Star Trek: Section 31

Writer:

Craig Sweeny

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Director:

Olatunde Osunsanmi

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Release Date:

2025

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about Section 31, the most critically panned Star Trek movie ever made. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier had a good run, but it's finally been dethroned. In fact, its review scores haves been giving Borderlands and Rebel Moon a run for their money, and I'm kind of not mad about that.

I've been biased against the movie from the day it was announced, because I strongly dislike the idea that Section 31 is necessary for Star Trek's utopian Federation to exist. Though I keep hearing that the film's actually about a team of fun misfits on a tame Mission: Impossible adventure, and I guess that's certainly one thing you can do with the dark conspiracy corrupting Starfleet's soul.

The film has already disappointed me by not having the bold magenta and yellow logo from the trailer. I didn't particularly love it, but it looked better than this.

Anyway, I'm going to share some of my thoughts underneath screencaps and I promise you this won't drag on for five pages like my Phantom Menace review. It will contain SPOILERS however, for this and earlier Trek stories featuring Georgiou and Section 31.

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Deep Space Nine 6x18: Inquisition

Man, I hate Section 31. I hate it so much. I'm not talking about the movie, though that's not great either, I'm talking about the concept. A group of agents that do whatever the hell they want to in order to put the Federation into a stronger position while people high up either turn a blind eye or outright support them.

Section 31 was already a bit dodgy when Deep Space Nine first introduced the group, but they worked so great as a foil for Dr Bashir and crew overall that I couldn't complain. Bashir had been fascinated with spy work since the start of season 1, and Section 31 gave him chance to become an agent for real. More importantly it gave the series some good drama, as Bashir took offence to everything Section 31 were up to and decided to stop them.

I'm right there with him and honestly Star Trek's generally been on his side too.

Star Trek Into Darkness

In Star Trek Into Darkness, Section 31 sent Kirk to murder someone with a drone strike instead of bringing them in for trial and then tried to destroy the Enterprise to start a war with the Klingons. To be fair that was the Kelvin Timeline, but in the Prime Timeline Section 31's AI, Control, wiped out all life in the galaxy, so that's not really any better!

Section 31 have been antagonists from the very start, but the concept of secret agents with all the coolest technology who don't need to worry about morality or directives turned out to be too appealing for writers to leave alone. It makes me think that this was a Pandora's box that should never have been opened.

The idea that the Federation needs a secret Illuminati carrying out 'extraordinary measures' in order for Starfleet to have the luxury of being the good guys is a corruption of Star Trek's aspirational message and ideology. Captain Kirk isn't a naive idealist who needs other people to make the hard choices so he can keep his hands clean, that's not how this works. Picard's speeches aren't meant to make him into a hypocrite who preaches the moral virtues of the Federation while relying on others to do the dirty work that keeps it safe.

But the funny thing is, nothing I just said matters to this film.

Section 31 may start off all intellectual with a quote from a guy with a name I can't even pronounce, but this is a very dumb movie. Deliberately so.

The film doesn't have any interest in dealing with all the moral ambiguities that come with having a war crimes division to support your utopia, but to be honest it doesn't even need to. The protagonists in this film are carrying out the organisation's stated goal, to search out and deal with potential dangers to the Federation, but this could've just as well been a regular Starfleet Intelligence covert operation. There's no reason they couldn't have just sent Starfleet officers on this mission and here's my proof: they sent a Starfleet officer on the mission.

The film begins with a flashback to the Terran Empire, using that reflected text effect I first remember seeing in Panic Room back in 2002. I also remember it showing up in the Doctor Who special Day of the Doctor in 2013 as well, so I guess it counts as charmingly retro at this point.

I don't know where this is meant to be. I assumed Emperor Georgiou grew up on Mirror Universe Earth, but these don't look like any kind of human houses I'm aware of.

I wondered if the film was going to brush Emperor Georgiou's crimes under the rug a bit to present her as more of an antihero. Nope! First thing we see is her poisoning her family in order to claim the throne. Her actually nice family who aren't terrible abusive Mirror Universe monsters who raised her to be the way she is.

