- Starring
- Michelle Yeoh, Omari Hardwich, Sam Richardson
- Director
- Oatunde Osunsanmi
- Rating
- PG-13
- Genre
- Action, Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi
- Release date
- Jan 24, 2025
- Where to watch
- Paramount+
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
Star Trek: Section 31 is a spy-fi action film centered on former Emperor Philippa Georgiou as she rejoins Starfleet’s covert black ops division, Section 31. She and an elite team of operatives confront a devastating weapon with the power to threaten the entire universe.
Star Trek: Section 31 Review
Anyone who has watched modern Star Trek is aware that it has fallen like a progressive meteorite, flash-boiling narrative oceans and creating a cloud of woke and creatively bankrupt detritus in the atmosphere that blanks out the sun and kills all good and original thought.
However, few could have anticipated that it could sink any lower than Star Trek: Discovery and no one could have known that Alex Kurtzman, the man largely considered responsible for Trek’s fall from grace, had it in him to have greenlit a bigger kick in the Tribbles than Star Trek: Section 31.
First and foremost, there is nothing, and I mean nothing, about this made-for-TV movie that in any way resembles anything Star Trek. Instead, Section 31 reads as though a junior high school student with a Guy Richie fetish directed a Star Trek script based on Joe Biden’s recollection of AOC’s description of Star Trek.
The characters are ridiculous, the performances are bizarre, and the plot is childish. Michelle Yeoh spends most of the film menacingly waggling her fingers like a cartoon witch as she delivers grade school dialogue in a cringe-inducing approximation of a self-aware coquettish femme fatale. The rest of the performances vacillate between painfully over-the-top and soap opera mugging.
The filmmakers inexpertly change tones without warning, often mid-scene, and the program never seems to know if it’s a sci-fi adventure, Mission Impossible in space, or a Peter Sellers comedy. Helping nothing, many of the costumes look like cosplay, with the worst offender being the mech suit worn by True Blood’s Robert Kasinsky, who looks like a middle-aged virgin who lives in his mom’s basement.
Star Trek is dead, and Alex Kurtzman killed it.
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James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
The original 1960’s Star Trek had costumes that were purchased from thrift stores, sets that were furnished with props recovered from the studio dumpsters after the sitcoms tossed them out, and silly stories about exploring planets populated by wacky aliens who treat human beings as playthings, 1930’s gangsters, 1940’s Nazis, weird children with super powers, and illusions of Abraham Lincoln. The ‘inclusive’ cast on the bridge included a Scotsman, a Russian, an Asian, an African female, and an odd-looking fellow with pointed ears and slanted eyebrows who came from the planet Vulcan. The performances were goofy. And by gum, not only did the viewers love watching that, they continue to enjoy watching it in reruns to this day.
Today, I’d like to ask “what has changed”? Why is the original Star Trek so fun despite its silliness, and why is modern Star Trek downright unwatchable? The review says “The characters are ridiculous, the performances are bizarre, and the plot is childish”, and “The filmmakers inexpertly change tones without warning, often mid-scene”. After witnessing other modern train wrecks with similar issues, I’m beginning to suspect that these poor creative choices are intentional. I don’t know why the performances have to be over-the-top and ludicrous or why directors insist on an inconsistent narrative with constant abrupt mood swings. I find this kind of direction nauseating, both in the sense of disorientation and disgust. How the actors can put up with it, I can’t understand.
An insult to all things Trek. An incompetent mash-up of the campiest, most phony, unwatchable elements of Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy, without any of the wit, humor, intelligence, or heart of either. Cartoonish characters, cheap-looking sets and costumes, baffling dialogue, and a storyline too lame for even the kind of Saturday morning animated programs that used to be aired on network TV for the sole purpose of advertising breakfast cereals to children. Disgraceful.
We expect evolution, not devolution.
I don’t understand how you could write things this one sidedly bad and then give it a 60. . . Isn’t that on the high side?
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