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.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 4

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've finally finished watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. And it only took me three weeks. This is the fourth and final part of this review, but if you want to check out PART ONE, PART TWO or PART THREE, you can click one of those links.

I'm really running low on trivia to pad out this intro text now. Uh, the title font looks mostly the same as the one used in Star Trek 1 and Star Trek 3, so they'd pretty much settled on a style by this point.

It also got brought back for the Deep Space Nine and Voyager logos, but they got bored with it after that. Which is a shame I reckon as it looks great. It's not an obviously sci-fi looking typeface but not quite fantasy either. The current TV series have gone back to the equally iconic Original Series logo, so maybe there's hope that the movie logo will also make a comeback someday.

Okay, please be aware that there will be lots of pictures underneath this writing and underneath each of those pictures will be even more writing. And that writing will be 90% SPOILERS. I'll not be spoiling any Trek that comes afterwards however. Well, unless stuff like logo fonts counts as a spoiler for you, in which case I've already given away too much.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm still writing about Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. 

I keep thinking that I should apologise for writing so much about this film and dragging this on for so long. It wasn't the original plan, I'm not working towards a word count goal, it's just how it worked out. On the plus side you're basically getting a free book out of me here. A free book without an editor!

This is the third part of four, so if you want to go back to PART ONE or PART TWO click the text.

SPOILER WARNING: I'll be spoiling everything that happens in the film and any Star Trek movie or episode that came before it is also fair game.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm continuing through the fourth of the original Star Trek movies, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I like roman numerals, they make titles seem classier.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation movies also made it to film #4, but only just, and they didn't put any kind of numerals in its title. It's just called Star Trek: Nemesis. The Kelvin Timeline films don't use numbers either (they don't even use colons) so there's no danger of another Star Trek IV coming out any time soon. I mean seriously, it's been seven years since Star Trek Beyond and they still haven't made a fourth movie yet.

This is the second part of four, so if you want to go back to PART ONE click the text.

I'll be writing about the whole movie scene by scene, so there will be SPOILERS. Though I won't spoil anything from later Star Trek stories, even when there's something really obvious I should mention.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Part 1

Writer:

Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Nicholas Meyer, Harve Bennett

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Director:

Leonard Nimoy

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Release Date:

1986

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the film I have to describe as 'The One With the Whales' for SEO purposes: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.  

It's weird to say that the fourth movie is the third in the trilogy, but that's how it kind of worked out, as this continues on from the events in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, two films I wrote about back in 2016. You might be wondering why I jumped ahead to Star Trek VI and never came back to this, especially considering it was the film's 30th anniversary at the time... well, it's never been a favourite of mine. It's all about whales instead of spaceships, and the music sounds like it's from a Christmas movie, and Spock's weird, and etc. Though to be fair I was really young when I formed my first impression.

Speaking of anniversaries, the film was released on Star Trek's 20th anniversary, though I don't think they made a big deal out of it. Not compared to when Star Trek 6 came out on its 25th anniversary. In fact in some countries the posters called it The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV, with the Star Trek part in tiny writing, to not put people off. (The franchise hadn't been doing so well outside of the US).

Alright, I'm going to split this review into four parts, because films are long, and I'm going to split the parts over three weeks, because they take ages to write about. Well they do when you write about every bloody scene at least. The way I see it, I'm only ever writing about this film once so I might as well say everything I want to say now. This means that there will be huge SPOILERS here, but only for Star Trek stories up to November 1986.

Star Trek Into Darkness - Part 3

This is it, the last Sci-Fi Adventures until December, and the last part of my unintentionally epic review of Star Trek Into Darkness (no colon).

I feel like I should be bothered by that missing colon, but I can respect the choice they've made there. It separates this era from the numbered movies with the Original Series actors, and the colon movies with the Next Generation crew, so there's no confusion. Plus I like that they're owning the 'trek' part of the title more. This is going on a trek into darkness, the next movie takes a trek beyond. They're trekking. Seems like a bit of a backslide though to go dark after the last movie rejected the prevailing trend of Battlestar Galactica grittiness and turned things up so bright that you got lens flares in the face in every other shot.

This is part three of this review by the way, so if you're looking for an earlier part you can click one of these convenient links: PART 1, PART 2.

Here's the SPOILER WARNING: I will be spoiling Into Darkness, Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons, and various bits from other episodes and movies. I will not be spoiling Star Trek Beyond.