The movie's kind of vague on how a poor kid who lives in a hut was able to enter a contest to become the next Terran emperor; that's kind of weird even for the Mirror Universe. Maybe I would've understood it better if I'd seen The Hunger Games, or if I'd been able to make out anything Kid Georgiou said with her quiet whispery voice. The resemblance to Michelle Yeoh is pretty close, there's a morph between the two actors that works really well, but I can't spot any similarity in how she talks.

I don't know if the film's deliberately borrowing Discovery's amber-tinted aesthetic for its own Mirror Universe scenes or if it's just the same production crew making the same choices, but this is an extremely yellow film at times.

The guy on the right is Georgiou's childhood friend San, who's finally makes an appearance here after being foreshadowed in Discovery season 3. It's absolutely no surprise that he's revealed to be the main villain as he's the only character in the movie except for Alpha Team and Dada Noe, but it's still kind of weird. I mean not only is it a huge coincidence that he'd just happens to turn up chasing a super weapon on Georgiou's space station, but he should also be about 120 years old.

After the prologue there's a video game cutscene where Control tells Alpha Team Leader what's going on. So yeah, Control's back! The one we got in Discovery destroyed all life in the galaxy, but I guess there's no harm in giving the idea a second chance.

Oh, speaking of Discovery, this Mission: Impossible briefing uses clips of Georgiou from the show, including a scene that takes place 865 years in the future. Section 31 are just that good.

Then we get one of the clearest maps of the Federation we've ever seen in Star Trek. In fact it might be a little too clear, as there's a orange border showing where the Federation cannot go, and it's obvious that there's a whole bunch of their starbases on the wrong side of it. But I suppose that can happen with a 2D map of 3D space. Also, the demilitarised zone between the Federation and Cardassians already exists, even before the Cardassian War. Oh hey there's the Battle of the Binary Stars marked on the right!

I'll give them bonus points for not writing Ferengi Alliance on the map, as the Ferengi wouldn't be discovered for a while. Though Section 31 clearly suspects that someone's there as they've coloured their space orange on the map.

And just above Ferengi space is where Georgiou's nightclub space station is currently located.

The bulk of the film takes place after stardate 1292.4, which is a bit of an awkward date as you can't tell by looking at if it's using the TOS system or the TNG system.

TOS stardates have only gotten more more messy over the years, with the Original Series, Discovery and Strange New Worlds all giving overlapping numbers, so using that system would place this movie between SNW's Ghosts of Illyria (2259) and Discovery's Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum (2257).

Fortunately it's actually using the TNG system, which is usually way more consistent. TNG starts on 41153.7, the next season is 42xxx, then 43xxx and so on. So that means 1292.4 is 40 years earlier, in 2324, and this is actually the present day of the TOS timeline! Walter Koenig and George Takei could've shown up and played Chekov and Sulu at their correct ages. It kind of puts into perspective just how old McCoy was in Encounter at Farpoint.

CODED TRANSMISSION 1: ONE NIGHT AT THE BARAAM

The film's split into three coded transmissions, which could be a clue to how the script was split up back when it was intended to be a miniseries. Or maybe not.

In retrospect I realise that scenes like this were obviously making use of the LED wall to put a virtual background behind the circle of actors in the middle, but it didn't even occur to me while I was watching. Partly because the effect was pretty well done, partly because I don't really care about Georgiou's lair.

Georgiou's hardly the first shady and powerful character to operate out of a flashy nightclub, but maybe that's why I caught myself rolling my eyes at this place. I think it was supposed to add a bit of glamour to the movie and get away from the typical Star Trek aesthetic of people in pyjamas in a sci-fi command centre, but it feels like they wanted to turn her into Aria T'Loak from the Mass Effect games.

Georgiou's hanging out under an alias and she's got a Cheron as an assistant! Or maybe he just looks like a Cheron as the ones we saw in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield didn't have black and white hair. It certainly isn't unlikely that a few of them could've survived the destruction of their civilisation, they were a space-faring race with a lifespan of thousands of years, but why did the movie throw in one of them as an Easter egg here? It complicates the ending of a classic episode for no reason and means nothing to the new audience the film is aimed at.

