Star Trek: Section 31

[sh9000]

https://www.startrek.com/news/star-trek-section-31-original-movie-event-michelle-yeoh

[Seto Kaiba]

We have literally three seasons of rock-bottom rated Discovery episodes to show why this is a bad idea... but Kurtzman's ilk do not learn from their mistakes.

[Thom]

Yeah, zero interest.

Saturn, over on Starship Modeler, suggested they just put her back in the captain's chair as Captain Philippa Georgiou and build a series out from there. I like that idea.

[Seto Kaiba]

45 minutes ago, Thom said:

Yeah, zero interest.

Saturn, over on Starship Modeler, suggested they just put her back in the captain's chair as Captain Philippa Georgiou and build a series out from there. I like that idea.

I'd watch that... as long as it was prime!Georgiou and not Emperor Georgiou.  I've got no interest in The Continuing Adventures of Girl Space Hitler: Secret Agent.

Prime!Georgiou was the only character in Discovery's first season who acted like she belonged to the Starfleet and Star Trek we know and love.

[tekering]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Prime!Georgiou was the only character in Discovery's first season who acted like she belonged to the Starfleet and Star Trek we know and love.

The only one?  I thought Saru was a quintessentially Star Trek character... 

In fact, he acted more like Spock than Spock did in Discovery. 😅

[Thom]

On 4/18/2023 at 11:01 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

I'd watch that... as long as it was prime!Georgiou and not Emperor Georgiou.  I've got no interest in The Continuing Adventures of Girl Space Hitler: Secret Agent.

Prime!Georgiou was the only character in Discovery's first season who acted like she belonged to the Starfleet and Star Trek we know and love.

Definitely Prime Georgiou!

[sh9000]

 

[Dynaman]

I have Paramount+ so I'll watch this - but if that trailer is any indication I'll only be watching 20 minutes or so of it.

[lechuck]

Eh... seems like they are trying to do a Suicide Squad thing with Star Trek – acid characters with team play. 

I feel like this is not appropriate for something like Star Trek.

[pengbuzz]

This isn't Star Trek.

If I want gritty, dark and dystopian, there are plenty of other franchises for that. They need to give Star Trek a rest for a while (continue SNW but not do much else new) and stop trying to be the next BSG:R

[Seto Kaiba]

*sigh*  In a way, it's kind of impressive how committed Paramount is to ignoring audience feedback.

Star Trek fans said loud and clear (and repeatedly) that they don't want this vaguely racist dystopian misery porn.  That's a big part of why Star Trek: Discovery flopped domestically and internationally and was cancelled two seasons early to finish as the franchise's worst-rated series. 

The whole Section 31 concept was already pretty goofy in Deep Space Nine, but Discovery's version was so incredibly stupid that it was one of the most-mocked parts of the series up to that point.  Even Lower Decks called out how stupid it was.  That's why they put Michelle Yeoh's character on a bus.  I'm amazed she didn't demand to exit sooner, given that she was stuck playing a cringeworthy and deeply racist "yellow peril" villain.

I guess, at the very least, she might be able to use this to add a Razzie to her list of awards, because this looks absolutle dogsh*t.

[Thom]

Yeah, I don't need 'dark and gritty' in Star Trek. The same thing bit it in Battlestar Galactica, and Paramount can't seem to do it well anyway.

Give me Star Trek Legacy, Paramount!

[Mog]

Meh, always viewed Section 31 as the bastards that did the dirty work to keep Starfleet and the Federation “protected.”

Like “Eff your morals and ethics.  If diplomacy ain’t working, we’ll do what needs to be done to keep our side successful.  AND we’ll do it ‘quietly,’ so none are the wiser.”

Which is the exact opposite of what this trailer is trying to promote.

[Dynaman]

1 hour ago, Mog said:

Like “Eff your morals and ethics.  If diplomacy ain’t working, we’ll do what needs to be done to keep our side successful.  AND we’ll do it ‘quietly,’ so none are the wiser.”

Which is the exact opposite of what this trailer is trying to promote.

Section 31 has been like that since it was first brought up.  The supposed secret that EVERYONE knows all about.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Mog said:

Meh, always viewed Section 31 as the bastards that did the dirty work to keep Starfleet and the Federation “protected.”

Like “Eff your morals and ethics.  If diplomacy ain’t working, we’ll do what needs to be done to keep our side successful.  AND we’ll do it ‘quietly,’ so none are the wiser.”

1 hour ago, Dynaman said:

Section 31 has been like that since it was first brought up.  The supposed secret that EVERYONE knows all about.

That's certainly how Sloane presented the organization when it made its debut in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Season 6's "Inquisition".

Of course, that didn't really last much past their first appearance as by Season 7's "Inter Enim Arma Silent Leges" they had effectively grabbed the villain ball with both hands and transitioned from "so secret even the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order don't know about them" to being an open secret protected only by the most ridiculous arbitrary skepticism.

Discovery just made it a million times worse by having them walking around openly on starships with special Starfleet badges indicating their affiliation openly.  That series also screwed them up worse by making them more or less indistinguishable from Starfleet Intelligence, borrowing large chunks of plot from the much (and deservedly) maligned DS9 relaunch novel series's Control mini-arc, and turning them into little more than Starfleet's Murder Inc.

