Michelle Yeoh slums it in this shitty Star Trek Suicide Squad.
I know that over the years I’ve given Alex Kurtzman a hard time for how much he doesn’t “get” Star Trek and how piss poor his showrunning in general has been but judging by Star Trek: Section 31 I haven’t nearly been hard enough.
Section 31 opens, as much Kurtzman-era Star Trek does, with a visual love letter to Star Wars before revealing that the Terran Empire apparently chooses its supreme emperor through a galactic Squid Game of challenges. It then sets up its own story by revealing that the final challenge is to kill one’s own family so that the emperor can rid themselves of all remaining attachments and rule for the empire’s glory alone, which young Georgiou does, even though her main character trait throughout her tenure on Star Trek: Discovery was how very attached she was to any mulitversal version of Michael Burnham.
Collectively, Executive Producer Kurtzman and director Olatunde Osunsanmi seem to have become a gestalt large language model, assembling their TV movie from a multitude of other sources, not of which are apparently Star Trek. They have watched Dune, though, and The Fifth Element, Men In Black, Hellboy, Borderlands and in one memorable scene, BBC’s The Traitors. As visually derivative as it might be, it’s still a masterpiece compared to Craig Sweeny’s wince-inducing screenplay, which bears all the tell-tale signs of having been written by ChatGPT, and the free version at that.
The adventure proper begins as we discover that Georgiou has given up a lifetime of despotic rule to become a space nightclub/ hotel owner (a premise that actually might have some potential as an ongoing series) and there’s some good news for outer space race relations as it appears Bele and Lokai managed to resolve their differences and settle down to raise a Cheronian offspring who later went into hospitality management.
Of course, Georgiou’s establishment is quickly disrupted by the arrival of a Section 31 squad, who are introduced in a sequence as leadenly obvious and clunky as Snyder’s Justice League YouTube montage. There’s a Chameloid who nods back to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country but never turns into anything interesting or useful like a Selhat or a Targ, a Deltan to titillate the incel nerds, a comic relief cyborg guy, a continuity porn by-the-book Starfleet officer (who just happens to be Rachel Garrett, future Captain of the Enterprise-C), and Plankton from SpongeBob SquarePants (yay corporate synergy), riding around in a Hot Topic-styled Vulcan android body, all headed up by team leader Suave Black GuyTM.
It’s not long before the crushingly dumb and cringey dialogue resorts to the unmistakable hallmark of Kurtz-Trek: profanity. The dialogue is laced with – shall we say colourful metaphors – but invariably not in witty or impactful ways. There’s a crass alien sex joke during one of the action sequences, after which the Deltan character is promptly fridged and the rest of her crew barely give a shit, preferring to move the action to a cheap-to-film-in-quarry for an extended and economical “marooned” sequence.
The MacGuffin, when it finally arrives, is an ill-defined awkwardly retconned doomsday device that’s somehow going to be used by the Mirror Universe to stage an invasion of the Prime Universe or blow up the Prime Universe or something. Nobody really seems clear except for the fact that it must be stopped and it must be stopped in the most action-packed way possible. The thing is, Star Trek has never been an action-oriented franchise. That’s not to say it can’t do action, it has but it’s not core to a franchise which more often than not solves conflict through philosophy rather than fists.
Throughout the 90 minutes, there are regular surprise twists but the biggest ones – the identity of both the main villain and his treacherous ally – are painfully obvious well in advance of their reveals and apart from one member of the team, none of the characters use their conspicuous special abilities in interesting ways. Even team leader Alok’s late in the day reveal as an Augment (not explicitly ruled in or out as one of Khan’s lot) doesn’t really amount to much.
The fault doesn’t lie with the cast, though. Yeoh, Omari Hardwick, Sam Richardson, Kacey Rohl and (briefly) Humberly González and Robert Kazinsky all do great work with the terrible material they’re given while Sven Ruygrok’s Fuzz is likely to be more of an acquired taste, sometimes emotion-chipped Data, sometimes Neelix. The problem is that the very nature of Section 31 is antithetical to what Star Trek is meant to be about and the character of Phillippa Georgiou doubly so. She is, as has been established multiple times, a ruthless, multi-genocidal sociopath but every time it’s brought up it’s treated as a punchline oopsie rather than an irredeemably damning indictment. Georgiou and Section 31 are villains, and not in cool anti-hero ways, they are explicitly bad guys. The worst. Perhaps with skill and nuance it’s something that could be handled but in a screenplay which is so clumsy that during its own exposition-dump opening monologue it mentions a treaty preventing Starfleet from crossing over the Federation border while the map shown on screen clearly shows several star bases outside the border.
Production wise, some of it looks quite pretty although it maintains Kurtz-Trek’s penchant for profoundly ugly ship design and a few too many lens flares and, for once, Jeff Russo’s score in’t a lifeless dirge, but there’s no escaping the feeling that this was commissioned in haste and repented at leisure. It’s lengthy journey to the small screen smacks of contractual imperatives driving a minimal viable effort so that everyone can finally free them from an obligation that’s been hanging over them. There’s zero sincerity in the closing coda which sees the team reassemble, ready for their next mission that surely everyone involved knows will never come. It does, however, feature a cameo from Jamie Lee Curtis at the very end, which makes her two for two in terms of appearing is crappy Guardians Of The Galaxy knock-offs. If this is a back-door pilot, we need to lock the door and throw away the key.