Incidentally Virgil's face colours match Bele, the cop who was chasing the renegade Lokai, so he was part of the dominant group on the planet, the ones that enslaved the others. Not that it matters much now that everyone's dead.

The beginning of the movie is shot a bit like a parody of a heist movie, with lots of Guy Ritchie editing and snap zooms. Actually the snap zooms continue for the rest of the film, we're never free of them, and I don't think it has the effect the editor intended. It looks a bit cheesy, to me anyway.

We're introduced to the team by Georgiou as she points out how each of them has utterly failed to remain inconspicuous in her club, which makes it seem like they're terrible spies. Then we meet them and yeah that's pretty much true. They also bicker like children and which surprised me as I had no idea this was a kids movie.

Alpha Team ends up joining with Georgiou and they run through plan, telling her how they're going to each use their abilities to pull off a proper Mission: Impossible caper and get hold of a mysterious case from a bloke called Dada Noe. But she's bored and decides to do it her way instead. This means that their skills are basically never used in the story, except to make them each suspects when they're figuring out the traitor. The shapeshifter never has to disguise himself, the seductress never has to seduce anyone, the hacker never needs to hack anything... well, except for his own team.

It's a shame really, because this guy got all dressed up in a ridiculous-looking robot suit just so he could run through some walls and fall over. Zeph's actor is a proper Star Trek fan, by the way, and he'd worked out a whole backstory for his character. He was into body modification and accidentally damaged his spine, leaving him reliant on his exoskeleton. None of this made it to the film.

Fuzz looks pretty good though. I kind of dismissed him at first, as I wasn't keen on the idea of a Men in Black alien puppeteering a robot Vulcan from his tiny spaceship, but once I learned that he's actually a real puppet himself I took a closer look and he's actually a really well done effect.

Anyway, Georgiou's plan involves sticking a device on the case to make it out of phase, like Geordi and Ro were in the episode The Next Phase. Except with a distracting blurring effect over the top. That way no one can touch it except Georgiou as she's also got a phasing device. But, plot twist, someone else comes through the wall and he's out of phase too!

This is not such a good effect, as they didn't even try to make his body cross the surface of the wall in 3D. The Next Phase had better effects back in 1992.

Also how did San know to bring a phasing device anyway? I mean sure he's from the same universe as Georgiou and they knew each other for years, but we've never seen one of these gadgets before so what are the chances the two would just happen to use the same trick?

Two out-of-phase characters means there has to be an out-of-phase fight scene!

The fight scenes are where the movie really started to lose me as they're not really all that well done. I know if you hire the female Jackie Chan for your action movie you've got to have some martial arts, but it really helps if the choreography's good and it's filmed well and I can actually see it. The blur effect on top of everything else makes it difficult to make out what's going on and spinning the camera around just makes it harder.

Anyway the team loses the case and one of them gets killed. No one really cares much. So the film's going for more of a Suicide Squad feel than Guardians of the Galaxy I guess.

CODED TRANSMISSION 2: THE GODSEND

One of the tricky parts of making a joke land is knowing when less is more. Sometimes you've got to resist the temptation to keep stacking cherries on top of the gag and quit while you're ahead. For example: the entire conversation about whether the super weapon is called God's End or God Send was too much.

You know what was funny though?

The flame jets from Discovery are back! Though they're less of a liability here as they're nothing anyone in the scene should be concerned about and they're not adding unintentional humour to an otherwise dramatic scene. They're just regular flame machines, lots of planets have them. Probably.

Alok and Georgiou have got Dada Noe captured on their ship and they manage to get him to spill the beans on how he got here from the Mirror Universe with Georgiou's Godsend weapon. Turns out that there's a passageway in the Crescent Nebula that will open up in 4 hours.

Hey, we saw a map at the start of the film, I want to see if the nebula is marked on it.