 

2 hours ago, Mog said:

Which is the exact opposite of what this trailer is trying to promote.

Yup.  Even the novels, awful as the are, did a better job of depicting Section 31 as a covert organization.

This is like off-brand James Bond, but with a really kitschy sci-fi aesthetic slapped on that manages to look hilariously cheap despite the no doubt ridiculously huge budget.

[sh9000]

Teaser Trailer.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

This is going to bomb so hard that it's going to cross the line twice from funny to not funny to actually pretty hilarious.

It really is nice of Paramount+ to continue setting millions of dollars on fire for no gain other than helping Michelle Yeoh join that select community of actors and actresses who have both an Academy Award and a Golden Raspberry.  Nicer still of them to give it a 2025 release date so it won't contest Lionsgate's Borderlands for the title of worst sci-fi film for 2024.

Section 31 is the unasked-for spinoff to Star Trek's all-time lowest-rated and least succesful series starring one of its most loathed characters in-story and out.  Nothing about that is a recipe for success.  You'd almost suspect Paramount+ is Springtime for Hitler-ing this.

[Dynaman]

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

  You'd almost suspect Paramount+ is Springtime for Hitler-ing this.

Paramount would love that, Springtime for Hitler being an unexpected smash hit...  But I really don't see that fate for THIS show.

[Seto Kaiba]

6 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Paramount would love that, Springtime for Hitler being an unexpected smash hit...  But I really don't see that fate for THIS show.

I was thinking more the intended outcome... flying it into the ground deliberately in order to run off with the investors money. 🤣

[Dynaman]

On 10/20/2024 at 8:22 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

I was thinking more the intended outcome... flying it into the ground deliberately in order to run off with the investors money. 🤣

I wonder how many little old ladies they tried to con...

[Old_Nash_II]

Nice Star Trek Rebels XD

 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Old_Nash_II said:

Nice Star Trek Rebels XD

Wow.  I mean, I was expecting Star Trek: Section 31 to look like ass and have aggressively bad writing because it's Kurtzman's pet project and a hilariously ill-advised spinoff of the franchise's all-time worst rated series (Discovery) starring its most hated character.  Am I crazy, or does nothing about that sound like a good idea?

I want to see this, but only so I can compare it to the Borderlands film in terms of "What the actual f*** were they thinking?"  Star Trek: Springtime for Space Hitler's definitely going to be a cringeworthy exercise and another ungentle reminder that Discovery was a mistake.

Paramount's hemorraging money and its share price is down over 70% across the last five years.  The company is desperate to sell out or merge with another so someone else can take the helm... and this is what they're sinking money into?  🤣

Edited December 7, 2024 by Seto Kaiba

[JB0]

1 minute ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Paramount's hemorraging money and its share price is down over 70% across the last five years.  The company is desperate to sell out or merge with another so someone else can take the helm... and this is what they're sinking money into?  🤣

Well, if they knew what to sink money into, they wouldn't be having those problems.

[TangledThorns]

Oh no, more threats in Star Trek...

[Dynaman]

I watched the first 10 minutes or so (just when the disco/bar scene starts) and I could not keep watching.  If anyone makes it past there and finds it gets MUCH better let us know.  Otherwise I can't stand to watch any more.  

[Seto Kaiba]

Big oof... the professional reviews are starting to trickle in for Star Trek: Section 31 and, as predicted, it's atrociously bad.

Pithy turns-of-phrase like "Set phasers to shun", "Boldly going where no one should", and "An embarrassment from start to end" feature prominently among the gentler professional reviews from news outlets.  Less diplomatic professional reviews call the made-for-TV movie "unwatchable", "a mistake", and "a mediocre episode of a television show that doesn't exist".

At time of writing, Section 31 has done what Star Trek: Discovery narrowly failed to: dethrone Star Trek V: the Final Frontier as the single worst-reviewedStar Trek title of all time.  And it managed it in both categories on Rotten Tomatoes with a 20% critic score and 20% audience score, compared to Final Frontier's 23% and 25% respectively.

 

I wasn't planning to reactivate my Paramount+ account to watch Section 31 because I figured it would be a turd, but after reading the reviews I'm questioning whether even hoisting the old Jolly Roger is worth it to subject myself to this cinematic crime against humanity.  

Here's hoping this disastrous public failure will finally be enough to convince Paramount that the time has come to evict Alex Kurtzman and the Pakleds he's staffed the franchise's writer's rooms with and tell them to take the other doomed Discovery spinoff with them when they go.

[Thom]

I didn't have any interest in this anyway, so 'oh well...' The whole 'Section 31' thing has been iffy ever since its incemption on Enterprise, and every iteration since just seems to double-down on Bad. Why they think spinning it out over and over again will somehow punch through to an audience that doesn't really care about it is the real plot here.

Michelle Yeoh is great, and I would hope that she would stop wasting her time on this. Her character was best as Georgio and they should get her back on that. They want another Star Trek show, then bring back Captain Georgio, either in her origal role with some sci-fi hand-wavium to explain her resurrection, or in tha actual TOS timeline. Although, they would then have to explain away her being a starship captain, when in canon they aren't any women in that role, but it can be done.

