By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Star Trek: Section 31 begins when a spitwad flies across the screen and traces out the shape of the Starfleet logo. I would later learn that this spitwad was the show’s hero ship.
The movie proceeds into a flashback, in which we are introduced to a girl who is worse than Hitler. She murders her entire family in preparation for a job promotion where she’ll get to spend decades committing galactic genocide and torturing the man she loves for fun.
“I’m the only one I could never defeat.” – Philippa Georgiou
This space Hitler is named Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), and the movie flashes forward to a present where she runs a floating space bar. We’re re-introduced to her while the movie plays badass chick rock music to cue the audience into the notion that we’re supposed to think she’s really, really awesome.
Then Georgiou pops a human eyeball in her mouth and savors the taste while the music swells and the camera swirls around her in adoration. Yes, the idea of Star Trek: Section 31 is selling the idea of cannibalistic mass murder being super cool if she does it in high heels! It’s the entire premise of this film. Hurray for Space Hitler!
This is not an exaggeration. This is not hyperbole. This glorification of atrocities is the movie CBS intentionally released under the Star Trek brand on Paramount+.
To make their genocide celebration happen, Paramount took an unpopular and totally evil character from Star Trek: Discovery, the least-liked Star Trek series of all time, and gave her a feature film.
Why did this happen? How did it happen? If that story is ever told, it’ll be more interesting than anything in this movie.
We’re soon introduced to the rest of the Star Trek: Section 31 cast, a spy team working for the secret Black ops organization Section 31. The organization Section 31 was first created on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as something to be hated, not glorified, and it was never something most Trek fans wanted more of. So, it’s fitting that Section 31 is the primary motivator for a movie spun off from a show no one liked featuring a character no one wanted to see more of.
The super cool Section 31 spy team engages in introductions by shouting at each other, making threats, and posing for the camera. Like Georgiou, they’re also mostly serial killers, and they’re all pretty upset that they aren’t able to do more killing.
Georgiou joins the Section 31 team for reasons and they set off on a mission to do something for some other reasons. That’s already more explanation than this movie gave me.
Luckily, this mission to do a thing takes place in the exact same space bar they’re already standing in. CBS didn’t need to build any other sets for their heist. What a financially fortuitous coincidence.
The critical mission to get something for reasons is interrupted by the surprise appearance of Snake Eyes from the GI Joe franchise. Or maybe it’s a space ninja. It’s probably just a surprise space ninja. GI Joe would never associate itself with this.
At this point, we’re 30 minutes into the movie, and it hasn’t changed location from the fancy space bar set where the whole thing started.
Get ready because the set’s about to change. The audience is introduced to a new location. It’s a desert with flame throwers randomly sticking out of the ground. Our team has a meeting there. Why they chose such an inhospitable location is totally unknown.
Their meeting concludes and we go inside their ship for the first time. It’s the spitwad from the movie’s opening logo sequence. Hooray, a third location.
This location is used to talk to a man tied to a chair because, of course, there is someone tied to a chair. The scene happens on the bridge of their starship, and you can’t see much of it besides some background office chairs.
Five minutes later, the ship you can’t really see anyway explodes, and we’re right back in the desert. Deserts are the best when you’re filming on a budget.
Luckily, one of our characters announces she knows about an old ship in the desert—a ship that just happens to be out there for reasons. So they walk to the ship, which they find in the woods.
In the woods. A woods around a desert on a place they repeatedly describe as a “dead planet.” Keep up.
From there on out, the desert is never seen or mentioned again, and everything happens in the woods. Even locations that they’d previously visited in the desert are now also in the woods.
Luckily, there are flamethrowers sticking out of the ground in the woods, so the audience always knows where they are. The flamethrowers don’t seem to bother the trees.
There’s a confusing fistfight in front of a bad green screen rendering of a blurry tunnel. A murder mystery that no one cares about. A robot gets incapacitated by being kneed in the crotch.
Star Trek: Section 31 ends when Phillipa Georgiou genocides an entire universe on suspicion of possible mischief and then tells her team she’s probably going to kill them later.
They all have a good laugh at their future homicides, and then Jamie Lee Curtis pops out of a table in the movie’s fancy bar set to give them their next mission.
If you still have doubts about the quality of Star Trek: Section 31’s writing, please enjoy this actual line of dialogue from the movie: “She died like she lived. By that you know what I mean.”
Star Trek: Section 31 is one of the worst ideas anyone has ever had, and it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. It was executed by a team of people who don’t know what a movie is and performed by actors who don’t know anything about acting.
It has nothing at all to do with Star Trek. There’s nothing Star Trek about it. Nothing in it looks like Star Trek, Star Trek things are not referenced or mentioned, and it has no bearing on anything in any other part of Star Trek (thank god). Someone wrote a horrible, horrible Suicide Squad/Guardians of the Galaxy ripoff mashup and then slapped the Star Trek name on it in hopes of tricking people into giving them money.
Star Trek: Section 31 has accomplished the impossible. It is the worst thing Star Trek has ever produced and also one of the worst things to appear on any screen, anywhere. Is it possible for a movie to be evil? This one is, and if Paramount has any sense of shame or decency, it will now shutter the entire company and auction off its assets to the lowest bidder.
Our GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT review system operates on a one through five stars scale. Our scoring system doesn’t go below one star. So, I’m giving Star Trek: Section 31 zero stars.
STAR TREK: SECTION 31 REVIEW SCORE
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