The Michelle Yeoh Star Trek TV Movie Just Doesn’t Have the Juice

It’s almost cruel to compare Star Trek: Section 31 to the series Deep Space Nine, which created its core concept. Photo: Sophy Holland/Paramount+

What Michelle Yeoh offers as a star, on the surface, is exactly what Star Trek needs. In the early years of her career — through Hong Kong action films like Police Story 3 (1992) and Yes, Madam! (1985) into works now embedded in the Western imagination like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) — she cultivated the ability to project capability, intelligence, and badassery. Her understanding of her body and her steely gaze has only deepened since then, culminating in her Best Actress win at the Academy Awards for 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s a shame that a beguiling actor of her magnitude continues to play Philippa Georgiou, a character whose genocidal violence is so extreme it contradicts the beating heart of the long-running Star Trek franchise, which has always been rooted in hope for the future.

After her Oscar win, Paramount clearly can’t afford her for an entire Star Trek series. So we’re left with Section 31, a Star Trek: Discovery spinoff film currently streaming on Paramount+. It is sloppy, misguided, and frankly rote, overstuffed with concepts that it only superficially explores. Yeoh has the juice, but the film doesn’t. Despite its mere 80-minute run time, it took me days to finish. Which is damning considering how deeply I love Star Trek and the series from which the Section 31 concept was born: Deep Space Nine, which ran for seven seasons beginning in 1993. It was led by a captivatingly bold Avery Brooks as Captain Benjamin Sisko, the franchise’s first Black lead; his character was a Starfleet officer, a religious figure for the Bajoran people (whom the Federation was tasked with ushering into stability after a decadeslong occupation and genocide), a single father, and one of the most complex figures in the franchise’s history. Deep Space Nine pushed the limits of the franchise and, in some cases, exploded them entirely, making Star Trek more alien, profound, and blissful in the joys it offered. The concept of Section 31 was sprinkled into the later seasons. They were a rogue operation who believed they were protecting Earth and the United Federation of Planets through extra-judiciary means involving mind-wipes, political assassinations, and espionage. Yet most of Starfleet doesn’t even know they exist, and the few high-ranking members who do simply look the other way.

Deep Space Nine introduced a darkened, complex morality to Star Trek, including through the introduction of Section 31. When a powerful operative named Sloan (William Sadler, absolutely bodying the role) tried to recruit DS9’s lead medical officer, Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig), he refused based on his disgust for Section 31’s cruelty and lack of accountability. Bashir was one of the sweetest, most stalwart characters in the series, so using him to critique the operation solidified that these people aren’t cool spies but dangerous monsters who use a thin excuse of keeping the peace to commit heinous acts. As Odo, the changeling constable played with grit and cunning by the late actor René Auberjonois, said in the seventh season, “Interesting, isn’t it? The Federation claims to abhor Section 31’s tactics, but when they need the dirty work done, they look the other way. It’s a tidy little arrangement, wouldn’t you say?” Deep Space Nine may have a cult following among the franchise’s fans, but those who make Star Trek today seem to have learned the wrong lessons from it, gobbling up the series’ darkness but forgoing its soulfulness and wonderful contradictions.

To compare the new Section 31 TV movie, directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi and written by Craig Sweeny, to the series that birthed the concept seems cruel. But the film can’t help but invite comparisons while also bringing up a number of important questions. Namely, who the hell is this movie for? The film opens with a catchup for those who didn’t watch Yeoh’s character on Discovery, framed as a priority message from Starfleet to the Section 31 team at the center of the narrative — though it’s hard to imagine people who didn’t watch her on Discovery being lured to this film in the first place. And yet, despite the overexplanation of the story’s framework, the film is replete with references to other Star Trek inner workings. That includes its final moments that name-check the planet Turkana IV, communicated by a surprising celebrity cameo who will be recognized by The Next Generation die-hards.

For all her prowess, Yeoh hasn’t been able to make the character Philippa Georgiou work. Here’s the rundown: Georgiou is from the mirror universe, an alternative universe in which the Federation doesn’t exist. In its place is the Terran Empire, a brutal and colonizing force that encapsulates the terrifying darkness of this alternative world. Through various shenanigans, Georgiou came to the prime universe, took the place of the version of her that existed here (who was killed by Klingons), joined Section 31, went off the grid, and eventually settled in the early 24th century for a number of convoluted reasons not interesting enough to explain. What is important to note about Georgiou is that in the mirror universe, she was the emperor of the Terran Empire and gleefully enacted genocidal events. She has killed millions of people, destroyed planets, and has shown little interest in being anything but cruel, even as she made her way to the ostensibly more stable prime universe. Section 31’s earliest scenes are leaden flashbacks to the pivotal moment in which a young Georgiou (Miku Martineau) completes the final task in order to rise from lowly commoner forced into battle-royal brutality to emperor: killing her mother, father, and adolescent younger brother. She does what her peer, San, a childhood friend and lover, cannot. And so he is forced to serve at her heel after she brands him on the side of his face with the hot iron of a newly made sword.