She, and SNW, is only good thing to come out of STD! 

..edit - and Dadmiral!

Edited Saturday at 09:08 PM by Thom

[Dynaman]

1 hour ago, Thom said:

I didn't have any interest in this anyway, so 'oh well...' The whole 'Section 31' thing has been iffy ever since its incemption on Enterprise, and every iteration since just seems to double-down on Bad. Why they think spinning it out over and over again will somehow punch through to an audience that doesn't really care about it is the real plot here.

The problem is not Section 31 in particular.  This movie was bad from the get go.  Terrible writing no matter what universe it was written for.  I say from the get go since I only made it through about 10 minutes.  I was not watching it looking to hate it either.  Last time I had a franchise move that was so terrible was the second Indiana Jones movie. 

Edited Saturday at 05:18 PM by Dynaman

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, Thom said:

I didn't have any interest in this anyway, so 'oh well...' The whole 'Section 31' thing has been iffy ever since its incemption on Enterprise, and every iteration since just seems to double-down on Bad.

One tiny nitpick, "the whole Section 31 thing" actually started in DS9's 6th season episode "Inquisition".

It has definitely always been iffy. Even DS9's producers regret the addition of Section 31 to the setting. They were trying to introduce more moral ambiguity into the show's Dominion War arc, and on the surface the idea that the Federation secretly having its own state sec organization similar to Cardassia's Obsidian Order or Romulus's Tal Shiar seemed like it'd be a logical way to do it. They didn't quite understand how stupid and fanfiction-y the idea was the way they presented it.

The idea proved to be too tempting to future writers who were looking for a way to make Star Trek darker, edgier, and more action friendly. ENT's use of Section 31 is probably the single most restrained example of the organization in the franchise. It was all downhill from there. It was not a great sign that Discovery's second season started borrowing from the already not great relaunch novelverse, and then twisting that to make it even darker and more nonsensically edgy than it already was.

 

5 hours ago, Thom said:

Why they think spinning it out over and over again will somehow punch through to an audience that doesn't really care about it is the real plot here.

Because the people working on Star Trek don't want to write Star Trek stories.

They feel constrained by Star Trek's vision of a brighter and more hopeful future where the human race can get along, where diplomacy can end or even prevent conflicts, and where science and exploration are what's really important instead of war and death. 

Basically, they want to be writing something more like Star Wars, Rebel Moon, or any other generic space war story. Something less cerebral, where they can focus less on having character driven stories and moral/social allegory and more on having lots of exciting action sequences full of big budget special effects.

 

5 hours ago, Thom said:

Michelle Yeoh is great, and I would hope that she would stop wasting her time on this. 

I have a feeling she's done after this. The only reason she did this movie was because it was part of her existing contract from Discovery's third season. They thought they were going to do a spin-off TV series originally, and ended up walking that idea back to this made for TV movie because Discovery's viewership numbers were still trash even after the show's second major retooling.

It feels like this got made just because of pre-existing contractual obligations, not because they had any actual idea of what to do with it.

[Seto Kaiba]

Well, as I've found a way to watch Section 31 without having to re-up my Paramount+ subscription for the worst Star Trek story ever committed to film... I'm going to wade into the sewage retention pond that is Section 31 and see for myself just how bad a Star Trek movie written by Pakleds can really be.

Libera te tutemet ex inferis...

 

Spoiler

Opening title coming up now and...

... I've already hit pause once at just 21 seconds.  The now-customary "flyby" with the show-specific ship is (dis)graced by what I assume is going to be the new main ship for this story.  It is so ugly, clunky, out-of-place looking for Star Trek as a whole that I honestly paused to confirm I was not the subject of an elaborate prank.  It's oddly reminiscent of the ugly, clunky, boxy ore hauler that the too-dumb-to-live kids in Alien: Romulus fly.

This is not an auspicious start.

Spoiler

The film proper opens with a quotation from the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus.  "Fate who makes the sword does the forging in advance."

The first actual shot of the movie is... a sword being forged.

Someone working on the film - likely several someones - probably thought that was clever.  

I didn't think they would tip their hand quite so early, but here we are... having hit pause for the second time at just fifty-three seconds into this 95 minute film.

Spoiler

Oh joy... we're starting off in Discovery's version of the Mirror Universe.

Have you ever heard the old saying "only the dose makes the poison"?  It's a basic principle of toxicology, and a polite way of saying that taking anything too far can cause it to become downright detrimental.  Used sparingly, the Mirror Universe was a fun break from Star Trek's business as usual.  An ironic, campy, Universe of Ham where every single actor could devour the scenery with Shatnerian gusto while playing the absolute worst, most antithetical version of their character.  Discovery's writers sucked all the fun out of it by not only taking the universe of sitcom evil twins completely seriously but ramping up the evilness to the point that all subtlety and nuance is lost.