So they need to get to this Crescent Nebula then? In 4 hours. Well that's clearly not going to happen. The nebula's further from Georgiou's nightclub station than Deep Space Nine is from Earth, and they don't call it 'Deep Space' because it takes a whole afternoon to get to.

They can't even go to warp right away as their Section 31 stealth ship just exploded.

Now those are some flames that I can appreciate! You can't tell from a still screencap but the scene looks fantastic in motion. The film's doesn't have a 100% success rate when it comes to visual effects but they're certainly not its weak link.

Anyway, the ship was sabotaged by a traitor in the group, so for the time being this spy thriller is going to be stuck on this Canadian garbage planet.

Everyone gathers in a circle around the flaming corpse of Dada Noe to discuss their problem. Their complete indifference to a man burning to death is probably the darkest thing these amoral agents actually do in the film. The only people they interact with beyond this point are villains and both of their kills are in self-defence.

Really there was no reason this had to involve Section 31 at all, as Starfleet's never had any problem sending officers over a border to sort a situation out when something was important enough. Picard went to Romulus and had some soup, Sisko infiltrated a Klingon party, and Garrett is standing right here with everyone else.

Chapter two turns out to be a bit of a murder mystery as they try to figure out who killed Zeph, with the evidence pointing towards their Starfleet babysitter Rachel Garrett. It's obviously not her as she goes on to become captain of the Enterprise-C, but the theoretical new audience this film is supposed to be pulling in doesn't know that.

I'm getting the impression the editor didn't have a whole lot of respect for the target audience's intelligence as there's one character on the team whose skill set is to do all of the things that the traitor did, but we're given flashes of the clues as Georgiou slowly pieces it all together. Good work Georgiou, you deduced that Zeph's cyborg suit was hacked by cyborg hacker Fuzz, whose only purpose is to hack cyborgs and yell at people with a terrible Irish accent. I wasn't going to say anything about the accent at first because I thought it might be real and I'm not going to mock the way a person talks, so it was a bit of a relief when I learned the actor's not from anywhere near Ireland.

Speaking of actors, the biggest surprise for me in this scene was how much I missed having Zeph around. I didn't want any of these guys to get killed off I just wanted them to have better dialogue. Well, okay maybe Fuzz.

Anyway, the traitor turns out to be Fuzz and there's a bit of a shaky fight scene as the others try to stop him escaping on a vehicle hurtling through a tunnel. It's similar to the infamous infinite turbolift chamber fight from Discovery but it makes a lot more logical sense. Unfortunately it's got the same problem as the fight in the bar earlier: the shaky camerawork can't hide the fact that there's not a lot going on here. It's just movement on screen and I'm not interested.

Okay, I was a bit surprised by Quasi leaping off and turning into a web to save Alok. Partly because I didn't expect any of these people to risk their life for someone else, but mostly because the Chameloid in Undiscovered Country had a very traditional morph effect where she shifted smoothly from one humanoid form to another. They've made this guy more like a Changeling blob creature and I don't like when they mess with the aliens.

CODED TRANSMISSION 3: THE PASSAGEWAY

Fuzz is beamed away by San, who apparently cares more about his partners than the Section 31 agents do. Fortunately the heroes are able to give chase in an abandoned garbage scow that's fast enough to catch up to a Mirror Universe warship. It can even survive a few photon torpedo hits!

This reminded me of the heroes taking the USS Franklin in Star Trek Beyond, and I'm not going to complain about a bit of spaceship action. I actually think this thing has an interesting look to it and I'm not mad that it gets to be the ship swooping around the logo before the film starts.

Meanwhile San's ship looks like origami. There's a bit of an obvious weak point right there in the middle.

Oh, I just remembered that Georgiou calls Garrett a "chaos goblin" at some point around here, which is weird because Alok's the one who should know modern slang. It turns out that he's actually from the present day and reached this time through suspended animation and I was suddenly a lot more interested in the character when this bit of his backstory was revealed. But then they carried on and revealed that he's an Augment from the Eugenics Wars like Khan, and my interest was lost again.

