STAR TREK: SECTION 31 (2025) **

Although I really enjoy the Star Trek movies, I don’t really keep up with the TV shows.  I’ve only seen about half of the original series, a handful of episodes of The Next Generation, some of Enterprise, and absolutely nada of Deep Space Nine.  In fact, since the advent of Paramount+, I hadn’t even bothered keeping up with the (too many) Trek shows they have been churning out.  Heck, I wasn’t even going to watch this new Trek movie, mostly because I really have no frame of reference.  All I knew is that it stars Michelle Yeoh who played the Captain on Discovery.  However, when the abysmal reviews started circling, it piqued my interest.  More than one person exclaimed it was “The worst thing ever to come out bearing the Star Trek name”.  Then, I got REAL interested. 

I always take the IMDb ratings with a grain of salt, but when I saw this had a 3.8, I knew I had to check it out.  For reference, the universally hated (although I like it) Star Trek V has a 5.5.  As a fan of bad movies, that sold me.  It was time to bold go where no Star Trek movie ever went before.  Straight to streaming. 

Emperor Philippa Georgiou (Yeoh) is hanging out on the edge of the galaxy.  Alok, a hardass from Section 31 (Omari Hardwick, looking like the Great Value version of Common) lures her back for one last mission.  Together, they have to steal a top-secret weapon.  Naturally, things go south, the weapon falls into the wrong hands, and it’s up to their team to get it back 

Basically, Section 31 is like the Star Trek version of Guardians of the Galaxy with its ragtag group of misfits pulling off a heist.  Sadly, none of the characters are memorable and most of them feel like slight rewrites of shit we’ve seen in Trek over the decades.  Right from the lazy set-up that feels like a mission debriefing in a video game, you know it’s going to be rough going.  It seems to be going for a hip kind of mood.  Like if you asked AI to imagine that Tarantino Star Trek movie that never got off the ground.  The music during Yeoh’s introduction sounds like a slight reworking of “Battle Without Honor or Humanity”, and the rewinding of past events and/or planned heists is obnoxious.  The useless camera zoom ins and outs during the action bits are annoying too and feel like something out of a bad ‘00s action flick. 

I knew I was in trouble when I saw Olatunde Osunsanmi as the director.  He’s the guy who made the crushingly bad fake UFO abduction movie, The Fourth Kind. If you’ve never seen that flick, consider yourself lucky.  This isn’t quite as bad, but it is easily the worst feature-length Trek flick. 

The performances are a mixed bag.  The only bright spot is Humberly Gonzalez, who plays the sexy, bald Deltan, but unfortunately, she doesn’t stick around for long.  As much as I wanted to like Yeoh in this, her character is frustrating as she seesaws from stereotypical Dragon Lady to miserable looking boss bitch.  As a fan of Yeoh, I have to say this isn’t the best use of her talents. 

Fortunately, after a rather dreadful half-hour, the film finds its footing and becomes, at the very least, watchable.  The best stretch is the second act when the group try to snuff out a mole who is sabotaging their mission.  These scenes are competently put together.  However, you know you’re in trouble when you’re fainting praising basic competency in a Star Trek movie. 

So yeah, the internet didn’t lie.  I don’t think I hated it as much as the fanboys did, but it certainly is the worst Star Trek movie by a fair margin.  Even the weakest of the theatrical films were still pretty good and felt like honest to God iterations of Star Trek.  Section 31 is quite removed from Gene Roddenberry’s original vision.  There’s no sense of wonder, exploration, and adventure.  Instead, it’s just a lot of cheap action, mindless quips, and incoherent plotting.  If you enough reading Firefly fan fiction, you’ll probably eat it up.