We get an introduction to Philipa Georgiou's hometown... apparently a primitive yurt in the middle of a nondescript yellow-tinted desert somewhere?  She narrates everything she's been through as part of the selection trials to become the next Terran Emperor.  This is supposed to be a big, dramatic scene, but it's undermined by the actress playing young Georgiou narrating in a borderline unintelligible whisper that just makes her sound ill and the piss-yellow filter superimposed on it all.  It's painful to watch, but more in the sense that the color palette is actually kind of hard on the eyes than anything.

Apparently this film's version of the Terran Empire, unlike the one seen in every previous work incl. Discovery, decides who the next Emperor is going to be with an off-brand version of The Hunger Games instead of by overthrowing the previous Emperor.

Spoiler

So Georgiou fulfills the last task on her to-do list for Emperor candidacy by poisoning her entire family over dinner.

Watching Georgiou shed a single tear over the bodies of her murdered family is clearly supposed to be an emotional moment, but it's absolutely impossible to take seriously because we've seen Discovery and know that this character is a gleeful genocidal psychopathic cannibal.

A massive brass fart sounds, and we see a gigantic starship descend through the piss-sky towards the piss-ground and an enormous column of troops beams into position so some random person can announce that her rival failed to murder his family so she's Emperor by default.  We then see her burn him with the sword her father was forging, and then the troops salute.

We then get to see a mission briefing from Control, who doesn't seem to understand how redacting text works, who gives some brief exposition about how the Mirror Universe is awful and Georgiou is a bad person before revealing she's set up shop under an alias (Madame du Franc) near Hupyria V.  (Poss. the same Hupyria where the Ferengi acquire the beetle snuff they love so much?)  Control reveals they're tracking an unspecified new terrorist threat across a border Starfleet can't cross due to treaty obligations (though it's not clear whose, since the Talarian Republic, Cardassian Union, and some other power.  The whole thing is so badly scripted and voice acted that it feels like it's from some spy B-movie.

We finally get the title card at about 10:20.

Spoiler

After the title card, we see a ridiculous-looking space station "Far outside Federation space" surrounded by rings of ships and then Michelle Yeoh finally enters the picture.

OK, I am sorry... I have to stop for a minute.

This is so *ss.

I'm just... ugh.  No.  No no no no no.  NO.  

Spoiler

Philipa Georgiou (current) enters the picture in a goofy bar/lounge full of goofy looking patrons that would look more at home in Red Dwarf or maybe The Fifth Element.  The rest of the cast are introduced with a series of goofily-framed zoom shots and horizontal wipes that would feel right at home in an Austin Powers movie... especially with the BGM they've picked for it.  It's a bouncy pop rock baseline with Fifth Element-esque operatic warbling over it.  Every other character is introduced as Georgiou walks from one establishing shot to the next.

Michelle Yeoh is a fine actress who deserves immense respect for her skills, but she is way too old to be playing a femme fatale.  She was 60 when this movie was shot.  The dress and mask they put her in for this intro scene look less "spacefuture" and more "I stole this from the set of Power Rangers", with the wire frame mask and built-in veil of gold chains and the fact that she's wearing what have to be 6"+ platform heels in an attempt to look tall enough to be intimidating at her natural 5'4".  The whole effect is less "sexy villainess" or "sexy proprietress" and more "that one maiden aunt who hasn't quite accepted that she's too old to call herself a 'cougar' anymore".  

Apparently she owns the bar/club/whatever.  One of her employees, who seems to be a Cheron playing to the "effeminate gay man" stereotype, tells her about a scandalous incident in the honeymoon suite that required a biohazard team and the manager's condolences.  

... I am at 13 minutes exactly and I am flabbergasted at how cheap this entire film looks and feels.  This is not even B-movie fodder, this is 

This is the fourth time I've had to hit pause because I can't stand what I'm watching.

What they're doing to Michelle Yeoh here is criminal in and of itself, but the everything else elevates this from simple abuse of a fine actress to a cinematic crime against humanity.

Spoiler

We get a daring attempt at innuendo that feels like the writer has never actually had a flirtatious encounter with another living person, as one of the agents attempts to talk Georgiou into meeting him in her office.  He's masquerading as a drug dealer to get his foot in the door.

Five.  I'm at 14:10 and I'm having to pause again out of disgust because some writer thought it was a good idea to have Michelle Yeoh say how much her character gets around and that trying this new drug would be one of her few first times left.

Dishonor on you, writer.  Dishonor on you.  Dishonor on your cow.  Dishonor on your whole **** family.

Spoiler

After doing a shot with the Section 31 team lead, she reveals she knows that they're Section 31 and that he's leading a team of six who are all over the bar.  Not coincidentally, the six weirdos we saw earlier in that goofy Austin Powers-esque intro sequences.  She literally rewinds the film itself to narrate over their earlier introductions, noting that the rest of the team is:

• A Chamaloid (the shapeshifter from Star Trek VI)
• A Deltan (the incredibly horny aliens Gene Roddenberry wrote for Star Trek: the Motion Picture)
• A meathead cyborg
• A "Vulcan" who, in her estimation, is either an idiot or insane
• A very serious human girl with a ridiculous haircut

We couldn't get past this without having at least one legacy character from better times, could we?