I do want Star Trek to build upon it lore but the Eugenics War has already got a lot of attention lately for something that's ancient history. Augments returned in the last season of Enterprise, and Khan's been a thing in Into Darkness, Picard and Strange New Worlds, so I feel like that well's kind of dry now.

Of course, new viewers watching this as their first Star Trek wouldn't have a bloody clue what an Augment is, or what a Mirror Universe is for that matter.

Then there's the third fight, which has the same problems as the other two except this time it's on a bridge with Disco's comedy flame jets in the background! I can't even pretend to take this movie seriously.

Oh, I do have something positive to say: the film is lit well enough for all the characters to be clearly visible on screen. I don't fully understand how this became a bar that TV shows are failing to hit, but Section 31 doesn't have that issue. Not that Section 31 is a TV show, but it's closer to a TV movie than a proper Trek film in budget and content. This is more of a Star Trek: Voyager - Dark Frontier than a Star Trek Into Darkness.

"Chaos is my friend with benefits," that's another line in this movie. Garrett says it as she completes her arc from an officer with proper Starfleet discipline to someone who keeps saying "Chaos!" as she runs through the trash. She also uses her science officer experience to turn a doll into bomb powerful enough to destroy Fuzz's ship, which is kind of concerning! I know its batteries are banned in the Federation for this reason, but there's no need for that much energy in a talking doll in any part of the galaxy.

The doll changes its tune from "We could be friends forever," to "We're all going to die," as its flushed into space, which is a bit odd. I mean, there shouldn't even be sound in a vacuum.

Turns out that the doll has similar explosive force to the Godsend super weapon itself, which ultimately just blows up the ship it's in and doesn't even wreck the garbage scow lurking nearby in transporter range.

I don't actually hate the idea of the Godsend being more bark than bite, as making a quadrant-destroying bomb the size of a football is kind of ridiculous. It would've also been impossible for its creators to test if it worked, as no one can get far enough away from the theorised blast radius to observe one of these bombs in action. A quadrant is 50,000 light years across so even Voyager and its advanced warp drive would take 25 years to get out of range.

Of course the reason the Godsend doesn't destroy the quadrant when it blows could be because it needs to be near a planet to start the chain reaction. It also apparently needs Georgiou's bio signature confirmation to activate at all, so I guess it would've never been a threat if she and Section 31 hadn't gotten involved.

Georgiou tried to hug her old friend but ended up accidentally killing him in self-defence. This is good though, as she gets to complete her character arc and the audience gets their satisfying villain death!

Fuzz apparently survived however, as Fuzz's wife strolls in, played by the same actor, and says she's here to track him down. Oh and she has a new comedy accent, so that's... great. Don't ask how so many people know about Section 31, though it might be something to do with how they have their secret briefings right in the open in the middle of a crowded bar.

The movie ends with an old school 'everyone jokes around as they get ready for five seasons of family-friendly action adventures' scene with Jamie Lee Curtis making a holographic cameo as their boss Control. The poor woman was in Borderlands as well, so the science fiction genre hasn't been treating her well since Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Star Trek: The Next Generation 1-06: Where No One Has Gone Before

Oh, and the last line is a 'Your Mama' joke about the horrifying failed colony Tasha Yar came from.


CONCLUSION

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I'm going to be nice to Section 31, at least for a little while. I'll get the positives out of the way first.

First, continuity! Aside from Next Gen's Tapestry, this is the only story that takes place in the Lost Era between TOS and TNG, and it doesn't actually contradict anything we know. There's no reimagined Enterprise-C or Wrath of Khan uniforms. Even the warp effect looks more or less right, and Garrett's phaser is a fantastic design. The Terran Empire still being around is a bit weird, but hey maybe San got accidentally locked in a cryo tube for 70 years and didn't realise that a whole bunch of stuff had happened while he was asleep.

Second, the movie does make use of its sci-fi setting. There's the phasing device, the android controlled by a micro-organism, the shapeshifter that never shifts into anyone... probably something else I've forgotten. It's not just a straightforward covert ops mission with spaceships. Though that's partly because it's a murder mystery in tunnels.

