The Worst Heist Ever

It’s been nine years since Paramount last released a Star TrekOriginally conceived as "Wagon Train in Space", Star Trek was released during the height of the Hollywood Western film and TV boom. While the concept CBS originally asked for had a western vibe, it was the smart, intellectual stories set in a future utopia of science and exploration that proved vital to the series' long impact on popular culture. film. That movie, 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, was something of a commercial failure, “only” recouping $343.5 Mil again it’s $185 Mil budget (which, by Hollywood math where every film needs to make 2.5x to 3x its budget to be a success) meant that in reality it flopped. The franchise was put on ice in theaters and Paramount went all in on its streaming service (first CBS All Access before it was renamed Paramount+) putting out show after show there. We haven’t lacked for Star Trek but we have all felt the loss of the film side of the franchise.

The wait is over, though, as Paramount has finally put out another film. It wasn’t released in theaters, though, going directly to Paramount+. And it wasn’t part of the Kelvin series (so not a continuation past Star Trek Beyond or a spin-off from there), instead existing in a weird spot in the DISCO-era timeline, allowing it to sit apart from everything else in the franchise. You get the vibe, watching this film, that this wasn’t a mistake. The film sits apart, away from everything, so that it doesn’t get its stink all over the rest of Star Trek because, make no mistake, this film is pretty bad.

As I observed just recently when discussing the troubles with this film, and fan reactions to it, it’s notable that the new film, Star Trek: Section 31, feels like a holdover from the DISCO (Star Trek: Discovery) era. That era for the franchise produced two shows of varying quality that, frequently, stunk more than they succeeded. Those shows, Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard, are probably two of the worst shows to ever come out of the franchise (which must be nice for fans of Star Trek: Enterprise) and very few things related to them have been good. Somehow Short Treks came out okay, and then Star Trek: Strange New Worlds shook itself free of the Discovery curse by ignoring everything Discovery did. But Star Trek: Section 31? It gives in to all the worst excesses, all the terrible beat and dumb ideas that marked the very lowest of the DISCO era’s storytelling. If you wanted a movie that could perfectly encapsulate what is terrible about the DISCO era of Star Trek you couldn’t have devised a better example than Section 31.

The film focuses on Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), the former Terran Emperor from the Mirror Universe turned former Section 31 field agent in the main universe. Having left that life behind many years ago (over in Star Trek: Discovery), she now runs her own pleasure dome starbase, the Baraam, on the outskirts of Federation space. But she gets sucked back into the life when six Section 31 agents – Omari Hardwick as Alok, Sam Richardson as Quasi, Robert Kazinsky as Zeph, Kacey Rohl as Rachel Garrett, Sven Ruygrok as Fuzz, and Humberly González as Melle – show up “covertly” on the Baraam to run a mission.

Georgiou, instantly spotting them, ruins their plans to use her as a patsy while they steal a device that a courier, Dada Noe (Joe Pingue), is bringing to her starbase. Helpfully, Georgiou has her own plan that she devises which almost, very nearly, works. But when it fails and a third party steals the device and gets away with it, Georgiou joins up with the team officially so they can get it back. Why? Because she saw what the device is: the Godsend, a powerful, destructive bomb that could wipe out an entire quadrant of space. She knows what it is because, when she was Emperor, she had it built, and that means that whoever has it must be from the Terran Empire, and stopping them also means stopping an invasion into Federation space from the Terrans.

The plotting for Star Trek: Section 31 is a mess. It feels like two or three episodes of a TV show grafted together, which makes sense since the film was originally pitched as a TV series (with a different creative team attached) that was then worked over and over again until it was reborn in this form. I could easily see how the film was a two-part series premiere, with one half the heist story on the Baraam that ends up failing and then the second half the chase to get the weapon back. Maybe it even would have been the first episode and the last, with a season long arc in between as the characters bond and become a real team. Whatever was the intent, this movie is oddly frankensteined together.

Not that either half of the film really works on its own. The first arc is the heist, and this is bungled in so many ways. Being kind, I do like the idea that Georgiou spots the agents instantly and knows what’s going on. That’s a fun little twist and one of the bright spots of this section. Where the arc fails is, well, in every other respect. We get introduced to the crew, with a lot of exposition. Then they tell us what their plan was for the heist, even after Georgiou has already ruined their plan by spotting them and getting up in their business. We don’t need to know their plan, since it already doesn’t work, so explaining it to us anyway is a wasted effort that just adds padding to the arc. This is made clear when, after explaining it all to us, Georgiou throws it away and does her own thing. There was no point to this, at all.