Spoiler

The very serious human girl with the awful haircut is subsequently revealed to be a younger Rachel Garrett, who will one day grow up to be captain of the USS Enterprise-C and die valiantly at Narendra III when she's hit in the head by a piece of shrapnel from a VF-1 Valkyrie model kit.  (No, really.)

Watching poor Michelle Yeoh have to try to play the femme fatale like this is just painful.

Apparently the Section 31 team lead has authorization to arrest her, and subject her to a mind wipe because she Knows Too Much... but he wants her to live with all of the memories of the genocidal monster she was in the Mirror Universe.

Georgiou seems as bored with the proceedings here as I am.  So he tries to sell her on One Last Mission with every single "get back in the game" cliche you could imagine.

So we get a meet-the-team montage on Section 31 guy's ship (I assume he has a name, but if he's said it it got blasted out of my head by how screechingly stupid this all is.)  Georgiou disparages everyone of course, and the Section 31 team generally reveal themselves to be too stupid to know that they're being insulted.  (Especially the cyborg.)

So apparently the "Vulcan" is actually a tiny little alien controling (and trapped inside) a Vulcan-shaped mechanical body.

Lt. Garrett has apparently been seconded to Section 31 from Starfleet in order to be the team's minder.  Poor kid.

The "meet the team" scene goes on for an intolerably long time... mainly because the characters keep interrupting and insulting each other for no clear reason.

It flows like a river of bricks, and the viewing experience is about as pleasant a pissing gravel.

I am only 22 minutes and 6 seconds into this monstrosity.  Pray for me.

Spoiler

We finally get to see the target... a bioweapons developer named "Dada Noe", who looks like Baron Harkonnen with too many cybernetics.  Apparently he was on his way to Georgiou's station to sell bioweapons to the Minosians.  

We then get treated to a montage of what the ORIGINAL plan was before Georgiou apparently foiled it... they were going to mug her so the Chamaloid could replace her and then the tiny alien inside the fake Vulcan can tinker with his implants so he can't defend himself, allowing them to beat him up and  

Our first look at Dada Noe in the flesh is... awful.  He looks like he wandered onto the wrong set while filming for a Power Rangers show.  He's just a fat old man with a cyber mohawk and a monacle wearing a blue tux with red lapels.

After Georgiou expresses her boredom with that idea, we get treated to her plan... which involves an outrageously fake French accent and just walking him to his room. 

THANK YOU DADA NOE!  Finally someone says out loud how outrageously tacky Georgiou's whole schtick is.  

So her plan just involves making the macguffin intangible with a "phase pod" and stealing it while he's unable to touch it.  This works surprisingly well given that she's now effectively phaserproof too.  This would be The End if not for someone else with their own phase pod walking through the wall dressed like Great Value The Rocketeer and attacking her for possession of the case.  

Ah yes, shouting "Who are you?" at the masked man is sure to convince them to reveal their identity.  

This then leads to a chase as the two phased people are able to run through the walls separating adjoining suites.  The cyborg follows by Kool-Aid Man-ing his way through the intervening walls of what we must remind ourselves IS A SPACE STATION.  They ditch the phase pods, and the fight ends up breaking through the window into the lounge proper.  The Delta femme fatale wannabe proves to be totally ineffectual in a fight, getting casually slapped around and then just as casually vaporized.  The rest of the cast acts like this should provoke an emotional response in the audience, but it doesn't because we don't know anything about this person.

We've invented a new kind of shaky-cam.  Shaky-person cam.  With the phase pods operating, everyone's outline is blurred so the already badly choreographed fight scene becomes even less distinct when every third frame looks to be smeared with vaseline and digital distortion.  

I refuse... REFUSE... to believe that any person could pull off any of these stunts in six to eight inch PLATFORM HEELS.  (And yes, she's still wearing them, we see one get stuck in a wall!)

Spoiler

For some reason, instead of just leaving, the bad guy takes the time to open the case and take out its dangerous contents in front of her before beaming out.

She apparently knows what it is, claiming she'd had it destroyed.  When the Section 31 team lead asks what it is, she attacks him instead and gets stunned easily.

 

Seventh pause.  I am 32:12 into this cinematic atrocity.  The first act is over.  

There are good films and bad films. There are films that are so good they're great, and films that are so bad they're somehow good.

This film - Star Trek: Section 31 - it a bad film.  A worryingly bad film.  It does not have a story.   It has a hostage situation.  This is an assemblage of events held against their will at phaserpoint, made to align into something that vaguely resembles, but is almost exactly unlike, a coherent narrative.  It is trite, cliched, stale, unimaginative, ill-considered, and at best cringeworthy to behold.  If I were a judge, I would rule in Michelle Yeoh's favor if she sued saying that releasing this film constituted an act of defamation.

I am going to go get a stiff drink before I wade back in to finish this.

[Seto Kaiba]

I am armed with a stiff drink, and the firm opinion that this film is what Miles O'Brien really experienced in that alien prison where he felt like he'd served a life sentence.

