Director – Olatunde Osunsanmi, Screenplay – Craig Sweeny, Story – Bo Yeon Kim & Erika Lippoldt, Producer – Ted Miller, Photography – Glen Keenan, Music – Jeff Russo, Visual Effects Supervisors – Brian Tatosky & Alexander Wood, Visual Effects – AB Studios, Cause and FX, Crafty Apes, Digikore, FX3X Cinesite, Ghost VFX, Pixomondo & Point 360, Special Effects Supervisor – Sophie Vertigan, Prosthetics & Makeup Effects – Glenn Hetrick’s Alchemy Studio, Production Design – Paul Kirby. Production Company – CBS Studios/Secret Hideout/Roddenberry Entertainment.
Cast
Michelle Yeoh (Philippa Georgiou), Omari Hardwick (Alok Sahar), Sven Ruygrok (Fuzz), Kacey Rohl (Rachel Barrett), Robert Kazinsky (Zeph), Sam Richardson (Quasi), James Hiroyuki Liao (San), Humberly Gonzalez (Melle), Joe Pingue (Dada Noe), Miku Martineau (Young Georgiou), James Huang (Young San), Jamie Lee Curtis (Control), Augusto Bitter (Virgil)
Plot
A group of operatives from Starfleet’s secret service Section 31 are sent to the Baraam space station outside of Federation territory. They have orders to recruit Philippa Georgiou, the former emperor of the Terran Empire in the mirror universe, who maintains a guise as a nightclub owner. Georgiou agrees to collaborate to stop a deal to sell a deadly weapon. In the fight that ensues, Georgiou discovers that the weapon is The Godsend, which can obliterate multiple worlds in a viral wave, which is something that she had ordered built when she was emperor. The Godsend is snatched by a masked figure. Pursuing, the Section 31 team end up abandoned on a planet where they discover that one of the team is a mole.
I used to hang out with a group of Star Trek fans. This was back in the days where the classic Star Trek (1966-9), the Star Trek movies and the second generation of tv series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-9), Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) and Enterprise (2001-5) were the works of canon out there. One of the ongoing debates among some members of the community was whether Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), which everyone agreed was a terrible film, should be regarded as part of canon or not due to the fact that it treats the series and continuity so shabbily.
I have the exact same feelings about Alex Kurtzman era Star Trek. Kurtzman era Star Trek covers the three J.J. Abrams directed/produced films Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) and Star Trek: Beyond (2016), which Kurtzman wrote and produced, and the revival tv series’ Star Trek: Discovery (2017-24), Star Trek: Picard (2020-3), Star Trek: Prodigy (2021- ) and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022- ), which Kurtzman produces. They are Star Trek in the sense that they feature familiar characters, places and species but are a betrayal of the ethos that drove the original Star Trek and the various series of 1980s-2000s.
Gene Roddenberry’s original vision was about boldly going discovering strange new worlds, making peace with what was encountered and using science to confront the unknown. By contrast, the Abrams films reduce the original Roddenberry vision to kids zipping around the universe. Everything takes place in a blur of CGI wow where you feel that any of the greater philosophical issues and politics of the day that Roddenbery wedded to the adventure would have gotten a surprised “huh” from Kurtzman, Abrams and co and the feeling they didn’t need to waste their time with that stuff before getting back to the adventure. When it comes to the revival series, all of the unique characters of the original series – the divided natures of Spock, Data and Worf has at most been subsumed to a deference to identity politics. Certainly, the effects budget lavished on the Kurtzman films and tv series would have made Roddenbery green with envy were he still alive.
Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) and Alok Sahar (Omari Hardwick)
Kurtzman-era storytelling represent the worst of whole writer’s room approach to tv series where the writing is delivered in terms of a series of dramatic peaks whose only purpose is to extrude drama for its own sake. The unique potted, sometimes highly original, sometimes awkwardly polemic Society of the Week stories have been replaced by an ongoing season-long saga where the characters have to face some universe-threatening peril. The science in the series is shabby – Roddenberry actually hired print SF writers to write his scripts – where the only morsels for classic fans comes every so often where they recycle an old familiar menace/species or character. As the saying goes “It’s not my Star Trek anymore.”
All of which brings us to Section 31. The organisation was created as the Federation’s equivalent of the secret service in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and later used in Enterprise and various Kurtzman era works, most prominently in Into Darkness. There was even a series of four Section 31 novels released in 2001. Section 31 was posited as a spinoff series featuring Michelle Yeoh’s character after her appearance in the first season of Star Trek: Discovery but was delayed by Michelle Yeoh’s other commitments and then the Covid pandemic. What started out as a series or mini-series appears to have been condensed into a single film. The film even comes in a series of chapter sections where you even get the sense that this is where the intended episodes would have ended.
I wasn’t as opposed to Section 31 on principal as much as the almost universally negative reception it has received around the web. It has a decent effects budget as all the Kurtzman films/shows do and some good sets and alien makeups. I found it particularly cute seeing reappearances of one of the half black, half white aliens from the original episode Let This Be Your Last Battlefield (1969) (although technically they were meant to be the last of their species) and a Deltan from Star Trek – The Motion Picture (1979).
Sven Ruygrok as Fuzz, the Vulcan with the Irish accent
On the other hand, Section 31 collapses the moment it starts introducing its characters, which are conceived as a motley Dirty Dozen of differing species. Most of these defined by two of three descriptions – Kacey Rohl is a regulation quoting Starfleet hardliner; Robert Kazinsky is a cocky character in a mech suit who is confused which part of him is the suit. However, the single most ridiculous character in the entire history of Star Trek would have to be Sven Ruygrok as Fuzz who is initially introduced as a Vulcan with a bad Irish accent (!) – which feels more like it should be the punchline of a joke – before the film takes a leaf from the Eddie Murphy comedy Meet Dave (2008) and had him as a robot that is being controlled by a nanotechnological lifeform.
And then there is the conception of Philippa Georgiou. She is introduced as character who has casually killed millions in her brutal reign (although all that we only ever see is her killing her family in the prologue). For reasons she is in hiding as a nightclub owner where Michelle Yeoh takes the opportunity to give a very arch performance, before deciding she wants to get back into the fray. People express distrust with her as a mass murder throughout but the end of the show are happy to sweep this under the carpet because she is such a bad ass. It is a ridiculous character. Imagine a genocidal mass murderer like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussein or Benjamin Netanyahu reconceived as a kick ass action hero – and with the addition of being outfitted in a classy ballgown.
Certainly, Section 31 has an action focus that you wish some of the classic Star Trek films would have found more of rather than playing the cosy nostalgia route. And the whodunnit aspect as the group try to work out the mole in the midst gives the film some interest. However, the writing of the film is atrocious. Lines like “You learned tyranny somewhere and you learned hard” or The Fuzz’s plea “My wife is about to lay our first litter of egg sacs. I have 190,000 hatchlings on the way” and Georgiou’s realisation “The Godsend is me. I’m the only one I could never defeat.” Characters trade insults like “Listen carefully, Junkyard”, “butt pretzel”, “I will piss in your suit until you go all rusty like!” and “Don’t get your prime directives in a bunch.” And the direction of Olatunde Osunsanmi, all focused on effects sequences and little on character and good drama, is not much better.
Olatunde Osunsanmi had previously worked in various production capacities and as an editor, before making his directorial debut with the horror film The Cavern/Within (2005) about underground monsters. He had reasonable success with the UFO film The Fourth Kind (2009), followed by the Found Footage psycho film Evidence (2013), before becoming a regular tv director. He also served as a director and producer on Star Trek: Discovery.