Star Trek Into Darkness - Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still writing about Star Trek Into Darkness! If you missed the first part of my review you can find it -> HERE <- and there's still one more part to go after this. It's a long movie.

Speaking of second parts, this was the second of the Kelvin Timeline trilogy kicked off with Star Trek 2009. But it's the last movie by the Star Trek 2009 team, as director J.J. Abrams had to go off and do the Star Wars: The Force Awakens afterwards. Trek 09 writers Alex Kurtzman (current overlord of TV Trek) and Roberto Orci also returned, and were joined this time by Damon Lindelof, who had a bit of experience writing sci-fi himself as he'd just finished working on the movie Prometheus. Oh plus he'd been co-showrunner on Lost for six seasons (which is considerably longer than J.J. Abrams worked on the show).

Anyway, this review contains SPOILERS for Into Darkness, Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons, and probably other episodes and movies too. It didn't seem right to spoil anything from Star Trek Beyond though, so I didn't.

Star Trek Into Darkness - Part 1

Written by:

Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof

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Directed by:

J.J. Abrams

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Release Date:

2013

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures... is going to be the last for a while I'm afraid. I'm taking another two month break, so the site will be going into cryosleep until December. But I figured I should give you something to read while you wait, so I've written about an entire movie this time! It's the second of the Kelvin Timeline films, Star Trek Into Darkness!

Though I ran into a slight problem with the first draft of my review, as it turns out that the movie shares the record for the longest runtime of all the Trek movies with The Motion Picture, and it's about people constantly running everywhere and doing things instead of staring at the viewscreen in awe. I ended up with twice as many words as my average movie review and three times as many as my average TV review! Though my recap is still slightly too short to qualify as a novel, so I can't joke about it being the unofficial novelisation.

I never like doing this, but I've decided to split the review into three parts and publish one part a day, for the sake of all humanity. That way each post is merely excessively long, not ridiculously long. But they are all going to include SPOILERS for the whole movie, and I'm considering basically anything in Star Trek besides Star Trek Beyond to be fair game this time as well. So there'll be a few Star Trek: Discovery spoilers from its first two seasons.

Star Trek: Nemesis

Written by:

John Logan

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Directed by:

Stuart Baird

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Release Date:

2002

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Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about more Star Trek! This time though I'm watching the last of the Next Generation movies and possibly the worst of them all: STAR TЯEK: NEMƎSIS! The reversed letters are there because the film's all about duplicates and mirror opposites. Also...

You know, from the video game Diablo. It's called Exocet if you're curious.

Anyway, there's a reason I'm writing about this particular film on this particular day and that's because it's Star Trek: The Next Generation's 30th anniversary! Yeah, it's not the ideal choice, I'd rather watch the pilot, Encounter at Farpoint, or maybe even something good, but this is what I got.

I'm also getting a bit of deja-vu here, as we already had a big Star Trek anniversary last September when the Original Series hit 50. Also, it was Voyager's 20th in 2015 and it'll be Deep Space Nine's 25th in 2018. You get a series with this many spin-offs and it's anniversaries all decade long. Oh, plus it's Star Trek: Discovery's 0th anniversary this year, seeing as it just aired 4 days ago. They could've held it back or moved it forward a few days to sync them up, but nope!

Nemesis itself came out in December 2002, which means that it had to struggle with being the first post-Galaxy Quest Trek movie. It's also the first Trek movie to have to deal with the Star Wars prequels raising the space opera VFX game, with Attack of the Clones having twice the budget to play with. It's hard to say that it was a lack of money on screen that killed Nemesis though, when it was Maid in Manhattan that beat it to the #1 spot in the US box office! The film opened badly and then fell to oblivion, with one of the worst second week drop-offs in the history of motion pictures.

Paramount had brought on a big name Hollywood scriptwriter for this one (Gladiator writer John Logan), and a legendary editor to direct (Stuart Baird), so they were convinced that the series must be suffering from 'franchise fatigue' and cancelled all plans for fifth Next Gen film. It was seven years before they'd dare releasing another Star Trek movie again, this time with J.J. Abrams at the helm and a budget. Worked out better that time.

Okay, there'll be SPOILERS and screencaps beyond this point, so continue at your own risk. I'm considering the whole Trek franchise up to 2002 to be fair game, but I'll not spoil a thing about what was released after it.