Spoiler

Act two starts with a flashback to Georgiou's Emperor years.  We see the macguffin presented to Emperor Georgiou by a cowering lacky who notes that the engineers who made it committed suicide upon its completion.  Apparently the cowering lacky is her friend from before she was the Emperor.  They try to have a moment, but he's having none of it and starts vomiting blood.  He's committing suicide in her presence by taking the same poison her parents were killed with, because nobody should live in the same universe as the monster she's become.

Then she wakes up in a Section 31 safehouse.  She and the Section 31 agent discuss trust, and he eventually reveals that he's actually 350-something years old, having lived through the Eugenics Wars.  (The writers seem to have suffered a research failure here, the Augments were designer babies not modified adults, but what he describes is he was taken prisoner by Augments and turned into one somehow.) 

Oh FFS another planet with the piss-yellow filter.  Is this a not-so-subtle sign from the VFX crew that they think Kurtzman's taking the piss?

We get a slow motion hero walk scene with the five remaining unit members and Georgiou... all wearing badass longcoats except the cyborg.  The effect is ruined somewhat by the piss-yellow filter and the fact that we know four of the six of them are basically imbeciles.

The weapon in question is called "The Godsend", an ill-defined thingy that will cause a chain reaction of spontaneous combustion to spread from planet to planet across an entire quadrant.  The moment is punctured by more quippy idiot behavior from the Chamaloid and cyborg, who seem to think they're in a completely different genre of film.  Everyone else is visibly annoyed.  They then have an argument about whether or not to trust her, under the piss-yellow sky of... wherever... because she surmises that Dada Noe is actually from the Mirror Universe too.

Apparently they were too cheap to build more than one set for the Section 31 ship, so they're interrogating Dada Noe by making him sit in the captain's chair.  They go into a longwinded recitation of titles that was stupid when it was done in Discovery, and sounds even worse now that they're trying to use it to intimidate someone.  For some reason, this film is now trying to be all quippy and quirky like Guardians of the Galaxy.  Georgiou threatens him by describing something she did to an officer who tried to depose her (that the audience can't hear), and he instantly confesses that he's from the Mirror Universe and that he stole the Godsend from the facility he worked at.

There's a subtle did-their-homework nod to the original TOS Mirror Universe episode when Dada Noe mentions that he traveled between universes by means of two ion storms that converged and created a rift between universes... similar to how Kirk ended up making the trip going the other way.  

Dada Noe launches into a rant about how the Terran Empire has exhausted its resources, is suffering widespread famine, and that they desperately need to find new territory to conquer and strip-mine to keep their war machine going.  He notes that they'll find the rift he came through and invade the prime universe.  He hints that whoever stole the weapon learned about it not from him but from Section 31.

Eighth pause.  Not because there's anything wrong with what's being done onscreen, but because there's some missing context that I wanted to look up.

According to showrunner notes and some fans who worked backwards from the stardate given at the start, this film is set in the mid-2320s.  Approximately 2324, 40 years before the start of TNG.  This is set 66 years after Georgiou disappeared into the future with the Discovery, meaning the Guardian of Forever didn't put her back in 2258.  This is also 57 years after the events of TOS "Mirror Mirror" that led to Mirror Spock overthrowing the Terran Emperor and trying to reform the Empire.  Apparently Spock's efforts didn't work as intended, since Dada Noe is suggesting the Empire is as aggressively expansionist as it was in the 2250s.  

Spoiler

Then the bridge explodes.  I timed that pause to a nicety.  I pressed Play again and KABOOM.

The scene of the Section 31 ship crashing is a muddy mess that's hard to make out because it's so dark, the ship is painted black, and there's still that piss yellow filter over everything.  Somehow, the ship blew up into tiny bits but the warp core never breached... otherwise the entire are would be one big crater instead of a field of gently burning debris.

Georgiou informs everyone that one of them is a traitor.  The team then energetically debate who the traitor is, even though it's pretty obvious it's the tiny alien piloting the fake Vulcan.  He's the only one who's shown sincere hostility towards the other team members and is said to be working for them against his will.  The others are too easy to rule out: the straight-laced commander, the future Captain Garrett, the cyborg idiot, the Chamaloid idiot, and the freaking protagonist who would and could have murdered everyone already if it were her.  Not much of a mystery is it?

They then note that there's a garbage scow nearby they can repurpose for their needs.  Apparently that garbage scow is the ship from the opening.

So this team of elite super-spies discovers that not only did someone sabotage their ship without them noticing, but also destroyed their transmitter too.  These might be the worst, or at least least observent, spies in the galaxy.  They hit on the genius idea that the stolen parts they need to fix the transmitter and ship might still be being carried by the thief, so they go looking.

They suspect cyborg man is the culprit because he goes missing, and when they look for him they find him dead.  This crack team of the Federation's most elite super spies is so razor sharp, so absolutely brilliant, that newcomer Philipa Georgiou has to point out to them that the one team member who was brought specifically and solely for his ability to infiltrate and hijack cybernetic body-mods can infiltrate and hijack cybernetic body-mods.  

Ninth pause.  1:01:39.

This is officially an idiot plot.  This plot only worked because everyone forgot the one character trait that only one specific character had.  Especially glaring given that it was also literally the only reason said character was present at all.

I cannot believe there are still thirty-two more minutes of this tripe.  

