After Star Trek: Discovery revitalized the television wing of the franchise to great success, CBS, then Paramount, began to really exploit the series with all sorts of additional media like its first foray into comedy, Lower Decks, and the Discovery spinoff Strange New Worlds. The originally wanted to do a streaming series based on Section 31, a secret division of Starfleet protecting the United Federation of Planets, although it got highly sidetracked and eventually converted into an independent film, Star Trek: Section 31. Was the change from series to film successful?
The movie opens in the Mirror Universe where a teenage Philippa Georgiou returns from a contest to determine the next Emperor and does stuff to claim the title. I found it awkward just as much in Discovery that even female rulers were termed Emperors rather than Empresses. In the Prime Universe in the 24th century, Georgiou poses as a bartender on the space station Baraam and forms a team consisting of various aliens including the moronically-named Fuzz, a microscopic Nanokin who pilots a robotic suit that looks like a Vulcan, who has a really weird Irish accent.
Georgiou and her team find out about a destructive weapon known as the Godsend (with a dumb conversation about the name really halting the film in the tracks, alongside Fuzz), and try to prevent it from wreaking havoc. Overall, Section 31 has its moments, including Georgiou's backstory, superb visual effects, and some of the performances, but also some horrible elements like Fuzz, the idiotic attempts at humor, and some of the weirdness of the music at times, particularly the vocal themes during the bar scenes. It's easily one of the worst among the modern Star Trek media, but luckily thus far it seems to be a fluke in the revived franchise...for now.
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| The Bottom Line | |
| One of the worst modern Star Trek media. | |
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