Star Trek: Section 31 is really more a vehicle for Michelle Yeoh than an examination of the titular secret agency. If you’re not a Star Trek fan (and if not, why are you reading this?), Section 31 was introduced in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as the secret service of the Federation, doing grey and black intelligence missions that Starfleet’s laws officially do not allow. If you haven’t seen Star Trek: Discovery, Yeoh played Phillipa Georgiou, the mentor and commander of officer Michael Burnham, who was quickly killed but then turned out to exist in the evil Mirror Universe as none other than the ruler of the Terran Empire. Burnham rescued that version and brought her into the main universe but when Discovery was catapulted into the far future, Georgiou became too much of a dimensional paradox to live, and so was sent to another part of the temporal continuum closer to when she came into it.
After a flashback scene with a truly brutal family reunion, it is announced that Georgiou reappeared in the main universe and was recruited by Section 31 only to go missing after a few years. The story starts with Georgiou running a swanky nightclub on a station outside Federation space, but she is tracked down and given an intriguing mission by Section 31 field leader Alok (Omari Hardwick). He then introduces her to his team: “Fuzz” (Sven Ruygrok), one of those Men In Black-type slugs piloting a bipedal robot in disguise, equipped with a terrible haircut and even more terrible accent, Zeph (Robert Kazinsky) a cyborg mercenary with a slightly less terrible accent, Melle (Humberly Gonzales) a Deltan seductress/’face’ agent, Quasi (Sam Richardson) a Cameloid shapeshifter and theoretical genius, and Starfleet liason Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl, who does look a lot like Tricia O’Neil).
Of course what seems like a simple job becomes more complicated as the mission turns out to be a loose end from Georgiou’s Terran past, one that threatens entire star systems.
The movie moves fairly quickly and lasts only a little more than 90 minutes, but it requires some clumsy exposition to connect most of the parts together. And as one of the action scenes sped along two-thirds of the way in, I found myself thinking of why the original Star Trek holds up so well despite having outdated ideas and really cheap production (which wasn’t much improved in the first two seasons of The Next Generation). And I decided that the Original Series’ painted sets and school-theatre special-effects budgets were almost an asset, because lacking our modern techniques, they had to depend on old-fashioned elements like scripts. And dialogue. And characterization.
I mean, Hardwick is good and Rohl shows promise, but the main reason to see this movie is Michelle Yeoh, clearly having a blast with the whole thing, despite playing a character who is always confronted with a legacy that makes Palpatine look like Mahatma Gandhi. The story’s epilogue clearly sets up “continuing missions”, and the production was originally intended as the pilot of a spin-off series, but with Star Trek apparently cutting production and Yeoh having a higher work profile, this was all that could be made of the idea. Just as well. Star Trek: Section 31 is good enough as a stand-alone action movie but its presentation makes it unlikely to work for a whole season, let alone more than one.