Star Trek: Section 31 (2025) Movie Review: Star Trek’s Version of Suicide Squad is Bad Generic Sci-Fi

The Gene Roddenberry-created, 60-odd-year-old franchise called “Star Trek” has had its own share of ups and downs. While the franchise had been rightly praised for its thoughtful exploration of conceptual ideas and unending possibilities, its worst endeavors are sometimes comically awful and sometimes tone-deaf.

But post-2016, with the release of “Star Trek Discovery,” under the purview of Secret Hideout, there arose a clear demarcation and division of “Star Trek” and its fandom. Under Alex Kurtzman’s jurisdiction, “Star Trek” would be catering to a larger fanbase and thus would have a higher budget and a larger focus on set pieces and action-driven storytelling, rather than striving for smart, thoughtful, and subtle writing. Messaging had always been an integral aspect of the DNA of “Star Trek,” but the bluntness of the messaging would reach a fever pitch with these newer iterations of Trek, barring a few exceptions. More importantly, the utopian ethos of “Star Trek” would be almost unrecognizable at times, downright dystopian, more importantly in the early seasons of “Discovery.”

It’s essential to point out that Section 31—a black ops organization acting as a counterpoint for the utopian ethos of the Federation—would be introduced in the sixth season of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” in 1998. “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” was the show that dealt with the Dominion War as well as exploring the underbelly of the Federation, daring to question and add moral ambiguity within “Star Trek.” But unlike Ira Steven Behr’s conceptualization of Section 31 in “Deep Space Nine,” “Discovery” would utilize Section 31 as the CIA of the Federation, open to executing dirty jobs without any moral compunction.

“Star Trek: Section 31” (2025) was originally conceptualized as a television series but is now recontextualized as a television film. It follows Emperor Philipa Georgiou, the rogue, wayward empress of the Terran Empire of the Mirror Universe, currently in hiding from Section 31 after the events of “Star Trek Discovery” season 3 two-parter Terra Firma. She would be recruited by Section 31 Agent Alok (Omari Hardwick) to lead a wayward team of misfits to obtain a mysterious device from one of her clients at her nightclub. But as events further transpire, she learns of the device’s true nature and connections to her past in the Terran Empire.

One of the major issues plaguing any long-running iterations of a franchise is its inevitable derivativeness. “Section 31,” like its source show, also feels entirely unoriginal. The Section 31 name seems to be more of a marketing ploy because the entire ethos of this Olatunde Osunsanmi-directed and Craig Sweeney-scripted film resembles “Suicide Squad” (2016). From the recruitment of the team to the character introduction utilizing freeze frames and voice-over by Yeoh to the banter between the team members, “Section 31” fails to overcome the feeling of a 13-episode season smashed into a badly edited 100-minute film.

I did appreciate its effort to provide some style, evoking irreverence into its structure—from its debriefing by the AI Control recapping the previous events pertaining to “Star Trek Discovery” to each of the three acts demarcated by chapter breaks; the skeleton of the show being broken up into three arcs is pretty evident. However, what doesn’t work is almost everything else.

The cold open of the film, following the origin story of a young Georgiou and essentially introducing the film’s emotional core, feels the most developed. It, however, also rests on the viewer’s knowledge of events that have happened to Georgiou that had transformed her into this reluctant anti-hero “infected by a conscience” rather than essentially being Space Hitler. And even if one takes into account all that context, it is hard to buy Georgiou’s emotional arc on paper, even though Yeoh and James Hiroyuki Liao as Zan manage to deliver convincing performances.

It’s easier to review this movie if one dissociates it from all the features that would characterize it as “Star Trek,” even though there are references and species about the larger universe (Sam Richardson as a chameleon species first introduced in “Star Trek VI,” Kacey Rohl’s character of Rachel Garrett acting as a callback to one of the more celebrated episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Alok’s past being connected to the Eugenics Wars, a Cheron server in the Baaraam nightclub). But even as a generic sci-fi action film, the story is quite thinly plotted; the action set pieces, while conceptually ingenious, are rather bafflingly edited, with Osunsanmi utilizing a lot of crash zooms and disorienting camera movements that ultimately render the film’s simpler and visceral moments harder to enjoy.

More importantly, the majority of the supporting cast is archetypally written and saddled with awful dialogues that undercut any major stakes or moments of dramatic heft. And because the film is cannibalized from elements of a series, none of the characters come off as interesting or compelling. The lower budget is also very evident, from the limited number of sets utilized in each act to the special-effect heavy fight sequence capping the second act.

If one were to view it as a Michelle Yeoh vehicle, one could find enjoyment in her flamboyant portrayal of Georgiou, as well as her valiant attempts to make a meal out of this bare-bones script. If one were to view it as a “Star Trek” film, that’s a difficult prospect altogether. As a fan of “Star Trek,” awful films or episodes are unsurprising. But “Section 31” is a misguided attempt at launching a spinoff out of a divisive concept of the franchise, led by a character that is the farthest thing from a fan favorite. It is a mess of a film that is baffling on account of its sheer existence.