“Star Trek: Section 31” Review
I watched this over the weekend and it was exactly what I thought it was going to be: for better or worse, it’s a vehicle to highlight the fact that Academy Award Winner Michelle Yeoh was under contract to do more Star Trek content and they couldn’t figure out how to use her in a way that would feel like Star Trek. It was weird that they didn’t highlight any of Michelle Yeoh’s more physical abilities, with all her action scenes being all closeups and poorly framed, much like what we’ve seen the parody clips of the Taken series devolve to. The story is familiar, the characters are familiar, the special effects are ok, but I think the best I can say about it is that it didn’t needlessly damage the Trek franchise or the world they’ve built. There were a couple really cool things: seeing a Deltan again was fun, and the station that was in the first & last chapters had a really cool design, but they didn’t do enough to make me want to watch this again and again.
Also, they completely butchered a quote at the beginning of the film, here it is, with no commas and an ellipses, exactly as they had it:
“Fate who makes the sword… does the forging in advance” – Aeschylus
And here’s how it should be read:
“The anvil of justice is planted firm, and fate, who makes the sword, does the forging in advance.”
It’s an awkward quote to start with, but the lack of commas in the published version really thew me off. Were they trying to use “Fate” as a noun? A verb? A Proper Noun? I think I’ve already done more thinking about this one quote they anyone really intended.
So the movie, how would I have fixed it? I would have done some time travel shenanigans, which were already set up before this movie was announced, and had the Mirror Georgiou go back to the time period that her prime universe doppelganger died in, run through a story of ‘what made Prime Georgiou such a good person’ then wrapped the story up with the redemption for Mirror Georgiou through a sacrifice to kill off the cannibalistic, horror show of a character that Mirror Georgiou is and give us a way forward with Prime Georgiou. Heck, make it so Prime Georgiou can’t be seen by the rest of the universe because of time travel reasons (she died in the official timeline, so can’t make changes?) and get her involved with section 31, changing it from within and fighting the evil Control.
We didn’t get that though.
