Star Trek: Section 31

Philippa Georgiou was the best thing in Star Trek: Discovery, a mirror-universe tyrant marooned among the well-mannered, played by Michelle Yeoh as a woman who finds everyone around her slightly disappointing. She earned a spin-off. What she has been given is Section 31, planned as a series, cut down to a 96-minute film, and put out in Britain on 24 January 2025 without going near a cinema. Olatunde Osunsanmi directs from a screenplay by Craig Sweeny, and the idea is a Star Trek without Starfleet: spies rather than diplomats, a heist rather than a mission, a crew who would not last a week on a Federation ship. It is a decent idea, and the film is poor.

The crew is most of the trouble. Alok Sahar (Omari Hardwick) leads, and Hardwick and Yeoh have a rapport, a wary, grown-up needling between two people who have decided not to trust each other and are enjoying it. Around them Sweeny has assembled the usual assortment: Quasi (Sam Richardson), a shapeshifter who would rather not shift; Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), a man inside a walking suit of armour; Melle (Humberly González), whose talent is being impossible to refuse; and Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), a tiny creature driving a borrowed body and talking without pause. Each is handed one joke on arrival and makes it again every few minutes. We were bored by the third repeat of Fuzz’s and irritated by the end of the first act, because a film this short cannot afford to keep telling us what it has already told us.

The action does not rescue it. Glen Keenan shoots the fights close and handheld, and Bartholomew Burcham cuts them into pieces a second or two long, so a corridor brawl becomes a rattle of elbows and sparks in which we could not have said who hit whom, or why the person on the floor was the one who had been winning. Jeff Russo’s score arrives at the same volume for a scuffle as for the end of a world. After an hour we had stopped hearing it, which we do not think was the plan.

Some of it is handsome. Paul Kirby’s production design gives Georgiou a club worth the visit: a bar stacked in tiers under red and violet light, with a dance floor she surveys from above like a woman still running a court. Gersha Phillips dresses her for it in gowns and long coats, each better than the last, and Yeoh wears them as though they were armour. Kacey Rohl’s Rachel Garrett, sent along to make sure the rules are kept, is the one supporting player with a straight face, and the film picks up whenever she is allowed to disapprove of something.

Yeoh is the reason to stay. The prologue, in which the young Georgiou (Miku Martineau) wins the Terran throne, shows what she paid for it, and there is a moment in the club, later, when the adult Georgiou remembers it and the bravado drops out of Yeoh’s face for perhaps two seconds. We were moved, and had not expected to be, and then Fuzz said something and it was gone. That is the film in small: a performer capable of carrying a tragedy, handed a farce and told to shout over it.

Sweeny’s screenplay wants Georgiou forgiven. In Discovery she was a conqueror on a planetary scale, and the film knows it, because characters keep reminding her. What it does not do is make her earn anything. She is rude, then useful, then embraced, and the story calls that an arc. Several critics have objected to pardoning a mass murderer on those terms, and they have a point, though ours is simpler. Nobody here changes.

A couple of reviews have enjoyed it as cheerful, violent rubbish, unlike the franchise around it, and we can see the film they are describing. It is not cheerful enough to get away with it. Star Trek has done comedy before and crooks before, and the trick both times was to let the joke land before the next explosion. Here the explosions arrive first.

It is 96 minutes, which is a mercy, and it ends as though a second episode were about to start, which is not. Anyone who missed Georgiou will get a few minutes of her at full strength and may think that enough. Everyone else has been sold a pilot for a series nobody is going to make, and the club is the only part of it we would ask to see again.