Last year, in my review of Star Trek: Strange New World’s season two episode “Ad Astra Per Aspera,” I said it was “not only the best episode of the recent Star Trek television shows; it’s probably the best Trek episode of the 21st Century.” To say the direct-to-streaming movie Star Trek: Section 31 fails to steal that title is a dramatic understatement. Section 31 is Star Trek at its intellectual laziest, a dopey shoot ‘em up with nothing to say.
L to R Sam Richardson as Quasi and Humberly Gonzalez as Melle in Star Trek: Section 31 streaming on Paramount+, 2024. Photo Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+
With Section 31, it’s clearer than ever we’re experiencing a cynical MCU-ification of Star Trek, where Paramount is just eager to crank out more product under an established brand. This new corner of the Trek Universe is “Space Mission: Impossible.” And it’s not that some version of that premise could never work; it’s just nobody involved seems to understand what makes Mission: Impossible popular in the first place. So we get a bunch of bland action set pieces populated by uncompelling characters. I imagine someone in the pitch used the phrase “turn-off-your-brain” at some point, but judged even on the terms of light escapism this isn’t fun or engaging. It feels like the kind of low-effort, formulaic, watch-while-you-fold-laundry content slop that’s saturating our streaming services more and more these days and usually stars Duane Johnson.
In terms of the plot, it’s a generic McGuffin quest where the heroes have to get the big superweapon before it’s used to destroy the universe, blah, blah, blah. I think even Marvel realizes at this point that maximal, fate-of-the-universe stakes have become tired and are less interesting than smaller, more personal stakes. There’s nothing here you haven’t seen a thousand times before.
Kacey Rohl as Rachel in Star Trek: Section 31 streaming on Paramount+, 2024. Photo Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+
Even this break from Starfleet-centered stories is nevertheless still populated with enough references to make any hardcore Trekkie or Trekker reenact the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen meme. Two members of our Section 31 team belong to species established in prior films. Another of our leads is Rachel Garrett, a significant character in The Next Generation episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Why did it have to be Rachel Garrett? No reason except fan service. One member of the team, Alok, is yet another recent franchise character with a history tied to Earth’s past Eugenics War, an increasingly overused piece of the Star Trek lore. What little character work is done on our Section 31 team is almost entirely told to us instead of shown.
The biggest star here is Oscar Winner Michelle Yeoh, reprising her role of Empress Philippa Georgiou from Star Trek: Discovery. Nobody can accuse Yeoh of not having a blast hamming it up on the screen. She’s certainly happy to be here even if she’s not served well by the material. The writers still haven’t cracked the fundamental problem with her character. Ever since her introduction in Discovery, Empress Georgiou was essentially defined as Space Hitler.
So when given the opportunity to keep working with the talented Yeoh, the writers labored mightily to redefine her as a girl boss antihero willing to be more dastardly than the goody-two-shoes Starfleet to get it done. Space Hitler to Girl Boss is an insane character arc that borders on offensive, especially in a franchise as historically humanistic as Star Trek. In Deep Space Nine, as light and comedic as they would sometimes allow for Gul Dukat, they had enough sense to never actually rehabilitate the character given the gravity of his war crimes. Georgiou’s crimes, we’re to believe, make Dukat’s look like misdemeanors by comparison. She’s committed grand scale mass genocide; why are we having drinks with her?
L to R Rob Kazinsky as Zeph and Omari Hardwick as Alok in Star Trek: Section 31 streaming on Paramount+, 2024. Photo Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+
I interviewed some of the cast at last year’s New York Comic Con about their characters. One of those actors I spoke with was Rob Kazinsky, who plays Zeph in Section 31. Kazinsky is himself a huge Star Trek fan, and he spoke thoughtfully about his initial hatred of Section 31 when they were introduced as villains in Deep Space Nine. He felt it undermined the rosy image of The Federation. Kazinsky told me he came to eventually appreciate the deeper exploration of the moral compromises — as represented by Section 31 — that Starfleet has had to make along the way towards its enlightenment.
Unfortunately, this film isn’t interested in any of those big questions, because nothing matters in this version of Star Trek. Everything is just a light jaunt, careless, and slap-dash. We’re supposed to just go for the ride and not think too deeply, which is a shame. A more thoughtful take on this premise that centered those ethical concerns — beyond lip service in a few lines of dialogue — surrounding a clandestine agency operating within Starfleet but with a license to violate The Federation’s noble principles and interstellar law might have been far less banal.
What’s always best distinguished Star Trek from other space opera fare was a commitment to telling 23rd or 24th century tales that were really about us in the 20th or 21st centuries, stories that held a lens up to our own society and institutions as well as dared to challenge the views of its audience. Trek works best when it’s interrogating us, putting humanity on trial (sometimes literally).
Star Trek certainly didn’t only offer social commentary. You had your action-adventure episodes, your horror or monster stories, etc. But Section 31 isn’t going to series; it’s a complete stand-alone film. Everything it was ever going to say has now been said. And with all the turmoil facing our world today that offers such furtile ground for Star Trek writers, what a disappointment to see Paramount squander the opportunity by delivering disposable content slop, as inoffensive as possible to maximize its audience and market potential.
As Captain Kirk famously said, “Risk is our business!” Section 31 isn’t boldly going where we haven’t been before; it’s a rote, lazy, incurious mess too afraid to risk anything by challenging its audience at a time when we may need Star Trek‘s progressive humanism more than ever.
Star Trek: Section 31 premieres January 24 on Paramount+.
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