By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Recently, the latest Star Trek movie came out, but you might not have noticed. After all, it was released directly to Paramount+ rather than theaters. Plus, this was originally supposed to be a TV series before being turned into a movie, so the film always felt like a kind of Hail Mary to keep the franchise alive after the sudden cancellations of both Discovery and Lower Decks. I had a bad feeling about this movie ever since it was announced, and those feelings are now validated: with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 24 percent, Section 31 is officially the second-worst Star Trek movie of all time.
Star Trek Slop
Section 31 has a plot that feels like every bad NuTrek idea was put into a blender and turned into one hour and forty minutes of pure slop. Empress Georgiou must once again work with Section 31, this time to stop a villain from the Mirror Universe who wants to kill everyone in the Prime Universe. She does so with an eclectic team that feels like they were plucked from a bad sci-fi heist film, but the only thing these guys are stealing is time you could have spent watching a better film.
On Discovery, Tilly once extolled “the power of math,” and speaking of numbers, it’s pretty easy to see how Section 31 doesn’t add up when compared to other films in the franchise. With a 24 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, this new movie is barely ahead of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which has a 23 percent critical score. For context, The Final Frontier is the most infamous film in the franchise; the one where Captain Kirk fights God in between climbing mountains and asking important questions like, “what does God need with a starship?”
A Tired Plot
As for the specifics of what makes Section 31 so bad, let’s start with the plot. It comes down to “let’s stop a maniac supervillain from destroying the galaxy.” This is just about what every Kelvinverse film boiled down to, reducing a franchise built on the importance of communication and exploration to a boilerplate plot of “kill the bad guy, save the day.” Frankly, that repeated plot was the worst part of the Kelvinverse movies, but they were anchored by a charming and charismatic cast. Sadly, Section 31 is not.
Certainly, Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh does her best with the awful material she is given, but it’s functionally impossible to avoid comparing the awful writing of Section 31 with the pitch-perfect writing of Everything Everywhere All At Once. We’ve seen what she can do when given an excellent script, and the script of this latest Star Trek film script is completely awful. This feels like an immense waste of Yeoh’s talents even as the movie itself seems like a complete waste of this franchise’s storytelling potential.
The other cast members of Section 31 do their best, but they are hampered by poor characterization…that is, almost all of them feel like half-baked characters from a Starfinder campaign with the most tenuous Star Trek connections. There’s an Augment, a Deltan, and even Rachel Garrett, the doomed future captain of the Enterprise C. But the simple fact is that simply slapping a Star Trek connection onto a poorly-written character does not magically make them compelling, not even to the biggest fans.
End This Star Trek Era
Even though the Discovery spinoff Starfleet Academy is around the corner, Section 31 feels like the end of an era, one that caps off that earlier show’s controversial insistence on making Section 31 a huge part of its plot. From the beginning, many fans hated the whole idea of Section 31 because it made no sense for the Starfleet hippies to have their own secretive wetworks division.
Now, we get an entire movie focusing on the Federation’s most amoral and out-of-place group, and watching Paramount go all-in on something fans hate rather than giving us more of what we love feels like a metaphor for the present state of Star Trek. While I enjoyed some of Discovery and all of Lower Decks, it’s been clear that the franchise has been in a downward spiral for a very long time now, especially with these two shows getting prematurely canceled. Sadly, Section 31 confirms that we’ve reached the end of the spiral. Star Trek is dead, Jim.
And unlike with Spock, there may be nobody left who cares enough to ever bring this franchise back to life.
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