Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Star Trek: Section 31’ Review: Michelle Yeoh Stars in a Franchise Tangent Too Thinly Tethered to the Mother Ship
In the ever-expanding “Star Trek” universe — which next year enters its seventh earthly decade — there’s room for all kinds of celestial phenomena, including the occasional underwhelming dwarf star. That status is claimed by “Star Trek: Section 31,” the franchise’s first feature since “Beyond” nine years ago, and the first going directly to home screens. A spinoff for Michelle Yeoh’s character from the “Discovery” series, whose frequent director Olatunde Osunsanmi again takes the reins here, this superficially diverting tangent is too convoluted and tonally wobbly to leave a lasting impression. Given a fairly hostile initial fanbase reaction to the Jan. 24 release on Paramount+, it may also stray too far from hitherto-consistent core elements to warrant any follow-up.
The still-nimble former Hong Kong martial arts genre star has certainly gained additional luster since her last Trekkie outing, thanks to that Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” plus the current “Wicked.” But despite her evident enthusiasm, Philippa Georgiou isn’t really an ideal primary focus — she’s a variable friend/foe/frenemy to the Federation whose slipperiness cedes the role of more standard heroic leader to charismatic Omari Hardwick’s Alok Sahar, though he never quite seizes the spotlight.
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Craig Sweeny’s screenplay strikes a frequently arch posture to accommodate this trickster protagonist, which undermines any pretense of seriousness elsewhere. What’s more, other characters so frequently turn out to have hidden identities, get pronounced dead prematurely and so forth that the incessant twists feel silly, rather than clever or meaningful. While the plot finally boils down to a face-off between lovers-turned-nemeses — with life as we know it hanging in the balance — that grand passion carries scant weight amid too much narrative clutter.
A prologue shows how as a young woman (Miku Martineau), Georgiou survived lethal competition to become the Terran Empire’s new empress, sealing that win with ruthless acts toward loved ones including San (played first by James Huang, later James Hiroyuki Liao). The story then leaps forward to a time after she lost that throne, and has already spent a considerable stretch as a quippy operative of covert Federation intelligence unit Section 31 on “Discovery.” (Never mind that this is only her “Mirror Universe” persona, as opposed to the same-named nice Star Fleet Captain killed off in that series’ 2017 pilot episode.) Since then she’s gone AWOL, assuming a new identity and suspected of trafficking in illegal bio-weapons. Ergo a new 31 crew under Alok’s command is sent to track her down, then “neutralize the threat.”
She turns out to be currently occupied as hostess-owner to a sort of deluxe dive bar, her edge not so dulled that she can’t immediately recognize a half-dozen new guests as poorly disguised agents: Strongarm Zeph (Rob Kazinsky), whose bull-in-a-china-shop ways are heightened by a tank-like exoskeleton; Irish-accented Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), who looks like a Vulcan but is really a Nanokin, or “intelligent microbe”; Quasi (Sam Richardson), who can morph into any physical form; initially blue-haired Garrett (Kacey Rohl), a humorless Star Fleet rules-enforcer; and chrome-domed Melle (Humberly Gonzalez), whose superpower is basically “hypnotic sexiness.” There’s also the eugenically “enhanced” human Alok, the sole member of this party who’s neither a middling one-joke idea or constantly bickering with the others. Camaraderie has always been a big element in “Star Trek,” but it’s notably absent from this competently played yet tiresome team.
Even when Georgiou decides to join ’em rather than beat ’em, things go awry in the Section’s attempt to grab a mysterious deadly weapon known as “the Godsend” from its visiting sales agent (Joe Pingue as Dada Noe). After a nightclub melee, it vanishes. All of this comes as a surprise to the ex-empress, who had originally ordered it made — and destroyed, she thought — back in her days as an unrepentant tyrant. Now she’s just a semi-reformed “monster with regrets.”
Hoping to retrieve the genocidal object (which resembles the “Hellraiser” puzzle box) before someone activates it, she ends up marooned on a dead planet with the others in the film’s midsection, which is largely taken up with “Who’s the mole betraying our every move?” intrigue. Finally, they get a disabled garbage barge working and zip off into space, hot on the trail of a perp who not only has the Godsend, but a lifelong grudge to settle with Georgiou.
There’s a lot of action, mostly mano-a-mano, in this last third. But it’s not particularly inspired, and the stakes feel more routinely contrived than urgent. It’s also hard to grant climactic events the gravitas required when so much preceding progress has been snarky, occasionally smirky and comedic, minus real wit. There’s always been a healthy vein of humor to “Star Trek,” but here there’s no depth of character dynamics or anything else to ballast sheer flippancy. The whole drifts uneasily toward deliberate camp, all its story’s intended dramatic substance shunted toward flashbacks, explicatory dialogue and other clumsy devices that thwart any centering narrative impetus.
Not that “Section 31” is a chore to get through — it’s reasonable fun on a moment-to-moment basis. The design contributions are up to par, from visual effects to sets. Bartholomew Burcham contributes a lively editorial pace and Jeff Russo a sufficiently rousing score. But the big-deal factor that most “Trek” endeavors carry is missing amid characters we may not miss if they aren’t seen again, embroiled in adventures that feel at once over-complicated, one-dimensional and irrelevant.
In the end, “Star Trek: Section 31” falls into an odd netherland between OK series episode and stand-alone feature, too big to pass as one thing, too frivolous to work as the other. It’s a watchable digression that floats off into viewer memory space, snapping its slender tether to anything else in this fabled sci-fi universe. When Yeoh’s “Everything” co-star Jamie Lee Curtis makes a late cameo appearance in holograph form, providing the surviving protagonists their next assignment, you can’t help but think such optimism for the future might not pan out.
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