Section 31 Review — ‘A bland comedy spacecapade’

We’ve waited nine long years for a follow-up to Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond. S.J. Clarkson’s sequel faltered and failed. Noah Hawley’s reboot never got out of space dock. Even Quentin Tarantino’s unexpected foray got sucked into a pre-production black hole. So, in the absence of a big-screen voyage to please the Trekkie faithful, the franchise has since set phasers to streaming, ushering in a vibrant new era of TV Trek under the auspices of Alex Kurtzman. It’s from that side of the aisle that Paramount+ draws its first Trek TV movie, with this long-gestating spin-off from Star Trek: Discovery.

Smartly seizing upon Discovery’s most interesting character — the sociopathic former Emperor of Star Trek’s dystopian Mirror Universe, played by a now Oscar-wielding Michelle Yeoh — Section 31 weaves a surprisingly accessible (for Star Trek) story that’s part heist caper, part spaceespionage romp, drawing heavily on both Guardians Of The Galaxy and Mission: Impossible for inspiration. With Yeoh’s Georgiou now set up as the unlikely proprietor of a space nightclub — having stepped through a time portal from the (even further) future in Discovery Season 3 (don’t ask) — she once again throws her lot in with Starfleet’s answer to MI6, after news arises that a stolen MacGuffin called the Godsend is to be trafficked through her establishment.

Undertaking this operation-cum-heist is a ragtag band of agents — Starfleet’s Seven, if you will — comprising Georgiou, Deltan seductress Melle (Humberly González), ornery cyborg Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), shape-shifter Quasi (Sam Richardson), buttoned-down officer Garrett (Kacey Rohl), no-nonsense leader Alok (Omari Hardwick), and a nano-sized lifeform called Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok) inside a robotic Vulcan body with an inexplicable (and borderline criminal) cod Irish accent. Skirting the fact that such a flamboyant band of misfits would be wholly unsuited for covert action of any stripe, the initial set-up does have potential. Leaning unusually hard into comedy the script doles out barbs and banter at a rapid clip (“So you’re into mecha boomboom? Lots of humans are, no shame” “Don’t get your prime directives in a bunch”) and a surprisingly bleak flashback prologue prefaces the whole affair with a kind of intergalactic Hunger Games.

However, after the heist itself — which peaks with an elaborately choreographed ‘phasehopping’ fight sequence from Yeoh — the story grinds to a shuddering halt, turning into a slight and somewhat disposable game of ‘sniff out the traitor’ (the identity of whom might as well be spray-painted on the hull of a starship) as they sit marooned on a barren planet. The team, while undeniably colourful, lack the heart or depth of Guardians’ motley crew, and with each of them being defined primarily by snark and glib asides, there’s little to differentiate them beyond the superficial. Meanwhile, the grating amount of 2020s meme-speak (“I love that for us!” “Chaos is my friend with benefits”) jars and feels painfully ‘now’, losing sight of the fact that, at its best, Star Trek should feel timeless.

Yeoh does her best with what’s available, but with such a crowded call sheet, Georgiou all too often gets lost in the mix. Worse, hard-hitting prologue aside, her character feels horribly sanitised, villainous edges sanded off, giving way to an unforgivable blandness that soundly defangs one of the franchise’s most consistently compelling anti-heroes. The film is directed by Discovery veteran Olatunde Osunsanmi, and penned by former Discovery producer Craig Sweeny, based on a story from two of the series’ main writers (Bo Yeon Kim and Erika Lippoldt). Given this pedigree, the results are disappointing — if not entirely surprising. Section 31 began life as a series in its own right before scheduling and a pandemic got in the way. Re-tooled as a movie from episode scripts, it ends up feeling neither one nor the other: a bland comedy spacecapade stuck between two (strange new) worlds.