Star Trek: First Contact

Written by:

Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore

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Directed by:

Jonathan Frakes

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Release Date:

1996

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm going to go through the 8th Star Trek film: First Contact, aka The One with the Borg in it. Not to be confused with the episode First Contact, which doesn't have even the slightest bit of Borg in it. The movie was nearly called Star Trek: Resurrection, but Alien: Resurrection went and stole that title. Someone was apparently fond of the sound of it though, as the next Trek film was called Insurrection.

Here's another fact for you: First Contact just turned twenty today, as it was released in November 1996, during Trek's 30th anniversary. Deep Space Nine celebrated by compositing its crew into The Trouble with Tribbles, Voyager celebrated by putting Janeway into the 25th anniversary film The Undiscovered Country, and here Next Gen is celebrating by... sending the Enterprise back in time to meet a boring guest star from one of the most forgettable episodes of the Original Series. Seems like now would've been the time to have the epic crossover with Kirk's crew, but they tried that already and blew it.

1996 was when Star Trek began to reach its peak as a Marvel-style shared universe with Voyager reaching its third season, DS9 hitting season 5, and Next Gen shedding its TV sets to become a true movie series. It didn't shed its TV creators though, as writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore returned to provide the script. Also Riker actor Jonathan Frakes took the helm, beginning the Star Trek tradition of the ship's first officer getting to direct two of the movies.

Anyway my writing will contain SPOILERS for First Contact and the episodes and movies preceding it, including DS9 up to season 5 and a certain episode of the Original Series. I might even mention that this film led to the Borg showing up in Voyager, the uniform switch-over in DS9, and the premise of Enterprise, but other than that I'll keep quiet about what came after. This far, no further.

Star Trek

Written by:

Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman

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Directed by:

J.J. Abrams

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Release Date:

2009

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September 8th was the day that Star Trek: The Original Series first aired on US television back in 1966 (Canada got it two days earlier, but don't tell anyone), so today on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm celebrating its 50th birthday by sharing my thoughts on the movie Star Trek! Or 'J.J. Trek' or 'Star Trek 2009' or whatever you want to call it (the DVD volume label says it's Star Trek XI). The first Trek movie is called Star Trek: The Motion Picture, so they technically haven't given two films the same title here, but it's still unnecessarily confusing and I don't like it. What was so wrong with calling it Star Trek: The Force Awakens or something?

I love that they brought the old school font back though, as it looks great with that blinding J.J. Abrams lens flare. Some people aren't so keen on the lens flares though, or the fact that this is a prequel, or that it's a semi-reboot, or that it's an action movie... in fact a lot of things about it have aggravated certain fans. Critics on the other hand seem quite fond of the film, with Rotten Tomatoes reporting that 95% of movie reviewers recommended it, which means it's beating Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (88%), Star Trek: First Contact (92%) and The One with the Whales in it (85%)! That makes this the second most acclaimed movie on my site so far, after Aliens (98%).

Right, as usual I'm going to be taking screencaps from the DVD release and writing a bunch of SPOILERS underneath them for this film and maybe even those that came before it. I'll even throw in a couple of spoilers for Star Wars as well, because this movie's begging for comparison. Into Darkness and Beyond are 100% safe though.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country - Special Edition

Written by:

Nicholas Meyer and Denny Martin Flinn

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Directed by:

Nicholas Meyer

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Release Date:

1991

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Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm going through another Star Trek movie! But why write about so many Star Trek movies when there's a million other science fiction films in the world? Because it's the franchise's 50th anniversary this year! And it's also the US release date for the 13th Trek film, Star Trek Beyond.

So I figured to celebrate the release of the 50th anniversary film I'd go back 25 years and look at the 25th anniversary movie, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. This is the last Original Series film, the last Trek movie to have 'The' in the name, and the last time that Wrath of Khan writer/director Nicholas Meyer got to do any writing or directing for the franchise until the new TV series coming in 2017. Incidentally, Meyer intended Wrath of Khan to be called 'The Undiscovered Country', so the guy held onto that name for almost a decade before he finally had the clout to use it.

The last four Trek movies were produced by Harve Bennett, and he had a script written up for this sixth film that would make it a prequel, with the crew as young cadets at Starfleet Academy who steal a ship and go on an adventure! Which is a concept that burns my soul like sunlight burns a vampire. When the head of the studio shut that down Bennett left the franchise (and Paramount), and Nicholas Meyer came in to co-write a new story featuring the original actors, inspired by Leonard Nimoy's suggestion to base it around the fall of the Berlin Wall... in space! So that's what this is.