In the present, Georgiou now runs a bar full of criminal dealings in a gleaming space station beyond the realm of Federation space, where she snakes around in glamorous gowns and eats eyeballs with her martinis. She gets involved with Section 31 once more when she spots their operatives in her bar, including the flinty team leader, Alok (Omari Hardwick, aiming for intimidating verve, though the film doesn’t give him enough to hit that mark). His dialogue explicitly states the film’s thematic intentions, “Do you believe in fate? The past always catches up to you.” Georgiou reluctantly gets in on the action to find and destroy a bioweapon a criminal is planning to sell; in doing so, she is forced to face the past that she thought she buried in the Terran Empire. This is especially clear once she sees the bioweapon and realizes it is her own creation, although she had ordered it to be destroyed when she was emperor. The bioweapon causes a chain reaction, demolishing planets and wiping out an entire quadrant in space. From here, Section 31 seeks to operate as an irreverent caper, a profound redemption tale, and a rollicking action film to give Yeoh the opportunity to beat ass in a series of eye-catching ensembles. But each effort is half-hearted and poorly formed outside of Yeoh herself.

When introduced early on to the Section 31 team, I immediately realized what the film’s most crucial stumbling block would be: These characters are incredibly obnoxious. “Now let’s cut the shit. What is Section 31 doing in my space station?” Georgiou asks, forcing Alok to drop his drug-dealing cover. She traipses through, correctly identifying each spy in her bar by way of introducing the supporting cast: Melle (Humberly González), a slinky Deltan who has the ability to seduce almost every species, no matter their own desires; Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), a brash human who lives in a souped-up mechanical exoskeleton whose strength doesn’t improve his rocks for brains; Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), a microscopic, octopuslike creature who lives in and controls a robot body meant to resemble a male Vulcan, despite constantly showing emotions and speaking in an Irish accent that would probably nullify his espionage efforts; Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), a character introduced in The Next Generation’s episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” as the captain of an alternate version of the Enterprise who here says things like “Chaos is my friends with benefits” with zero flair; and Quasi, the character most successfully brought to life (played by Sam Richardson, who rightly calibrates his humor), a shape-shifting Chameloid with a penchant for overthinking.

The redemption plot is, at best, questionable. How can a story justify that approach to a character whose violence reaches a body count in the millions? The film — like Discovery before it — is too invested in making Georgiou look cool to actually critique her and dig into how she’s been able to survive for so long despite the number of enemies she’s garnered. The love story between her and San (played as an adult by James Hiroyuki Liao), like the overarching redemption plot, doesn’t hit the proper emotional beats because it doesn’t have the space and time to. The film moves at a clip through a host of disasters — losing the bioweapon in the originating caper, getting stranded on a dead planet, finding out one of the Section 31 crew is a mole for someone from the Terran Empire. It comes across like a first season squished into a 100-minute movie, with an open ending that feels like Paramount+’s argument for a series continuation.

Matters are worsened by the horrendous editing that lards up rewinds and flashbacks, as if the audience can’t remember what happened ten minutes before, and a sort of busyness that aims for cool but lands on encumbered corniness. Nothing is serviced by this approach — least of all Yeoh. She’s clearly having fun with the character, relishing lines like “Let’s get messy” before Georgiou makes another ambitious move. And I appreciate the desire to make Star Trek more alien — with weirder beings that don’t align with humanoid sensibilities, designer drugs that glitter in the air, and wild technology. But the film adopts a visual slickness that renders it anonymous. You don’t have to squint hard to recognize how the writers and the director are cribbing from other science-fiction franchises in an attempt to refresh Star Trek — though all that accomplishes is giving the franchise a center of gravity that isn’t its own.

Few franchises better exemplify the failures of modern Hollywood’s dwindling imagination than Star Trek. Once propelled by a genuine curiosity, it is now saddled with the impulse to chase after the styles and approaches of other properties, including moving like a dead-brain producer’s idea of the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Section 31 reminds me of the failures of J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek films, which went out of their way to mimic the rollicking adventuresome nature of Star Wars, losing out on what makes this franchise endure. For all the heartfelt lunacy of the animated Lower Decks and the gleaming wonder of Strange New Worlds, there’s a litany of other baffling decisions that arguably stem from Abrams’s films and, later, the Discovery series. Yes, franchises must change in order to survive. But do they have to become so dumb?