17 minutes in, Emperor Georgiou drums her fingernails on the table in her office. "Booorinnnng."
JRS nods and mutters to himself. "Yep."
*sigh*
A boilerplate action movie with the thinnest of thin veneers of Trek applied to it - some names, some sound effects, that actually rather nifty Starfleet phaser design - that left no trope untouched in the search for...what, exactly? I wasn't entertained. Thoughts weren't provoked. It showed me nothing new, nothing unexpected.
Directed by the reliably mediocre Olatunde Osunsanmi, whose 'style' is at least fitting for this kind of movie, Section 31 wanders all over the shop in tone. Seriously, we begin with a quote from
the father of tragedy Aeschylus and you think hey, someone who was part of putting this together has actually read something. Maybe this will be a bit more intelligent than the trailer portrayed. But no. All it means is that someone read and watched a bunch of things...then ripped off the bits that they wanted, and shoehorned them into this 100 minute borefest. So we end up with Suicide Squad slash Guardians of the Galaxy slash Andor slash Men In Black (Fuzz, the little alien in the regular-sized golem) slash Mission: Impossible slash The Hunger Games, only it doesn't do anything as well as any of those and does a lot of things worse. All the while failing to act or look like Star Trek. I would applaud them for doing something different if that had meant doing something different to not just previous Trek projects but to other action movies as well. No such luck, this is rip-off central. Any humour to be found is stomped on by both the resolutely terrible dialogue (shades of DIS in that regard), and the small detail of having seen the protagonist murder her parents and younger sibling at the beginning making nothing afterwards seem particularly amusing. But it tries, God does it try. Mostly by having the characters insult each other, then laugh at the 'cleverness' of their insult.
Now, the action and fight sequences. Those should be up to snuff, eh? What with Michelle Yeoh still able to pull such things off even at 62. Well, maybe she could or maybe she couldn't. We'll never know, because Osunsanmi didn't really let us see. Perhaps all the camera cuts and pulls serve a purpose other than disguising a liberal use of stunt performers, but damned if I know what that might be. It certainly doesn't add anything of any artistic merit.
There's the usual non-twists that we've come to expect in nuTrek from DIS and, sadly, other nuTrek productions at this point including the
de rigeur 'curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!' from Sven Ruygrok's Fuzz (in the service of Georgiou's boyfriend turned nemesis San, played by James Hiroyuki Liao) that isn't just telegraphed - it has its own Bat Signal. Along with that betrayal comes our old favourite of
Bond Villain Stupidity, where somehow - despite having a weapon pointed right at her - San doesn't in fact shoot Georgiou down and instead gets into a exceedingly boring fistfight with her. Pacing is out to lunch, again a DIS hallmark. The dialogue, as mentioned, is simply awful culminating in an exchange at the 41 minute mark about the name of the weapon - is it Godsend or God's End - that had me reaching for paracetamol to shake the headache that the anger had given me. None of the cast are outstanding, though Sam Richardson does his best with the material handed to him, but a special word if I may for both the cod Oirish accent that Ruygrok puts on as Fuzz and the Benoit Blanc take-off that he does for Fuzz's wife. I simply can't describe how lousy his voice work is. And then there's Kacey Rohl as Rachel 'future captain of the Enterprise-C' Garrett. Her presence here is simply so the makers can say 'see, this is
so a Star Trek film!' but really this character could have been from current day TikTok right down to the outfit and hair in the end scene. Certainly it's hard to see how this woman becomes the one we saw in TNG's "Yesterday's Enterprise". And even the stuff that nuTrek does pretty well - the VFX, music, makeup - was pretty ordinary here. Certainly nothing better than we see on the regular from TV Trek these days.
Good points...man, I'm struggling. Hooray for continuity with Quasi's chameloid eyes (see Iman's character Martia in the sixth film), the mention of ion storms regarding getting from mirror universe to prime one and the reference to Turkana IV (where Tasha Yar grew up) at the end, I guess.
I expect that there's an audience somewhere for this. But I'd be very surprised if that audience was in any way made up of Star Trek fans. May the executives at Paramount who cancelled Lower Decks and greenlit this wretched mess catch a case of diarrhoea, and then have to wipe using that Izal medicated paper that your grandparents used to buy.
*wanders off to get another mug of tea and more painkillers*
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