While “Star Trek Discovery” ended its final season last year, there was word about the possibility of a spin-off series starring Michelle Yeoh’s character ‘Philippa Georgiou’. However, when Paramount stock took a nosedive, cuts needed to be made, so instead of a full series spin-off we got it as a Paramount+ exclusive movie.

The common consensus against this movie is that it is against Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a perfect future and showing off how wonderful it is. However, there have long been examples of Star Trek’s future not being so perfect: Even back in Roddenberry’s time, “Star Trek VI The Final Frontier” made the controversial decision to have the story revolve around the enterprise crew’s racism against the Klingon. So I don’t think it is out of the realm of possibility to portray a flawed vision of the future, as long as it’s not utterly hypocritical like “Star Trek Insurrection”.

The direction here was an incredibly action-forward environment. In Michelle Yeoh’s first scene, she goes over the possible assignment and just yawns at them out of boredom, as if the audience would be bored by something more mundane.  I don’t blame her though, since she is from the mirror universe and the only thing people in that universe do is murder each other, mug for the camera, or have a lot of sex.

There are other characters in this movie that one would hope would be of interest (there was hope this would be a more spy-like Guardians of the Galaxy thriller). However every character here is an example of “Kurtzman Trek”, they are there to be a gimmick, they have some sort of gimmick, their entire personality is based on their gimmick and the impression they leave on the audience is a feeling of annoyance. They are there to create over-the-top action sequences with technology that brings shame to Spock’s rocket boots.

The execution of the plot could not be any lazier: in the opening scene we see a younger version of Georgiou kill her entire family to become the head of the Terran empire, as we see her show mercy to her lackey. The movie tries to make a mystery out of who its masked villain is, but it is super obvious it would be the one character from the opening scene who Georgiou didn’t kill. The villain has a weapon to blow up half the galaxy so the Terran Empire can take over this alternate universe. This is probably one of the dumbest moments of this franchise, because of how universe-breaking this weapon is and how much it ruins the stakes for any other future projects, but I’m not too worried because it feels like this movie is going to have to be ignored by the community, considering its terrible depictions of already established characters.

Michelle Yeoh is probably the only thing that seems to work in this movie. Her performance may be akin to an Easter Ham, but her screen presence and confidence manage to keep attention in what feels like a pretty over convoluted plot. It’s not like this movie doesn’t lack effort overall – this franchise has never had better special effects than it does now, but I personally disliked the set direction for the film, on top of too much influence from what you’d expect from Star Wars instead of Star Trek. The look of the movie is nothing like the sterile clean-cut sets you would expect from this franchise, and more like something out of a weird Sci-Fi fetish comic. It’s common for actors in this franchise to chew on the scenery, but here the art direction is so overwhelming it’s chewing the actors. I do think people are kind of getting sick of seeing Star Trek taking this “ugly” art direction, but I think it is more of a product of what we might expect from a sci-fi environment during this time period but sometimes less is just more.

I admit I like some portions of New Trek: both Prodigy and Lower Decks are great, but they rely so heavily on being self-referential to other points in the franchise. This could have been a great chance for the franchise to introduce new characters and concepts outside of the restriction of being the “perfect future”. However, the overall execution was just not an ideal introduction.

I don’t really think this movie is for anyone. In Kurtzman’s quest to make Star Trek Paramount’s flagship franchise, he has made a junk food movie out of KFC, Taco Bell and McDonald’s taking great parts from other movies and making them even more mindless.  General Sci-Fi fans will hate this, general audience will hate this for its hard-to-follow plot. No one gets a win from this movie, aside from maybe the Michelle Yeoh mega fans but even then I’d strongly recommend any of her other work in favor of this.

If you like pain, “Star Trek: Section 31” is now available for viewing on Paramount Plus.

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