Then the heist happens, and Georgiou introduces a phase matter device that, in essence pulls herself and anything she attaches it to, like the device they’re trying to steal, into a different phase, essentially letting her move through matter because she no longer exists on the same “plane” as the rest of reality. It’s a cool idea visually but it also has a major logic flaw: if she exists in a different phase of existence, how is she able to stand on the floor? How does she not fall through the starbase when she takes a hit and falls down? How does the device not fall through the floor when she drops in? The phase matter projector is a magical convenience meant to add drama to fight sequences and be a cool effect, but it makes no logical sense in any way and that ruins all the immersion for the heist and action that follows. It’s just dumb.

The rest of the episode has similar problems. The crew shows up on a planet, over-explains everything, fails to do exactly what they said they were going to do (which only begs the question of why they bothered explaining any of it to us) and then come up with some magical solution out of nowhere that might help solve the problem. The fact that everything works out in the end (as you’d expect it to) isn’t down to the characters being good at their jobs or competent in a bad situation, but only because the surviving crew members are covered in thick layers of plot armor and they had to survive because Paramount expected this film to do well and wanted to make sequels. Those are doubtful at this point.

Really, the only bright and shining spot of this whole film is Yeoh as Georgiou. I wouldn’t say this is a good character for the Academy Award winning actress to play, but that’s down to the fact that Georgiou, like everything in this film, is poorly written. The film really revolves around her – her reign as Emperor, the device she had built, the villain who is a secret character from her past – and it’s supposed to be her spotlight, which is great if the story is any good, but the writing fails to make a consistent character out of Georgiou or do anything with her character development, background, or future options. Georgiou only works because Yeoh is an incredible actress and is able to spin magic out of nothing. And this film truly gives her nothing to do otherwise.

Unfortunately for the show, the rest of the cast members do not have Yeoh’s magnetic charisma or her ability to spin gold out of shit. They’re a motley bunch of underwritten characters, each with one personality tick they beat over and over, all while their actors seem lost trying to piece anything to work with together from the script. They’re all equally disposable and simple, and they could all easily be replaced by anyone or anything else and it wouldn’t affect the story or the show in the slightest. Considering one of these characters is a future captain of the Enterprise, while another is a shape-shifter from a species we haven’t seen since Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, you would think they should have been more interesting than this. But no.

Finally, I need to harp for a moment on the dialogue because it is such utter trash. The show doesn’t understand how characters should talk, how they should explain things, how it should have them interact. Characters exist to give long spouts of exposition dumping, and they do it in the most awkward and blunt ways possible. They don’t react to situations, they explain the situation with a bunch of information all of them should have known ahead of time. It’s minutes upon minutes of useless exposition when all we want to do is get to the meat of the story.

And they don’t interact as characters, learning about each other and bonding. Instead they throw out quips that make no sense, jokes and comedic lines that don’t suit the situation at all. It feels like the writers really wanted to turn their Section 31 team into the Guardians of the Galaxy (which is Hollywood’s favorite band of misfit heroes that they keep trying to reproduce) but they didn’t understand anything about James Gunn’s magical writing that made those heroes work. The worst example is when, in discussing how Rachel Garrett supposedly feeds on chaos (an idea that comes out of nowhere, suggested by Georgiou without any evidence, Garrett replies “Chaos is my friend with benefits.”

I will not lie, that was the moment my brain shut off with the film and I found that I just couldn’t care about anyone or anything happening in this film at all. It was so terrible, in writing and execution, that I knew, at that moment, this film was never going to work. Ever. No sequels. No continuing adventures. That line sank this film.

I want to be clear, though, that I feel like somewhere, deep down in this film, there was a workable version of this concept. Exploring Georgiou as a character is a great idea, and it’s clear that Michelle Yeoh could play Georgiou in her sleep and still make her work. Giving her a cast of oddball, non-Federation types to work off of is a great idea because she’s not Federation and trying to make her work within the rules of the Federation just doesn’t suit her style. And setting her on outside-the-norm adventures, like a heist caper, perfectly suits her outlaw status. All of that, along with an exploration of her past and the sins she committed as Emperor, would make for a compelling movie or series. The film, at times, almost reaches for that, even, but it can never rise above the shit writing it’s mired in.

At the end of the day this is a bad film, through and through. Paramount, I’m sure, was happy to dump this on its streaming service with little fanfare and let it fade away. Already it’s not promoted anywhere on the app (that I could see), forcing me to search for it so I could watch. And even then the app had a ton of other, non Star Trek, suggestions, as if begging me to watch anything other than this. Honestly, I should have listened. This film was bad and I feel worse having watched it.