Long delayed from its original announcement almost a half-dozen years ago, the planned Star Trek: Discovery spinoff series Section 31 was eventually reduced to a television movie deposited onto streaming in the late January dumping ground. That this project saw any completion at all is no doubt a consequence of star Michelle Yeoh having won an Oscar in the meantime, and the franchise producers desperately wanting to exploit that connection before her contract lapsed.
In general, I’m an easy mark for anything Star Trek related. I’ve stuck with the franchise for decades, through its many ups and downs, and I’m not among the very vocal contingent of Discovery haters. While it may not be my favorite Star Trek installment, I found most seasons of Discovery to range from at least passable to pretty decent. Sadly, this Section 31 movie… well, it’s just not very good.
| Title: | Star Trek: Section 31 |
| Year of Release: | 2025 |
| Director: | Olatunde Osunsanmi |
| Watched On: | Paramount+ |
Michelle Yeoh’s Philippa Georgiou character was introduced in the first season of Star Trek: Discovery as captain of the U.S.S. Shenzhou, only to be quickly killed off in a conflict against warmongering Klingons. Nevertheless, she returned later. More accurately, an alternate and decidedly less noble version of Georgiou from the Mirror Universe, where she was Emperor of the evil Terran Empire, got trapped in the Prime Universe and caused all sorts of trouble for the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery. In time, the character became semi-reformed and was recruited into Starfleet’s super-secret Section 31 black ops division.
Plans for Yeoh to headline a spinoff series about Georgiou’s adventures in Section 31 had been in talks for years, but kept getting put off for one reason or another as the actress’ career flourished elsewhere. As we last saw her, Georgiou was written off Discovery again when she was transported back in time from the 32nd Century to some undefined point where the Mirror and Prime Universes were still aligned and she could forge her own, new destiny. That felt like a pretty conclusive ending to the storyline that might preclude further appearances from the character. But then Yeoh won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once and became a hot commodity in the industry. Those stagnating plans for a Section 31 series were put back on a fast track and some unfinished scripts written for it were reworked into a TV movie.
Even having now watched it, exactly where in the franchise timeline the new Section 31 movie is supposed to be set is unclear to me. The story takes place outside the main narratives for any of the recent series, and has few to no reference points to indicate whether it happens before or after Georgiou’s time travel. We learn that she’s fled Starfleet and built a new identity for herself outside Federation territory, but Section 31 still knows about her (suggesting that she hasn’t gone back in time yet) and sends operatives to track her down and rope her into one last, very important mission.
In contrast to the organization’s depiction in other Trek series – where it’s always been shown as a highly skilled, elite intelligence and espionage agency – Section 31 is portrayed here as a Dirty Dozen or Suicide Squad style unit comprised of misfits and weirdos Starfleet considers expendable, and therefore prime fodder for dangerous missions with low chances of success. Among the teammates she’s forced to partner with are an idiot cyborg (Robert Kazinski), a fumbling shape-shifter (comedian Sam Richardson from Veep), a bald-headed Deltan seductress (Humberly González), and a lunatic Vulcan who speaks in a thick Irish accent (Sven Ruygrok) and turns out to actually be an android body piloted by a microscopic bug. The only somewhat competent members of the team are both humans, one a Starfleet officer with a stick up her butt (Kacey Rohl from Hannibal and The Magicians) and the other a guy (Omari Hardwick) whose main distinguishing trait is that he’s a dead ringer for musician/actor Common, in both appearance and performance delivery.
The plot is some nonsense about Georgiou needing to help Section 31 retrieve a super-weapon MacGuffin capable of destroying an entire Quadrant of the galaxy – because of course that’s the type of low-stakes mission Starfleet would send a C-List team of losers to take care of. The so-called “Godsend” device, which looks suspiciously like a volleyball with a bunch of circuit boards glued to it, originated in the Mirror Universe and was actually commissioned by Georgiou herself when she was more evil. The main antagonist she needs to prevent from getting it is someone from her own past.
Section 31 neither looks nor feels much like Star Trek to any recognizable degree. Much of that is by design. With an antihero character in the lead, the movie is meant to have a looser, freewheeling tone, like the aforementioned Dirty Dozen or Suicide Squad (or, more to the point, very much in direct imitation of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy). It’s filled with weak attempts at irreverent humor and has quite a lot of swearing (typically a no-no in Star Trek) and decidedly 21st Century slang. The outcome of all this is a film that feels like a derivative knockoff of a lot of other popular things that have nothing to do with Star Trek, lacking just about any of the qualities Star Trek fans enjoy in the franchise. This is a huge miscalculation. I think it’s safe to say Gene Roddenberry would have absolutely loathed it.
To be blunt, the movie is awful. Aside from Georgiou herself, the other characters are mostly dumb and unlikable. The plot is stupid, with every supposed twist obvious well in advance. The dialogue and attempted humor are terribly lame. The generic sets and production design look like leftovers from some long-forgotten early-2000s cable TV sci-fi series.
Michelle Yeoh does her best to make any of this seem even remotely enjoyable, but the effort is wasted. The script is obviously stitched together from what was originally meant to be a two- or three-part series premiere, and ends with a set-up for more episodes that will almost certainly never come. At least, I sure hope they don’t. Section 31 is a seriously misguided branch of the Star Trek franchise best forgotten and left to fall into obscurity.
Video Streaming
Star Trek: Section 31 premiered on Paramount+ on Friday, January 24, 2025. While it may technically stream in 4K HDR format, I fully expect that the movie was probably upconverted from a 2K workflow. In its best-looking scenes, the 2.35:1 image is modestly sharp, but much of the photography appears to have been deliberately softened to blend with the mediocre CGI visual effects. The HDR grading likewise may have a few popping bright moments, but is inundated with dingy yellow and brown filters that dull the colors and clip highlights. It’s a very bland-looking movie with uninteresting production values.
The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack opens with a nice bass hit and has a quite a lot of rumble throughout the action scenes, but the bombast has only mediocre fidelity. Like the rest of the movie, the audio is mostly dull and tiresome.
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Note: All screenshots in this article were taken via capture in a web browser, and came out looking even softer than the movie looks during regular viewing from a streaming device. Images on this page are for illustration purposes only.
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