 

Spoiler

So the little micro-alien confesses to his treason and sets the cyborg's remote-controlled corpse on the team.  This leads to a chase through some tunnels on some kind of ridiculous mining cart.

Tenth pause. 1:03:13.

There is SO. MUCH. SHAKYCAM.  It's like every action scene is filmed by volunteer cameramen with Parkinson's disease.  I know the fight choreography sucks and they're trying to hide it with shakycam and a thousand cuts but it just makes what they're attempting to cover up more obvious.  

Spoiler

This scene is also incredibly stupid if you think about it even a little.  Three flesh-and-blood people are attempting to win a karate fight against a cyborg wearing a mechanical exoskeleton and a tiny alien piloting a robot body.  

 

At this point, my internet connection died... apparently desperate to spare me from the rest of this incredibly awful film.  I'll have to watch the rest when it comes back up.

[sketchley]

13 hours ago, Dynaman said:

The problem is not Section 31 in particular.  This movie was bad from the get go.  Terrible writing no matter what universe it was written for.  I say from the get go since I only made it through about 10 minutes.  I was not watching it looking to hate it either.  Last time I had a franchise move that was so terrible was the second Indiana Jones movie. 

I checked out of Discovery (and the "nu" Star Trek) at the end of Disco's 2nd season and haven't looked back since.

Michelle Yeoh was the sole reason I started watching Disco.  So, when she recently appeared on The Graham Norton Show (2025/01/17) to plug the Section 31 movie, it tweaked my interest.  However, as the preview clip shown was a bad jumble of nonsensical action shots with no characterization, it left A LOT to be desired.*  Reading the comments here has confirmed that it wasn't just me, the show runners don't understand their audience, and that the bad clip speaks volumes about the quality of the show.

I fully agree with the person who said that the current show runners have to be replaced with someone who actually understands what the fans want... what compels us to keep watching and talking about a show 55+ years later!

 

* It closely followed the preview for Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz's new movie, which smartly had a single action scene with snappy dialogue and strong characterization—that after viewing the Section 31 preview, left me feeling "THIS is how you promote a show."  Not a jumble of quick cuts where you can't tell what's going on, and no substantive shots of the poor actress who has to go around promoting it! 🙄

[Seto Kaiba]

It's back up... apparently my suffering has not yet ended tonight. 

Spoiler

Honestly, aside from the massive levels of shakycam and the obvious problem of three meatbags attempting to wrestle a cyborg and a robot, this underground fight scene's main problem is the same one as that inexplicably vast space for the turbolift fight in Discovery's third season.  Why is there a functionally infinite-seeming series of tunnels underneath this dead planet's surface?  The trams never seem to run into anything or arrive anywhere, they just travel down this infinite tunnel at high speed.

They completely bungle the fight's conclusion when one pair gets tossed from the tram, and the other end up shot into the sky somehow only for Georgiou to be knocked off and somehow silently pull herself up the other side of the tram to shank her opponent.

So, after being beaten, her opponent who is not in any way mortally wounded or more than mildly inconvenienced on account of being a robot body for a microorganism dispenses the obligatory defeated enemy exposition about how her dead friend who killed himself in front of her is actually still alive... because apparently nobody checks dead bodies to make sure they're actually dead?  He built up an immunity to the poison somehow and faked his death in order to take revenge on her.

This feels like the previously mentioned what-year-is-this-set-in just became a bit of a plot hole.

Spoiler

After all, this is by all accounts 2324.  Her friend was either the same age as her or very close to it when he failed to murder his family in order to become the next Emperor of the Terran Empire.  Georgiou was born in 2202, meaning she was 55 when she left the Mirror Universe with the crew of the USS Discovery and approximately 57 when she got sent back in time by the Guardian of Forever.  So her age seems to be roughly the same as her actress's (~60).  Her friend who is apparently the film's Big Bad should be in his 120s if he had to get to 2324 the honest way.

We then get to see an incredibly ugly and badly rendered CG starship that looks like something out of Red Dwarf.  It seems to be a Terran Empire ship, and we see Georgiou's friend seemingly hasn't aged despite the 67 years that've passed since Georgiou went missing.  Honestly, this thing looks like if you let Asus design a "gaming starship"... and I say that as someone who uses their gamer-grade network hardware.

There's a lame attempt at soul searching as Georgiou becomes defeatist... only for the unit leader to reveal that he's the one who stole the critical part from the garbage scow's engine, and just couldn't tell anyone with the mole still on the team.

They couldn't resist doing the fake-out "car won't turn over until you thump it" thing.  Which is stupid and lame in this context... and most others.  This ship also looks like absolute garbage... which is fitting, because hauling garbage is literally what it's for.  It doesn't look like it belongs in Star Trek though.  Like Rios's La Sirena, it looks like it belongs to Star Wars in terms of its grungy, used-future appearance and off-center cockpit.  It also does the exact same thing the Onyx Cinder does in Skeleton Crew where it leaves a cloud of dust and debris behind when it goes FTL.