The following text will contain all kinds of SPOILERS for this movie and any Star Trek that preceded it. It shouldn't spoil anything made afterwards though, unless something's gone horribly wrong.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

Writer:

Harve Bennett

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Director:

Leonard Nimoy

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Release Date:

1984

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I've found Spock! He's right there in that coffin!

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm giving an action recap of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, directed by Spock. With Star Trek Beyond coming up this seemed like the right time to revisit the original third Trek movie.

First thing I've noticed is that the film's dropped the slightly rubbish looking hollow Star Trek II font and gone back to the iconic The Motion Picture typeface. In fact this logo would stick around until the end of Star Trek: Voyager in 2001, for everything but Star Trek: The Next Generation and its movies. Because they just had to be different.

Actually the first thing I noticed was that Search for Spock is an odd-numbered Trek movie, meaning that it has to be terrible. This curse actually does hold true with both critic and viewer ratings all the way up to the even-numbered Star Trek: Nemesis, which was so bad that it basically ended the film series (with Star Trek: Enterprise's ratings hammering the final nails into Trek's temporary coffin). But hopefully for the new movies the rule's been reversed, as Beyond's technically Star Trek 13 and it'll be nice if it doesn't entirely suck.

Alright, quick warning before I start: there'll be massive SPOILERS for Search for Spock and perhaps other Star Trek stories that came before it, but everything afterwards should be safe.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - Director's Edition

Written by:

Nicholas Meyer

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Directed by:

Nicholas Meyer

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Release Date:

1982

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Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm revisiting Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, considered by many to be one of the best Star Trek movies and considered by me to have one of the worst Trek movie title fonts.

The Director's Edition of the film finally got a rescanned and remastered Blu-ray release last week to replace the weirdly blue-tinted theatrical cut Blu-ray that's been around since 2009, but I'm going to be going through the fuzzy old 2002 Director's Edition DVD instead (mostly because it's what's on my shelf). Not that there's actually much difference between the theatrical and director's cuts though, and they definitely haven't pulled a Star Trek: The Motion Picture this time and added new effects shots (because the film doesn't need them).

I'm going to be giving away SPOILERS for this movie and things that came before it (the episode Space Seed for instance) but everything afterwards is safe. I do want to spoil one of the recent films, but I'll restrain myself.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture - The Director's Edition

Written by:

Harold Livingston

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Directed by:

Robert Wise

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Release Date:

1979

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Good news everyone! Today on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm going to improve the internet by posting a few thousand extra words about Star Trek: The Motion Picture, padded out with pictures of people in beige staring at a cloud.

I love that this is called 'The Motion Picture' by the way. It's not a film or a movie, it's a motion picture, it's about something, it cost money. A feature film based on a TV series starring the same cast isn't unheard of, but they're rarely set up to be the next 2001: A Space Odyssey. They even got Robert Wise, the guy who made The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain, to direct it. Which kind of explains why it looks like The Andromeda Strain now that I think about it.

There were a few attempts during the 70s to bring Trek back in some form, but this particular project started life as Star Trek: Phase II, a television series starring most of the same cast (minus Leonard Nimoy) intended to launch a new fourth US TV network. But someone decided the pilot script had movie potential and there were soon bigger plans in play. From what I've heard the series was actually cancelled within a month of being announced, but they had to let pre-production roll along for almost a year while they got the movie deals in place. Of course the film was expected to pay for all the work done on the false starts along the way, which made it seem even more wildly over-budget than it actually was. The most expensive movie ever made at the time in fact, aside from maybe Superman. But you couldn't call it flop; if you adjust for ticket price inflation it's actually right up there with the J.J. Abrams movies.

You'd think this leap to cinemas was inspired by the success of Star Wars, but it was apparently much the opposite. I read that Paramount believed they'd missed their chance because everyone had already spent their money on one big sci-fi movie and wouldn't want to see two of them in just a few years! That's why they were making Phase II instead. But the massive success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind that same year made it clear that science fiction had a future.

Anyway this is going to be 50 images separated by SPOILERS for the entire motion picture, so either mentally prepare yourself for that ordeal, or bail now. You can tell me what a huge mistake this was in the comments box underneath.