Third, its 'utopia can only survive because folks who live in the grey areas are doing the dirty work' philosophy pretty much manifests as a Starfleet-supervised black ops team crossing the border to stop a superweapon. That's not actually all that controversial! Kirk stole a cloaking device, Picard was sent to blow up a bioweapons installation, Janeway raided an Omega particle facility. This is stuff you might imagine Starfleet Intelligence doing.

I think the real mistake was to call this the film 'Section 31' as the producers were well aware of how much negativity is attached to the concept. The name is baggage the movie didn't even need and it probably did more to destroy fans' enthusiasm than even the trailer did. They should've just called it Star Trek: Alpha Team, problem solved. Or A-Team for short. Okay maybe not that.

How about Star Trek: Misfit Content, like it said on the trailer.

The trouble with Section 31 is that their introduction on DS9 was so strong, with Sisko intending to take them down and Bashir straight up kidnapping one of them to stop their genocide plan, that it's hard for some fans to see them as anything but villains. DS9's Section 31 were actual criminals that would be arrested by Starfleet Security if the crew could get enough evidence of what they'd been up to. We came to like a lot of Cardassians, people had sympathy for the Maquis, but Section 31 were a problem. A problem that was never resolved.

The funny thing is, if the producers had ripped off The Suicide Squad properly then the movie would've had the characters divided over ideology and forced to decide whether they wanted to continue doing bad things to support the agenda of bad people. And if they'd ripped off Mission: Impossible properly then it might have been a competent spy thriller.

Another mistake they made was to try to win over fans of these 200 million dollar action movies like Suicide Squad, Mission: Impossible, Fast & Furious and Guardians of the Galaxy without having the resources to pull it off. People have been saying for a while now that Trek should lower its movie budgets so they can make a profit from intelligent science fiction stories instead of having to produce dumb spectacle aimed at the lowest common denominator. Well they lowered the budget but then doubled down on the dumb spectacle!

Though money's not the only resource I'm talking about, as it seems like the production was missing folks with the talent and experience to construct and film proper martial arts scenes. Series like Arrow and Agents of SHIELD used to pull off some impressive stuff on a TV shooting schedule, Daredevil especially. It helped that those guys didn't bury their fights in effects.

I'm going to call the tone of the dialogue a mistake as well, the tone of the whole movie in fact. It seems to be trying to mimic stylish heist movies and Guy Ritchie crime capers, but the characters talk it's made for children. Or maybe written by children. It's got some edgy swearing and characters that 13 year olds might think were badass, mixed with a little bit of '80s action-adventure TV storytelling. 

It's a shame, because I liked the actors and I think their characters could've been very endearing with some wittier dialogue. In fact, I won't be mad at all if any of these guys show up in another story with better writing, as long as it has nothing to do with Section 31. Bring back Zeph's actor too.

Overall the film is almost like a distillation of Discovery's flaws. It's as if they took all the Star Trek out of Disco and this is what was left over. The unpleasant colour grading, the flame jets, the purely coincidental personal connection to the villain, the galaxy-threatening threat etc. Okay, "Star Trek" can mean a lot of different things to different people, but it tends to be about a team of competent ethical professionals in a supportive quasi-military semi-utopian exploration organisation navigating moral dilemmas while working together to solve science fiction problems. It shows audiences a future that's worth building and lets them live there for 40 minutes.

Section 31... well, it's about a team at least. And there's a guy called Quasi.


RATING

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I am giving Star Trek: Section 31 a score of...

4/10

Why is it so high? Because it moves at a decent pace and didn't do anything to piss me off. I was bracing myself for the worst, but I got campy forgettable trash instead. It's basically a feature-length adaptation of that Discovery season 1 deleted scene where Leland goes to Georgiou's nightclub and talks her into signing up, except with more kung fu and explosions.

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Thanks for reading! I've got no idea what I'll be writing about next, but I'll think of something eventually.