Conveniently, the would-be slayer of the Terran Emperor fires exactly one photon torpedo at the incoming ship and nothing else, allowing the garbage scow to tank the shot and keep coming.  That's actualy kind of weird in its own right, since civilian ships generally aren't armored or shielded well enough to take military-grade torpedo fire like that.  (Normally they explode if anyone so much as breaks wind near them... must be all the main characters aboard.)

They let nebula radiation wear the Terran ship's shields down and then board it.  Somehow, they fail to notice the bad guys sneaking up on them... again.  These folks are really REALLY bad at situational awareness.  This is like their fourth or fifth time being ambushed in the space of an hour or so.  The two Terrans conveniently either lower or drop their guns so it has to be settled by martial arts.  So they do kung-fu at each other and accidentally arm the big bomb in the process.  They try to have a moment, but it ultimately ends with him freaking out when she suggests they start over together.  

Garrett conveniently finds a toy with an explosive power source in the garbage in the ship's hold, and plans to turn that into a convenient missile to destroy the shuttle that's attacking them while everything else is going on.

This amazing augment super-spy who runs this Section 31 team doesn't seem to be very sharp at all.  He has spent the last five minutes trying energetically to strangle what he knows full well is a robot in humanoid form not a person.  These people have phasers, but they absolutely insist on fistfighting things that can't be beaten in a fistfight.

Georgiou's fight reaches a climax with her trying a barehanded blade block in a way that doesn't actually work at all.  She's trying to stop a stab, not a slice, so there shouldn't be anything stopping the blade from just cutting through her hands and continuing down into her head.  She somehow kicks the blade into his neck and kills him?  It makes zero sense.  Suddenly he pulls a complete 180 as he's dying and says he loves her.  

Eleventh pause.  1:24:25.  

Talk about a waste of a character, a plot... none of the aspects of this relationship work or make any sense at all.  He hates her but he loves her but he hates her and wants to take revenge for HER family but he loves her as he's dying but he hates her for what she became... can we get a tiny bit of consistency please?

Spoiler

Georgiou finally picks up the bomb, and arms it... and then asks the augment Section 31 leader if he'd kill the woman who took him prisoner givne a second chance.  He says yes.  They fly the Terran ship into the rift, with the bomb slowly counting own, as Garrett and the Chamaloid try to beam them back.  

The bomb goes off, but Georgiou and the other guy got out in time.  The passageway collapses.  

We get a jump cut epilogue of them on Georgiou's station, with them being all chummy.  Garrett's been promoted to Lt. Commander for some reason.  They found another guy of the same species as the traitorous mini-guy, in an identical fake-Vulcan body, though this one talks with an American southern accent instead of an Irish one.

For some reason, they decide to take their next briefing for their secret black ops organization standing at a table in the middle of Georgiou's club.  They're briefed by Control, who is revealed to be a cyborg Jamie Lee Curtis, who sends them to Turkana IV... Tasha Yar's homeworld.

 

Well, that was frankly awful.  I got through the whole thing despite my modem's attempt to preserve my sanity through honorable suicide.

I can honestly see why this is the lowest-rated Star Trek title of all time.  It DESERVES it.  Star Trek V at least tried to be thematically consistent with the rest of Star Trek.  Section 31 is an unholy mess that tries to make a quip-heavy Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff out of the very worst parts of Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Into Darkness. 

The whole movie looks and feels unmistakably cheap.  I don't know if Paramount has disclosed how much was spent to make this movie, but it either wasn't enough or someone made the inexplicable creative decision to spent vast sums of money making a mockbuster-tier Star Trek film.  So much of the design work from this film looks like it was nicked from Red Dwarf.  Georgiou's garbage scow would fit right in parked next to one of the Starbugs and the cyborg in particular looks like someone nicked a Replicant costume from the BBC property master.  The story is such a mess of terrible, cliche, unbearably stilted writing that it's actually almost a mercy when the action scenes start and everyone stops talking.  The reason it's not is that the action sequences have so much shaky cam and motion blur that you'd swear the camera operator was a drunk Parkinson's patient with an inner ear infection, and the editing is clearly trying VERY hard to disguise the mediocre-at-best fight choreography with dozens of mid-fight cuts.

As harsh as I judge some films and shows, I seldom feel like I've seen a true "Zero" on a five-scale or ten-scale.  This is an authentic zero.  This is "See me after class" levels of poor performance.  This is the kind of project that, if it had come out in theaters, would probably have killed the franchise stone dead.  This is a career ending fiasco of a film that ought to see Paramount clean house.  If Alex Kurtzman isn't "invited to leave" after this, I will officially start wondering who on the board he has compromising photos of because there's just no explanation for how he can keep failing like this and still be employed.

I was prepared for a bad movie.  I was not prepared for a movie this bad.  Yikes.

[JB0]

Daaaaaaaang.

As always, I salute your suffering.

[Dynaman]

I tried to warn you Seto!  Your 13 minute mark is where I decided this film has no hope at all of being good - or even watchable.

The intro on the mirror universe was bad

The info dump briefing was a badly hacked attempt at the Mission Impossible "this tape will self destruct" briefing (or the Star Wars opening scroll).

THEN that bar scene starts and just the camera work alone screams out garbage coming up!

Edited 18 hours ago by Dynaman