratatouille driving a fake Vulcan I think, ADHD shapeshifter, and a tightass Starfleet officer. They’re all pretty thinly written but they have distinctive personalities, which is better than absolutely nothing, I guess. They all have one character trait and that’s all they do when they show up. Georgiou immediately clocks them all as Section 31 because they are the only patrons at the club. Grim Badass explains the plot and they do the heist movie planning scene, then Georgiou tells them the plot is stupid and she’ll do her own.
So to get the super weapon she personally greets the mad scientist and then plants a thingy to make the super weapon and herself go out of phase, so that she can touch the super weapon, but the mad scientist can’t touch her. She tries to run away then a ninja who is exactly out of phase in the same way shows up and they have a really incoherent and hard to follow fight all across the ship.
Then the second funny thing in the movie happens. I guess it turns out Klingons have two hogs because Andorians don’t have any hogs at all. They’re fully ken doll down there.
I have a feeling some nitpickers will pick on this scene, but instead of it being stupid that both Georgiou and the ninja are out of phase in the same way it’s actually foreshadowing of who the actual villain is. But, like, there’s no other options for who the villain could be, so it’s not as clever as it thinks it is.
The result of this fight scene is that Georgiou discovers that the super weapon is the Lament Configuration that she commissioned while emperor of the evil universe, and the bald sex lady gets vaped.
Our heroes extraordinarily rendition the mad scientist to a fire geyser planet. They start to interrogate him but then the ship randomly crashes into the planet and they have to escape (they leave the mad scientist to die in the explosion). We get some backstory about the super weapon. It was delivered to Georgiou by her boyfriend who used this as the culmination of an evidently decades long plan and he takes the poison she used herself to kill her family, definitely killing him and making it 100% impossible he could be the real villain. The Lament Configuration can blow up an entire quadrant of the galaxy (??? Isn’t that a little bit excessive? Come on!) and the ninja is going to use it probably.
Evidently there is a mole in the ranks of these very trustworthy spies. Is it Space Hitler who is sad she used to be Space Hitler? The Grim Badass who evidently was infected by superhuman DNA in the Eugenics Wars or something? Ratatouille? Cyborg in a stupid suit? ADHD shapeshifter? Bug-up-her-ass Starfleet lady? Who knows! They break up into two teams, one team trying to fix a radio transmitter and the other team trying to find a ride off this planet. The Cyborg disappears and Starfleet and Grim Badass try to track him down. Georgiou, ADHD shapeshifter, and Ratatouille come back to help investigate. They find the cyborgs body—evidently he abolished himself too. There’s some more sub-Marvel movie dialog where they’re trying to be quippy while they download the cyborg’s memory logs.
Then Georgiou figures it out. Ratatouille propped up the steering wheel on his fake Vulcan with a cane and was actually driving the cyborg around. Ratatouille expositions that actually the ninja is Georgiou’s dead boyfriend who is definitely dead, then they have a boring chase sequence and he escapes.
It turns out Grim Badass could fix the garbage truck all along and so they chase Ratatouille and the ninja. Ratatouille and the ninja are on an advanced spy ship, and so they shoot missiles at the garbage truck, but the garbage truck is big and heavy and survives the hits. They crash the garbage truck’s trash compactor into the spy shuttle, and crushes up it’s nacelles really bad. Georgiou and Grim Badass go to the spy ship and have a boring showdown and some perfectly symmetrical violence. Meanwhile, Ratatouille realizes the situation is fucked and tries to bug out while nobody is paying attention, but the garbage truck figures out he’s taking off and crushes him to death in the trash compactor.
Blah blah, Georgiou feels sad that she used to be Space Hitler. Her ex-boyfriend is pissed that she was ever Space Hitler. He actually wanted to go back to the evil universe and use the power of the Lament Configuration to become Space Stalin and make the evil universe less evil. The Lament Configuration rolls on the floor just right to open the puzzle box and it’s about to unleash all hell, so they set a course maximum speed to a portal to the evil universe. The ship explodes, all hell opens and destroys the portal between the evil universe and the regular universe.
Oh? You thought there were going to be consequences? Fuck no. No consequences at all. Grim Badass and Georgiou were teleported to the garbage truck at the last second. They are fine. They learned nothing. It is very sad to be Space Hitler, but you can go back to being Quark from DS9.
In the end a sequel is somehow teased. Nobody has changed, except for the stick-up-her-ass Starfleet lady, who had decided sometimes a little murder is okay and she has loosened her bun. Ratatouille’s pissed off wife has joined the crew with her own fake Vulcan identical to her dead husband’s. Oh yeah, the cyborg and the bald sex lady are dead. The surviving crew look directly at the camera and wink, then a laugh track plays. Freeze frame.
There’s two ways you can look at this movie. As a movie fan or as a Trekkie. It sucks for both audiences. As an action comedy it’s a poor man’s Suicide Squad (2016); a bland regurgitated retread of something that already sucked. A Trekkie is not going to want to watch the hero of the movie murder her entire family as a weak plot device and to show that since she came to the normal universe your evil character has normal feelings.
Georgiou is an impossible character to empathize with, one who could be come up with only by the stupidest liberals who view mass murder as less criminal than rudeness. I appreciate that they didn’t want to just paper over the history of the character for this movie, but the world has changed since Star Trek: Discovery came out. It is impossible to ignore the spineless genocide apologia that Philippa Georgiou’s character arc represents.
Star Trek: Section 31’s saving grace is that it’s bad, but at least it’s bad in an interesting way. Through most of the movie my jaw was agape at what a terrible idea everything was. Why was this movie made? They have Michelle Yeoh under contract and they wanted to squeeze something out while she’s hot? Otherwise the impression I get from Paramount Plus is that it’s slowly getting sucked into a death spiral. They’re doing so badly I kind of expect them to greenlight a sequel, honestly.
The worst way for something to suck is in a boring way. Insurrection, Nemesis and Into Darkness are just bland nothing. They make no impression at all, no horror, no revulsion, mere boredom. To sit through any of those you need to be playing an endless runner on your tablet and watching LittleRedBook on your phone at the same time. At least Section 31 makes you ask “Why the fuck did they do that?”
Just for funzies, here are my current power rankings for Star Trek movies:
1. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
2. Galaxy Quest
3. Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales
4. Wrath of Khan
5. Star Trek V: The One Where The Gang Kill God
6. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
7. Star Trek Beyond
8. Star Trek the Motion Picture
9. Star Trek 09
10. First Contact
11. Generations
12. Star Trek: The One Where Space Hitler Feels Sad That She Used To Be Space Hitler
13. Insurrection
14. Nemesis
15. Star Trek Into Darkness