What Is 'Star Trek' Supposed to Be Now?
The new movie 'Section 31' is the latest attempt to chase other franchises rather than embrace a distinct personality.
A little over a week ago, Paramount+ released the first Star Trek movie in almost a decade: Star Trek: Section 31. It is an awful film, and so incompetently made that its low budget leads one to wonder if any single department head had worked on a studio production before. And yet even if the film had beautiful craftsmanship and a script that didn’t feel like it fell out of ChatGPT, Section 31 raises a more dire question about the lack of identity for the iconic sci-fi franchise.
I won’t profess to be the world’s biggest Star Trek expert, but I do know that in the age of IP, Paramount leaned heavily on relaunching Trek, and put the project in the hands of Alex Kurtzman, co-writer of 2009’s Star Trek and 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness as well as the director and co-writer of a movie where a guy almost ends up bopping his sister. Rather than different shades of Star Trek like we had in the 90s and 2000s the new Trek feels all over the map. There’s Star Trek: Discovery to the legacy series Star Trek: Picard to the kids show Star Trek: Prodigy to the acclaimed animated sitcom Star Trek: Lower Decks to the Discovery spinoff Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. For a property that didn’t produce a single series between 2005 and 2017, there’s now a wealth of Star Trek shows. And yet if Section 31 tells us anything, there’s still no coherent idea of what Trek should be other than an attempt to fill out the Paramount+ streaming service.
The film came out of a failed attempt to create a Section 31 streaming series, a spinoff of Star Trek: Discovery. In that show, viewers met Emperor Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), ruler of the Terran Empire in the Mirror Universe, an alternate dimension introduced in Star Trek: The Original Series where people tend to be evil and Spock has a goatee. Discovery teased Georgiou, given her ruthless background, would be well suited to “Section 31,” the name for the Federation’s secret black-ops unit that could get their hands dirty where Starfleet officers had to follow the rules.
The show fizzled due to COVID, strikes, and creative focus moving towards other shows like Strange New Worlds, but Paramount couldn’t completely give up the ghost, so now we have the bizarre standalone movie Section 31, which plays like a pilot to show that only had the slightest chance of happening if the reviews had been glowing. The reviews have not been glowing.
But even if you look beyond its technical failings, what’s more striking is how it’s only Star Trek on a surface level. There’s a collection of various alien races, but they play more as easter eggs than anything that would identify the show as Star Trek. There are transporters and phasers, but it’s all window dressing. The film’s guiding force never seems to be any previous iteration of Trek (not even Discovery as you can watch this movie without ever having seen a single episode of that show), but Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s a rag-tag team bickering, bantering, and tasked with saving the world/universe. Of course, this is a bizarre fit because if you’re supposed to be the equivalent of Starfleet’s CIA or NSA, you lean more into professionalism rather than Starfleet apparently putting an ad on Craigslist and encouraging team members to talk loudly about their scheme in a heavily populated bar.
Why would anyone want Star Trek, with its core earnestness about discovery and optimism, to be Guardians of the Galaxy? I love Guardians a lot, but it’s a different thing, and it feels like someone at Paramount said, “Look at all those space aliens printing money for Disney. We need to make our space aliens be like that.” Kurtzman, who I don’t think has ever said “no” to a studio note as far as a major franchise was concerned, apparently allowed this to come to fruition, and that’s how you get something as clumsy and flavorless as Section 31. It’s the kind of movie that assumes Trek fans, hungry for anything and everything Trek, will show up, and then you can trick everyone else with a purple poster of Michelle Yeoh awkwardly sitting in a chair.
Watching Section 31, I thought about its sci-fi contemporary Star Wars. That property seems to suffer from the opposite problem where the brand is guarded so fervently that only the blandest possible version (save for Andor) can now get a greenlight to be a Disney+ show that people watch but still gets canceled. Say what you will about Lucasfilm creative head Dave Filoni (and I am not a fan), but he makes it a priority that everything in Star Wars should work together in that universe. There are no bad ideas in Dave Filoni’s Star Wars; simply stuff that has yet to be repurposed into a more palatable form (e.g. a Naboo starfighter from The Phantom Menace now serving as The Mandalorian’s ship). Everything in Star Wars is precious, so nothing can be fully discarded. By comparison, Paramount released a feature film that doesn’t feel like Star Trek, only makes the faintest connection possible to Star Trek: Discovery, and is an immediate dead-end for all the characters and intrigue involved.
I don’t want Star Trek to become as staid and fragile as Star Wars, but it would be nice if its current caretakers had a vision for it beyond pointing at something else popular and saying, “Make it like that.” Star Trek has an identity, but if that identity comes through in a show and connects with fans, it feels accidental. Every big franchise is going to have flops, but typically those flops come because you didn’t nail the story beats or the characters. Section 31 flops foremost because in the seven years since Star Trek relaunched with Discovery (and arguably even further back for those who don’t care for J.J. Abrams’ Kelvin universe of movies), there isn’t a clear vision for what Star Trek should and shouldn’t be.
That’s a shame because we could certainly use Star Trek’s brand of optimism and celebration of science. We certainly need it more than a fight scene involving the phasing shields from Dune.